A Life Well-Lived I grew up in a single parent household. My mother was 100% of my parental influence, which is, sadly, more often the case in life. I have great admiration for my mother, both for what she achieved professionally in her life and how she went about her role as parent to me and my sisters. The things I have mentioned previously that I liked about her parenting included that she was a…
Who’s The Bad Guy? Tonight I found a Netflix 5-part series on WWII. I know what you’re thinking, haven’t I had enough of WWII with all the war movies I have watched over the years? Yes, I’ve seen them all, but what I liked about this documentary series was that it used original footage that was colorized and enhanced (which does bring some of that old film to life as Peter Jackson showed us with…
The Art of Turning the Other Cheek I am constantly amazed at all the opportunities I get to declare that no good deed goes unpunished. I am well aware that I spent 45 years on Wall Street and developed a thick skin and an ability to joust with the best of them. I know that normal guy trash talking has become the standard and that joking around with your pals is the norm in modern…
Friends and Enemies This morning I spoke to an associate that I first met in late 2008 (fifteen years ago). For the better part of six years of that time we worked together in what was a fairly strained relationship. We were never outwardly hostile to one another, but let’s just say that there was a lot of tension. Now, with the mellowing of age and the passage of time, we are quite friendly in…
Our Own Reality This Christmas my daughter Carolyn gave me a great grandparent gift in the form of a 2024 calendar that is a four-inch block of daily photos of my granddaughters. That means that I have a pad of 366 (2024 is a Leap Year) daily reminders of the charm and beauty of my two granddaughters, Charlotte and Evelyn. When you stop and think about that, to gather and even have 366 current photos…
Blind-Sided One of the fun, but supposedly true life stories made into a movie in the past few years was the story of Michael Oher, the former NFL offensive lineman who was taken in during high school by the Tuohy family of Memphis. The movie, called The Blind Side, based on the book by the same name written by Michael Lewis (strangely enough a writer mostly of financial stories), refers to the offensive line position…
The Sedona Vortex We have come to Sedona for the weekend to attend the wedding of my niece Nichole. Nichole is the daughter of my sister Barbara. She attended Cornell and travelled with me and my kids overseas on several occasions, so I got to know her pretty well in her youth. Nichole was an interesting college student. She studied Art History in school and as a bright and attractive young woman, she managed to…
An AI Experiment Out of the blue, a friend and former colleague sent me a book called Command the Page by Charlie Deist. The book is intended to help writers embrace AI for the benefit of their writing and to do what he calls “future-proof” your future creative career. Deist goes through his own journey over the last year of ubiquitous presence of AI in the hands of the general public. We have all heard…
The Ropa-Dope Going back to the time between 1977 and 1990, I was a daily commuter into Manhattan from Long Island. I realize that it sounds totally crazy (something I failed to comprehend at the time), but I would get up at 4am every weekday morning and catch the 5:14am train from Rockville Centre into Penn Station. I would then share a cab (always with the same two other guys who I know only from…
My friends at Best Buy delivered my new TV today. Notice I did not say install. Yep, they dropped off the new one, still strapped in its box. I had taken the old one off the bracket, so they took that and left. I had seen the Geek Squad do this several times, so I just went through the drill and installed my TV, and voila! New TV at no cost and now I only…