Inside My Head These are strange times. They are strange for me, strange for my family and strange for my country and the world. I am certainly the first human being in the history of mankind to pass into irrefutable old age (65) and spend too much time thinking about my state and the state of the world. I am sure that no one thinks about stuff as clearly as I do. This is why…
The Seriousness of the Moment Jill gently pushed her way through the crowd, heading for the west exit from the ballroom. She just wanted to get to the elevators and then she knew it would be a quick trip home at this hour. Her job required her to come to these big functions at times and, truth be told, it probably also meant she was supposed to use the networking opportunity of 500 of her…
I Cry for Stalin I recently watched for the nth time, The Death of Stalin and found it hilariously tragic or perhaps tragically hilarious. It is fun to imagine that powerful men might be the bumbling yet funny idiots that the Politburo of 1953 appears to be in this movie. The scene of them discovering and then moving Stalin’s non responsive body into his bed may be one of the funniest scenes in movie history.…
Even the Vikings Had to Stretch Make no mistake, Wall Street is a battle zone. There is excess aggression and emotion everywhere you look. I have often thought that the only thing that separates successful Wall Street professionals from the rest of the world is their level of drive and ability to withstand pain. Sometimes the battle rages for gain alone, but often the battle is for the battle sake. Worst of all is…
Le Weekend When I was in high school I learned that in France they had adopted the English word weekend into their language and culture, which had not previously existed (and therefore had not single word to represent). This became Le Weekend. It seems the concept has more going on with it than I had realized. The designation of years, months and days connect to cyclicality of the heavens. Solar orbits, lunar cycles and terrestrial…
On Friendship Tonight we are having dinner with several of Kim’s closest friends, or, to be precise, one of her closest friends and her beau. Usually we would be having dinner with those two and their other mutually good friend with whom they share a long theatrical history (I think it was on the National Road Tour of State Fair). Unfortunately, that person is not invited and is somewhat at odds with the one with…
Emeritus Status In the days of the Roman legion, when soldiers earned their wages some suggest it was at least partially paid in salt, hence the word salarium and eventually the English word salary came into being. There is little or no evidence to support this myth even though it is part of modern etymological lore and is somewhat supported by sayings like “worth your salt”. However, despite this debate, it is true that many…
Renegade Nation Our mantra as a nation has always been E Pluribus Unum or “Out of Many, One.” Our new mantra might be more accurately changed to Quid Dicere, Quid Faciunt , which translates to “Say anything, do anything.” The recent news from Washington is that as Congress moves to enforce its constitutionally-given obligation to balance back against the Executive Branch of government, the President has decided that he’s not having any of it. He…
The Raid on Entebbe Entebbe juts out into Lake Victoria and is the main airport for Uganda. The only reason any of us know the name is because of the 1976 Arab-German hijacking of an Air France airliner enroute from Tel Aviv to Paris. It was less about the fact that the terrorists landed at Entebbe and sought sanctuary from Idi Amin, than it was about the 100 Israeli commandos that executed a near-flawless and…
Camel Money In the world of finance, everybody understands the term Camel Money. It means money that has, what we call on Wall Street, a high talk-to-ticket ratio. It is the money that has supposedly been flowing from the middle east since the Oil Embargo of 1973 and OPEC’s wanton thrashing of the U.S. consumer. That was when Petrodollars first came into visible existence and we began to understand that people who had scads of…