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Robot Wars

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My sister called that one right. I’m referring to a disagreement we had during our visit to San Francisco last week after we wrapped up our family reunion. Right wing media has working overtime to depict the Fog City as some kind of dystopian hellhole, but we saw very little evidence of that during our outings. It’s a big city with big city problems, okay? Give it a rest, dickwads. But one spooky thing that stood out to us was the overwhelming presence of Waymo robotaxis zipping up and down the streets seemingly every other second. Seriously, you’d get to an intersection and they’d buzz by--white driverless vehicles with LIDAR units mounted on the roof, often two or three at a time. I’m fascinated by the science behind these robots, but I am a bit creeped out by the lack of humanity. Still, I kept bugging my sister to take a ride in one of the things just to say we did it. However, she steadfastly refused, pointing to safety concerns and the human toll as people are l...
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Why I Otter…

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And so, the First Cousins Reunion is in the books. My sister and I are back home after a five-day get together with our father’s side of the family in Northern California. During that time, we got a tour of the Monterey Aquarium courtesy of my cousin Erin, explored San Francisco and Sausalito, met a ton of cool people (and a couple of twits) while reconnecting with the West Coast branch of our family. My cousin got us a bird’s eye view of the otter tank so we could watch the frisky little critters glide through the water with the greatest of ease. We hadn’t seen each other since my Uncle Joe’s memorial service Los Angeles, prompting my sister to suggest that we should get together for happier occasions. The fact was underscored in May when we lost our brother Peter. And, oh how I wish he could have been there with us. It still hurts to think I'll never see him again. We spent a couple of days at Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove before heading over to our Cou...
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Wednesday’s Child

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So who are you siding with—Odin or Mercury? Wednesday got started as “day of Woden”, reflecting the religion practiced by the Anglo-Saxons, the English equivalent to the Norse god Odin. In many Romance languages, such as the French mercredi , Spanish miércoles or Italian mercoledì , the day's name is a calque of the Latin dies Mercurii “Day of Mercury." In Japanese, the word for Wednesday means “water day” and is associated with the planet Mercury, literally meaning “water star”. In the mid-1950s, people started calling Wednesday “Hump Day”, which views the middle of the workweek as a mound you've got to climb over to reach the weekend. !975, JJ Cale featured the term in his song “Friday” and in 2013 the phrase saw a monstrous surge in popularity after a Geico commercial with an obnoxious talking camel walking around an office and asking people "what day is this?". And, of course, there’s Wednesday from The Addams Family , who has her TV show now. ...
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St. John’s Water Bottle

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I guess this was bound to happen. I had this tacit agreement with my gym, where I routinely forget my water bottle and they give it to me the next time I come in. I’m not a fan of this routine; in fact, it scares the screaming bejesus out of me since I’m a senior citizen and extremely concerned about the old memory banks going on the fritz. I liked to joke that the gym staff should find a special shelf for the damn thing so I could leave it there and fill it up every time I work out. Well, my luck finally ran out. Last week I left that water bottle somewhere in the gym—perhaps by the Stairmaster?—and when I got home, I went through the routine of calling to ask them to set it aside for me. Only this time nobody turned it in. I’m so used to the receptionists reaching under the counter and coming up with the water bottle that I was surprised when they told me they hadn’t seen it. It’s was pretty nice, too, which makes me wonder why I wasn’t more careful with it. I ...
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Keep it Brief

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So, where did I leave that briefcase? I lay in bed obscenely early one recent morning trying to remember where I had left my attaché case. I was so upset. How the hell could I lose something so important? God knows what I had in there, but it must have been vital or I wouldn’t have put it in the briefcase in the first place. And now it was gone. It took a few minutes for me to realize that the attaché case I was so attached to didn’t exist, and that it was, in fact, the stuff that dreams are made of. I haven't worked in an office in years and even then I didn't feel the need to use a briefcase. Why would I dream about one now? My mother bought me an attaché case for my birthday—or was it Christmas? —many years ago, when I first started working. It occurs to me that I haven’t laid eyes on that thing in years. I’m reasonably sure that it is somewhere in my house, I’m just not sure where. But this was not the briefcase in my dream. I had this delusion a fe...
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Slice of Life

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I heard the guy before I even opened the door. It was Saturday night, bitter cold here in Brooklyn and I was starving. I had gone shopping at my local supermarket and now I just wanted to pick up something for dinner and go the hell home. I decided to pick up an order of spaghetti and meatballs at Rocky’s & Nicky’s Pizzeria on Colonial Road. It’s not fine dining and I don’t have it often since I’m watching my cholesterol, but it’s just the right thing for a cold winter night. The hideous arctic blast was so nasty that my aunt had called earlier in the day from Los Angeles to see how I was doing. I let her know in no uncertain terms that I was trapped in my house and miserable as hell. “It’s like Covid all over again,” she said. I guess I was feeling particularly masochistic because I asked my aunt what the weather was like in L.A. “Well…a young woman walked by a little while ago and she was wearing shorts,” she said. I had to ask. Worse yet, I called my ...
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Dear Long Island

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Fidelity: faithfulness to a person, cause, or belief, demonstrated by continuing loyalty and support. My phone pinged late Friday morning and moments later I was traveling through time. I had just received a text message from my niece Kristin who had sent me a 1989 magazine ad that featured a photo of my brother Peter—Kristin’s father—when he became branch manager at Fidelity Investments’ Garden City office. “Dear Long Island,” the ad proclaims alongside a photo of Peter with a very serious look on his face. “When it comes to your investments, I’LL EARN YOUR FIDELITY…Instead of investment ‘advice’, I’ll give you useful, objective information. The facts and nothing but the facts.” It was such a jolt. I remember that advertisement so well. We had a copy mounted in a plexiglass frame that we used to keep on the dining room buffet. When our oldest brother Jim was visiting from California, he couldn’t resist making a wisecrack about insider trading. “Dear Long Island,” he said, ...
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