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When we first traveled to Vietnam nearly two decades ago, the roads were filled with bicycles and scooters. Over the years we began to see more scooters and fewer bikes. This week during our trip to Ho Chi Minh City, cars entered the great race to middle class status. Back in the day, crossing a […]
We raise a new and troubling trend that we need your help to understand. We talk, of course, about waiters’ insistent desire to take our plate away before we are finished eating. This happened again to us last night. Interestingly, we were at a private club not a restaurant. We once assumed restaurants do this […]
Truth and facts are much debated in public discourse today with various parties claiming ownership over them. We are a data person by nature–Lou Dobbs once called us an empirical bast**d in front of a crowd of hundreds, a badge we wear proudly. But it is easy to become overconfident in data so that it […]
We attended the Washington Council on International Trade’s annual Trade Summit earlier this week. As always, it was informative and educational and we especially appreciated and were informed by the sage Spencer Cohen and legendary David Tang’s words. In these times of transition–from a U.S.-led world, a post-World War II global architecture, an era of established […]
Many years ago, we decided to transplant a dwarf maple tree from one part of our front yard to another. We began digging. And digging. And…the tree’s roots were much deeper and wider than anticipated and before we knew it perhaps half of the front yard was a rather deep and wide hole. But the roots were not […]
Public perceptions are a strange commodity. We admit to perverse amusement at the college entrance cheating scandal, including the arrest of two Hollywood actors. One of them, Felicity Huffman, has now pled guilty and given the best apology we’ve seen by any public figure in the last eleven years and seven months. The contrition was complete and genuine, […]
At 6:30 pm our cat, Willow, expects to be fed and our other cat, Putter, expects to be taken outside for his afternoon jaunt. During his time patrolling the yard, Putter will purr, rub against our leg and give us a gaze of love, contentment and gratefulness. At 7:37 pm Pacific Daylight time on October […]
If you are like us (and we, of course, refer to the royal “you”—come to think of it, all of our readers are royalty to us) you are probably in a perpetual state of surprise. We had not anticipated, for example, that in one week both Donald Trump and Jussie Smollet would be completely exonerated […]
On the first day of spring the mind wanders: to a study in Sweden that finds centrists have the best bull%$#& detector. Those with extreme views have more difficulty detecting BS than those in the middle of the spectrum, or as the study puts it, the results point “to the existence of bull&%$# receptivity among […]
Like Donna Summer we were on the radio. Okay, not like Donna Summer in any way, but we were on the radio, whoa, oh, oh, oh. Paul Casey asked us to be on his show “Voices of Experience” on KKNW-1150 AM where we talked about this very newsletter you are reading right now, as well […]
