As we were on our way to Europe a few weeks ago, Kim was speaking to her friend Candice and she recommended the latest Dan Brown novel to us. I enjoyed the other Dan Brown books I’ve read, starting with The DaVinci Code. I seem to have a hard time finding male novelists these days. The novelist ranks seem to be heading in the way of most professions, with women increasingly dominating the scene. Overall,…
We are changing it up this holiday season every which way. We started by taking our trip to London, Edinburgh and Prague over the Thanksgiving holiday. And while we kept to form with our NYC Cornell Club family gathering and will have the whole local family over on Christmas Day, we usually have done a New Years Party for the neighbors, but have chosen to substitute that with a neighbors’ holiday gathering here next Saturday.…
This morning I got an email notice from my friend Steve in Phoenix announcing that he and his lovely wife Maggie have moved into a new rental apartment as part of their aging/downsizing progression. As in most families, tribes and animal groups, there is always a lender of the pack, and that family seems to have Maggie as its leader. As the mother says in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, “the man may be the…
One of the things that I carry with me from my 40+ years of living in metropolitan NYC is my love for bagels. I had had bagels during college since Cornell is basically an outpost of NYC in some ways, and the biggest bakery/eatery/hang-out spot in Ithaca is called Collegetown Bagels. But it was my lime living in NYC and Long Island that made me love bagels. My favorite bagel is an Everything Bagel, which…
Back in the day, when I was traveling into the Middle East with regularity, we would spend a few weeks going all through the Gulf to see clients and prospects, gathering money for our global private banking business. The Gulf was particularly fertile ground and I very much enjoyed the travel and business discussions. The Saudis, Emirates, Qataris, and Bahrainis were all well schooled in markets and investments, having had more than twenty years of…
As I read today’s post I realize that I wrote it almost two weeks ago while in Edinburgh. I sometimes juggle stories around and occasionally get temporally misaligned. In any case, the good news / bad news is that while I did return home to a small weight loss while traveling (in the range I anticipated), it was not as large as my regular at-home weight loss. What I did do on returning is to…
“Sitting is the new smoking” is a popular health phrase that emerged in the 2010s, warning about the dangers of prolonged sedentary behavior. While it’s a catchy slogan, the comparison is somewhat overstated. Smoking is definitively more dangerous, but the underlying concerns about excessive sitting are legitimate. When we were younger, much less when our parents were younger, seeing a movie with a guy like Humphrey Bogart sucking on a cigarette, was normal and not…
Australia just launched what is being called the world’s first ban on social media for children under 16. It takes effect today (December 10, 2025). What the law does is that it prevents Australians under 16 from creating or keeping accounts on age-restricted social media platforms. That means the government is deactivating a huge number (over 1 million) of social media accounts that transgress that standard. There are no parental consent exceptions. Even with parental…
In this day and age it takes a lot to shock me and even more than that to stop me cold in my tracks, but this morning that has happened. I’m sitting here at the Cornell Club, having flown into JFK last evening with Kim from Prague via Finnair and Helsinki, over the pole (flyin’ in a big airliner..just like Paul McCartney wrote in Back in the U.S.S.R.). There were no chickens flying everywhere around…
This is day 67 in my Zepbound journey. but given our travel schedule, I haven’t stepped on a scale for 14 days. During that time I’ve had two Zepbound shots, the last of my 5 mg shots and the first of my 7.5 mg shots. I should note that since the Zepbound journey takes you over six months from a dose of 2.5 mg to 15 mg, I’m not even half way to the end…