My first memory of television was in 1958 in my grandfather’s house (we called him Dodo, which is the Slovak version of Gramps). We were living there while my mother regrouped from divorcing my father and leaving California, where we had been for a year in Santa Monica. On Saturday morning, with my mother and sisters off shopping in the metropolis of Ithaca and Dodo out puttering in the barn or nearby fields, I was…
I’ve never thought of myself as either a greedy bugger or a particularly jealous soul. Moses came down from Mount Sinai where he received the Ten Commandments according to the biblical account in Exodus. This occurred during the Israelites’ journey through the wilderness after their exodus from Egypt and after they were freed from servitude from the yoke of Pharaoh Ramesses the Great. The story describes Moses ascending the mountain where God gave him the…
I have mentioned several times that I have been a founding member of the news service Puck since it began in 2021. Puck is an American digital media company who’s coverage aims to cover the ‘four centers of power’ in the United States: Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Washington, D.C. and Wall Street. The company was founded by Jon Kelly (former Vanity Fair editor who created The Hive), Joe Purzycki (co-founder of Luminary), and Max Tcheyan, and…
My youngest son, Tom, just turned thirty yesterday. I was never terribly overwhelmed by turning thirty, forty, fifty, sixty or even seventy. I don’t tend to connect myself to my age very much even though I never deny my age, nor do I even try to hide it. I just don’t seem to care one way or the other for some odd reason. Everyone else seems to attribute much more significance to age and birthdays,…
Do you remember when you were in college or business school and it was steady week? At Cornell they used to give us about a week in between the end of classes and the start of final exams. That week was called study week and of course some people (those that were diligent), would use the week to review all of their course notes so has to be as well prepared for their exams as…
Given my natural inclination to write about the things on my mind at the moment, I should be writing about how I only have one more day until Kim gets home tomorrow, but I’ve already sung my lonely hearts club song this week. I actually had one friend tell me that he always suspected that I had father issues…so I think I’ve had enough therapy for the moment. It’s the Saturday of Labor Day weekend…
Last night I had dinner with two of my favorite people in the whole world, Terry & Paula. I met Terry 27 years ago when I invested in a business he was running. I remember him telling our group of investors that his business was for $50 million. We eventually settled on investing at a $20 million valuation. Terry seems unusually dispassionate about everything during the negotiations. There was no apparent emotion in his business…
At 4am this morning, Kim caught an Uber to San Diego Airport to take the early Delta flight to NYC. I do not envy her her time in JFK Terminal 4, my least favorite airport terminal in the world. My next trip to NYC, which will be in eleven days, will be on the less convenient Jet Blue flight, which at least will put me into Terminal 5, which is far more manageable even though…
I first became aware of Mercedes Benz as a vehicle in 1965 when I moved to Maine. The daughter-in-law of the owner of the Poland Spring Resort, Tudi Feldman, drove a classic Mercedes sedan around the rural hilltop in mid-Central Maine. I’m not sure in those days anyone knew what to make of it. Most locals were still engaged in the Ford v Chevy wars and foreign imports were still a small part of the…
Napoleon was indeed a dictator, though he came to power during a period of political chaos and initially enjoyed significant popular support. Sound familiar? Napoleon seized power through the coup of 18 Brumaire in 1799, overthrowing the Directory government (a lot like the January 6 insurrection attempt). He quickly consolidated authority. By 1802, he became Consul for Life, and in 1804, he crowned himself Emperor of the French (Trump probably has his playbook on his…