Minneapolis, MN -- (UPI)

The President of the National Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers came out against regulation and registration of the purchase of  pressure cookers in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings last Monday.

Jake Maguire, President of  NAHAM said, "We don't wan… Read full post »

In 1983, I was in a conference room in the newly completed Administration Building of the Seabrook Station nuclear power plant. In that meeting was a representative of the FBI, and one from the ATF division of the U.S. Treasury department.

As part of the security force in place for… Read full post »

There's been a lot in the media recently about the day an NFL football player comes out as gay.  NFL Punter Chris Kluwe and Linebacker Brandon Ayanbadejo have been speaking out on behalf of Same Sex Marriage and this week have talked about players coming out.

Ayanbadejo has said in the… Read full post »

I guess it's time to name names. I've been here for over four years.  A lot of talented people have posted on this site. It's time to give them their due.

But first, it's entirely possible that your name will not appear below. I have to say this. You didn't… Read full post »

I must have been eighteen the first time this had happened to me. She was in my communications class.  She chose me for an assignment on non-verbal communication. We had to spend time together for four hours and we could only communicate non-verbally.

It started as a flirtatious walk in… Read full post »

Let’s start with a thought experiment. Imagine all CEOs of publically held companies are sociopaths. Their purpose for being is self reward. Yeah, they have to meet the financial goals set by the street and genuflect occasionally on the quarterly call with analysts, but their board is made of t… Read full post »

I was going to title this "I left my barf in San Francisco," but I thought that would be both inaccurate and inadvisible.

This story took place during my freshman year in college. In the lovely fair city of Boston, Massachusetts, the hub of the universe and the cradle of… Read full post »

Dear Congress,

Welcome back from vacation.  How exhausted you must have been from all that campaigning, fundraising, pontificating and obfuscating. It certainly hasn't been from Legislating.

Now that you're back from vacation, after being on the job for a rough three and half weeks, perhaps you… Read full post »

As I hunker down, for winter storm Nemo,  I remember the Blizzard of '78.  

My daughters would probably ask if was that eighteen or nineteen 78. Nineteen, thanks very much, girls. I was a 22 year old jock (the industry term for disc jockey or radio announcer) working… Read full post »

If you cast one movie with Kenneth Brannagh, Colin Firth, Judi Dench, and Keira Knightley, you would flock to the theatre to see some great performances. What if you added Lily Tomlin, Jason Alexander, Julia Stiles, and Valarie Pettiford? Sound like a hit?

Stars in Shorts is a compilation of sev… Read full post »

In 1960, the first presidential election I have memory of, the first televised debate took place between Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy. Moderated by CBS's Howard K. Smith (one of the famous Murrow boys), viewers who were polled concluded that JFK was the winner of the debat… Read full post »

I've developed an elevator speech for those few people out there who are still undecided in this election.  There may be a few Romneyites who might crossover, but I'm not really looking for converts this late in the game.

Here they are:

Shaping the supreme court for the next 25 years.… Read full post »

Dear Tom Stemberg,

I was a loyal customer of Quill, Inc., the predecessor to Staples and then became a loyal Staples customer. I’ve purchased my first computer from Staples. My wife has a small business and she has been a loyal customer for over ten years.

I’ve supported the b… Read full post »

Call it intuition, or a sixth sense. I travel through two of the biggest terrorist targets in New York City, Grand Central Terminal and Pennsylvania Station.

I work in the shadow of the Empire State Building. I easily could have been one of the shooting victims today outside the Empire State… Read full post »

Photo IDs are probably important. Until about 40 years ago, you only saw them on Passports or at places where you needed positive identification, like military installations or nuclear power plants.

Thanks to the Polaroid Corporation and its photo ID system in the early 1970s, States began issuing ph… Read full post »

 I originally posted this in 2010.  In light of recent denials that the Holocaust ever took place, I felt compelled to share this again.

Prague as viewed from the Castle in April 2005

Our MBA class traveled to the Czech Republic in 2005 for our international residency.… Read full post »

Tomorrow afternoon, my 83 year old father will have open heart surgery to replace his aortic valve. Over the last two weeks I've watched him prepare for death.

Struggling in his hospital bed to get comfortable, I've watched him joke with the doctors, nurses, personal care attendants, speech pathologi… Read full post »

I contemplate this as my father will undergo a cardiac catheterization tomorrow in advance of an aortic valve replacement. Dad is 83, and we found him collapsed next to his bed where he lay for almost three days.

While I've written about him before, the last few days have been spent… Read full post »

I remember a elementary school writing assignment asking me to write 200 words about how I spent my vacation. I failed that assignment miserably.

 I handed in "I went to sleepaway camp for eight weeks and had lots of fun."

I was 188 words short.

This summer vacation I went to … Read full post »

It would be easy to determine who is more of an American Patriot than another if it was about the trappings of Patriotism. By trappings, I mean the flag, the bunting, the jingoisms of Mom, Apple Pie, Chevrolet. The more trappings, the more one is a Patriot.

Perhaps patriotism is about… Read full post »

One only has to replay the tapes of the quitter from Wasilla, former half term Governor and Weathergirl Sarah Palin, when she said that the Affordable Health Care Act would create "Death Panels."

I never I thought I would admit that Sarah Palin was correct. The law did create a "Death… Read full post »

I married way too young the first time. I was emotionally immature and I thought I was in love. She chased after me. She was physically attractive, and she told me how much I meant to her. My low self esteem got pumped right up. She wouldn't stop calling… Read full post »

It's been almost four months since I started commuting from Connecticut. I used to commute from Yonkers into New York on a different branch of Metro-North, the Hudson line. I wrote about that experience here.

This commute takes a little longer, about 79 minutes to go the 59… Read full post »

New York, NY (UPI) - Web site Open Salon.com was down for several hours today. According to an unnamed source in their midtown Manhattan offices, the outage was due to a reverse vortex effect, when million of Spammers ceased posting because of the high heat and humidity over much of the… Read full post »

In the early nineteen sixties, my parents purchased a small lakefront lot in rural northern New Jersey, with the purpose of building a home. My parents and I made the journey back and forth to this development at least a dozen times between the times I was eight and nine years… Read full post »