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The Holiday Nobody Understands
Labor Day is one of America’s great mysteries. It arrives every year on the first Monday of September, carrying with it the promise of a three-day weekend, backyard barbecues, mattress sales, and the vague feeling that summer is over even though the thermometer (and the calendar, for that matter) strongly disagrees. Officially, Labor Day is…
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Goodbye Jackie
For almost a week now, I have been struggling to write about Jackie, a bald eagle that lived in a nest with a live webcam trained on it 24/7 high above Big Bear Lake, California, in the mountains just north of me. You see, she died last Monday, and I have been profoundly sad. There…
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The life we live and the stories we tell
Daniel Kahneman was an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate. Along with Amos Tversky, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors that arise from heuristics and biases, and developed “prospect theory” (cited in the decision to award him the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics). In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow he explores what…
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Mileage
Awhile back, over a year and a half ago to be precise, I told you about this new hobby of mine – live webcams. I’m still watching them, my favorites being this watering hole in the Namib desert in Namibia (the wildlife is amazing), and this channel that cycles through US cities (and a few…
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The curious case of Comme d’habitude
Those of us who practice the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism have a saying: “the obstacle is the way.” In life, we encounter hardships, loss, disappointments, and failures, and they seem to block our path. Seeing them as “blessings” is more than just trying to put a positive spin on them. I look at it…
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Kintsugi
We live in a culture that is far too quick to discard that which is broken. I think that comes from cheap goods readily available. Growing up, we lived across the street from Mr. And Mrs. Marcus who owned a repair shop called Marcus Electric. A repair shop was a place you took broken household…
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Friendship
I have lunch plans today. I’ll be meeting a friend, and his husband, at Billy Reed’s, a famous Palm Springs eatery not a quarter mile from my residence; I wrote about Billy Reed’s last December on the occasion of their 50th anniversary. It is one of four restaurants in my neighborhood close enough I can…
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The good old days
I like music. Everything except country. And the really hardcore rap about da bitches and da hos. I have an extensive iTunes library with 557 songs in it, and I love putting it on “shuffle” where one minute I’m listening to Earth Wind & Fire’s “September” and it segues into “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from…
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Mirth
Mirth is one of those words that sounds like it ought to be wearing a waistcoat. It has a polite little lilt to it, like it might tip its hat as it passes you on the street. “Good day! I am Mirth. I brought a chuckle and perhaps a mildly undignified snort.” It’s not quite…
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Where’s my flying car?
The 1960s were an amazing time to be born, if only for the television programs. And growing up in the 70s meant those programs found their way into syndication and were a kindof “life primer” for a young boy like me in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Flipping between channel 11 (KTTV) and channel 13…
Your mileage may vary.