This is inspired by my good friend Ben Haller, who writes an annual letter and sends it out in December. I’m a little late and more long-winded. I’ll mostly pretend COVID doesn’t exist as we’re all tired of it.
Carrying over from 2019, Eric and I were deep into investigating moving to Portland.…
One of the most popular articles I’ve written is called Why do stocks go up and down. The conclusions it draws are not what you are going to hear on CNBC or from financial analysts. It’s uncomfortable to think that stock movements have no direct connection to what they call “fundamentals” unless a critical mass believes that and acts on it in the market.…
Every few years I like to look at the list of songs I’ve liked in Spotify so I can see who my favorite artists are. It’s not that I don’t know who they are, it’s just interesting to quantify them and sometimes I’m surprised who is present and absent from my Top 10 list.…
37 years after Mrs Devine was my 2nd grade teacher at Elm School near Chicago, I flew to Colorado to stay with her at her home for several days.
Before I go into all the details, I’ve always thought that her last name was so appropriate. That she was so devine.…
People always ask “what’s your favorite music”—a harder question to answer than it might seem. Rather than try to stab in the dark, I resort to data analytics. Obviously.
I recently found this wonderful website called Skiley that you connect to your Spotify account and it spits out all sorts of wonderful data.…
Just so people don’t think I only take pictures of birds, I thought I’d share what I consider some of the best photos I’ve taken.
There are 16 of them and they are all from trips to New Zealand, Hawaii, Costa Rica, and California.
Based on this, the most beautiful place in the world is the South Island of New Zealand.…
At one point recently, I had 23 parrots of 7 different species. How did I get here? I’ll start with an exchange with my Mom over Christmas:
Mom: So how many birds do you have now?
Me: I have 23
Mom: Oh, that’s not many
That should give you some insight into my family.…
Everyone likely has their list of greatest albums. But what I’ve always been obsessed with is the perfect album. We’re all probably familiar with buying the new album from our favourite band and being thrilled. Except for that one song. Or two songs.
I define a perfect album as:
…An album you can listen to from beginning to end, at a medium to high volume, and you never feel like skipping a song.
I’ve had this idea for a long time to start a non-profit to promote bird keeping as a way to raise awareness about the plight of birds in the wild. Here is my business plan. I’m half hoping someone will just take it and run with it as it would be a huge undertaking.…
Photo: David Byrne at Coachella, 2018
I created a playlist of David Byrne songs spanning his career and you can jump to the end if you’re not interested in my ramblings. I could talk endlessly about him.
At the beginning of 1983, I was listening to a steady diet of artists like this:
Not that these bands are terrible or anything, but they have one thing in common: I haven’t intentionally listened to any of them since then.…