I missed the Vietnam War era on my college campus by a few years. I didn’t have anyone like Hanoi Jane nor Abbie Hoffman. But I did have Mike and Hugo. Mike and Hugo were the closest things to activists on my frigid campus. Mike also happened to have been elected student body president the … Read more
It’s Sunday, so I suppose a confession would be in order. Yes, I made an impulse purchase. I bought a pair of these. I probably will never wear them again after tomorrow, and if my schedule is off by even a few minutes I may not even use them tomorrow. But tomorrow, so I’ve read, … Read more
On Friday I had a brief phone conversation with an executive who was responsible for hiring for an open position that I was fully qualified for and had been personally recommended to by a mutual business friend. A couple of weeks had passed since my friend told me to follow up by calling the hiring … Read more
Now, where were we? When I chose to take a break a bit more than a month ago, I was arguably at a low point even by my modest standards, and in hindsight it showed at every level. Even when people were doing something that had the chance to be right, more often that not … Read more
My best friend, for reasons I can’t possibly try to sensibly go into publicly, has given me the pet name of “Brock”. So I was kind of rooting for Mr. Purdy, that young up-and-comer quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, who led his underdog team to overtime and down the field with an impressive seven-minute-plus … Read more
If I have anything resembling a mantra that I do my best to reinforce every waking moment, it’s the one I often had to remind disbelieving executives with whenever I’d be the bearer of ratings news or testing reports that went against every instinct they had had when they put blood, sweat and tears, and … Read more
These days, I’m subserviant and a slave exclusively to data and information, not to the whims and the wishes of anyone who might want to control how and why I believe. It clearly frustrates quite a bit of people who might somehow see this as a sign of my ultimate demise. I know this because … Read more
When my best friend was exploring options for where to take their soon-to-be 91-year-old grandmother for a New Year’s Day brunch, they were handicapped by the fact that the nearest and what they saw as the most fiscally responsible option that was open was a Burger King. When I heard that was under consideration, I … Read more
If you want to know how to get on my bad side, just try reassuring me in the manner that someone in an online chat group recently tried to when I remarked that I was having lots of trouble sleeping lately, most recently due to a persistent shoulder and neck ache. “You’re getting old!”, this … Read more
