We flew from Seattle to London on a late afternoon flight arriving in London the next day, Tuesday. We flew business class and the seat configuration on the 747 has the seats facing the opposite way so that your next door passenger faces you only inches away. There is a privacy divider but when the seat is extended flat, it means the inside person has to step over your foot rest to get to the aisle. However, the seats are adequate…
Tomorrow, Monday, we fly to London, then on to Milan, Italy and from there by car to beautiful Lake Como where we will stay for several days. From there we travel by car to Venice and spend another two days before boarding the Seaborn Spirit for a cruise down the Adriatic. At Lake Como we are staying at the Castadiva Resort which is located on six acres right on the lake. It was the residence of a 19th century opera singer, Giuditta…
I know full well that talking about politics is a waste of time because virtually everyone has their mind made up and there is nothing anyone can say or do that will change the already established opinion. But, it makes me feel better to write about things that really bother me regarding the two parties. One of them is Congressman Paul Ryan's continuous gross misstatements of significant historical facts. I won't repeat the list of these in his convention speech, but…
I came across a website, “Want to know info” which had inspirational stories. http://www.wanttoknow.info/060520inspirationalstories There were multiple examples of failure turned into success. Many I had read before, but this was such an excellent collection I recommend it to you. The website says the stories were compiled from two excellent books by Jack Canfield and Mark Hansen: Chicken Soup for the Writer's Soul and A Cup of Chicken Soup for the Soul Here are some examples that were described. …
I finished a book: Dropped names: Famous men and women as I knew them by the actor Frank Langella. Here are a few excerpts I thought worth repeating. Bette Davis was asked what it takes to succeed in the acting profession. She always answered "the courage to be hated." I've often said that a lawyer, especially a trial lawyer, is very unlikely to be a great lawyer if they are worried about being liked and put that as a priority….
Public radio KUOW carried a story, today, about the Idaho Republican party and its transformation from its traditional character. Apparently there are now strong factions within the party at odds with one another. One member of the party was quoted as saying: "I visualized myself as more conservative than many, and that's what I thought until I was rudely awakened by some of these other people who started calling me a liberal." Idaho has been so Republican that the joke is the Democrats could…
My maternal grandmother Marija Babarovich was born on September 21, 1863 on an island in the Adriatic Sea and died in Anacortes, Washington on August 5th, 1953. She was born in what was Austria Hungary, became Yugoslavia and is now Croatia. She died the year I graduated from high school in Anacortes, Washington.Her life story is one of great courage and sacrifice involving immigration to America while not being able to speak English. I've previously talked about that in writing about my…
The first world war lasted from 1914 to 1918. Along the Western front there were some six thousand miles of trenches extending from the sea to the mountains. The trenches were subject to cannon bombardment and the fighting involved crossing the area between both sides trenches, known as "no man's land" to the enemy trenches where hand to hand killing took place. The strain of this kind of war and the life in trenches took a mental toll. In WW I it was called…
In an article entitled "Why Consumers Aren't Good at Telling You What They Want" http://www.instituteofdecisionmaking.com/?p=619 The writer, Matthew Wilcox, says that when Steve jobs was asked if Apple had used consumer research to help design and launch the I-Pad, he replied "no." And when asked why not, he said,"it's not the consumers Job to know what they want." What neuroscience marketing research has shown, is that the consumer is not very good at telling us what they want. We know…
The recent nuclear disaster in Japan and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine are certainly not the first nuclear disasters. But, Chernobyl was the worst nuclear accident in history. The attempt to contain the contamination involved some 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion Rubles which crippled the soviet economy. We had our own nuclear diaster in March of 1979 when a nuclear power plant failure happened at Three Mile Island in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. There was radiation contamination…
