Brown Motion

 Before you find a home you buy a house.  A house is nothing but a box made of wood, nails and glass. It sits on a piece of land called a parcel.  Many such adjacent parcels with their own boxes constitute a community.  Hope of a home buyer is to find said box that is to their liking in terms of the holes it has (windows and doors) and the position of said holes as well as the surfaces inside and few appliances that sit inside this box to make life comfortable. All this plus what is around the community and who is in this community matters.  Are there going to be eclectic food purveyors aka restaurants in a few mile radius?  Are there opportunities to get outdoor for a walk?  Is a commercial hub not too far?  What about getting to an airport? Oh and what is the crime rate in this community or town? Hmm.  All good questions for someone on a house hunt wanting to find said house and then make it their home.  We are in the boat so to speak....

 Yea!  Lest readers get ahead of themselves and congratulate their luck that the author of this rather inane blog had somehow come into a windfall and struck it rich and would now stop publishing drivel once and for all I would want to burst that bubble. Right away.  Meaning no such luck.  Well as they say the key to winning a lottery ticket is to first buy one.  And me has never and unlikely ever would.  So just relax and get used to more drivel down the road.  I am not going away on some la la trip never to return to type out a few keystrokes. Rather I wanted to rant about these so called 'For Dummies' self proclaimed wizards of lore (that they seem to think they are) aka self help gurus.  Each time the local Powerball reaches stratospheric levels of potential winnings with many zeroes in front of  a 1 or 9 or whatever number you want that to be; these 'let me tell you what not to do' crowds begin to make an appearance. Not sure why this is...

 Since modern man started roaming the planet he has obsessed with the idea of brand.  It is a representation of oneself, whether a single entity or a collective. Humans with their ego like to have a way to identify with something and a brand helps them do so. Large governments are brands that people know about and can easily associate by virtue of the country's flag for example.  The flag is the brand.  Or their money.  Also called Fiat (not the car although that is an example of a brand) it represents the stored value that can be easily exchanged for goods and services. The first major birthing of private sector branding came about with the creation of the British East India Company circa 1600. A private enterprise with a sole aim of garnering and maximizing revenues from the jewel in its colonial crown, India.  They looted and plundered under various CEOs or its equivalent titles and the world knew what the East India Company meant then and now. The Dutch...

It was an unusually warm winter day in the bay area.  With a long weekend in the offing courtesy a great black leader who is to be remembered we enjoyed a visit to a favorite haunt of mine - Tilden Regional Park in the Berkeley Hills. The readers may recollect my narration about this area that I visit on many an occasion - less so in the recent past.  Now with our child heading out to college once again and our likelihood of leaving the bay for good a distinct possibility I had to recharge and visit some of our fave haunts again. So I went for a walk to Inspiration Point part of the park.  Parking was at a premium in the assigned few spots this evening so we had to trudge a way out but all was well. The vistas are magnificent from this mount which is about 1,000 feet elevation I suspect. Sitting atop the San Pablo Dam watershed (the drainage feeds the reservoirs for drinking water for the area) I had a jolly good walk for a couple hours.  The setting sun was beating ...

 In a year of covid people have shied away from socializing.  At least majority did. Physical contact became anathema.  Wearing masks became a new normal. We forgot what an actual smile looks like.  The huggers among us suddenly could not.  What happened to all those hugs that were to be given?  Outstanding hug count has been the highest it has ever been. Some will never return given the people we lost.  Those are the hugs lost. Could we do better as a species? Did we learn anything here? What should we focus on here on out? Does law and order matter? What is good governance? Are we essentially cave dwellers in better clothes? Cannot wait for Yuval Harari to pen something intelligent about cause and effect on this new way of life.

 So will be written some prose after we are long gone.  History will judge what has been.  Of the almost 245 years of America's democracy there have been many a war and uprising.  Much blood spilled and ideologies threatened. Yesterday was a mere formality or so we thought.  Acknowledging American voters' right to choose their next leader.  A counting of electoral votes seen as a tradition long upheld as traditions go with the VP presiding and announcing the next President to take oath Jan 20th. Instead it went from an orderly event to shoot out.  In the capital's Capitol where this putative event was to finish without much drama there was a riot.  Trump supporters stormed the barricade of the Washington police and entered the building.  Smashing hardware and trampling all the artifacts that America holds dear as representations of its democracy. Then there was some shooting.  One died.  Senators and Representatives took cover....