“Hello. My name is Steve Cotler. Each week I go out to a ranch in the country and pick up fresh eggs and deliver them in this area at a price within a penny or two of store prices. Of course, these eggs are much fresher than store eggs because I pick [...]
One thousand words…
We scheduled our trip down the Keys so as to avoid the human embarrassments that attend Spring Break. We sought spectacular sunsets, coral reefs, beachside conversation.
We came for the waters. We were misled.
We didn’t know that the Florida colleges let out their students a week early, so that they will [...]
At Tokyo’s Narita Airport, Mr. Mizutani shook my hand, bowed slightly and said, “Kotora-san, you have safe trip home.”
“Why,” I asked Mr. Mizutani, “do you pronounce my name Kotora? My name isn’t COAT-ler. It’s COT-ler. Why don’t you call me Katora?”
Mizutani took a deep breath and smiled broadly. “Kotora good name. [...]
Near the end of my stay, to thank me for my efforts, six Japanese executives took me to dinner at a very upscale Tokyo restaurant. I had read guidebooks that highlighted cultural differences and how Americans abroad should behave, but nothing had prepared me for this.
In the early 70’s, as assistant to the president and product manager for a small, NYSE-listed business machines company, I traveled to Tokyo to teach our Japanese affiliate how to sell our new product, the world’s first high-speed, commercial fax machine. I was 27.
My introductory talk was to 60 men, all of whom leaned [...]
Benny Silverstein and Marty Stein operated shoe stores in Oxnard, my California childhood’s small town. Marty’s store was on A Street’s east side, right next to my father’s men’s & boys’ clothing store. Benny’s store was directly across the street. Marty carried a marginally higher-priced line, but in a town that lived [...]
Today my four-year-old Mac G4 laptop began acting its age.
Groups of pixels jittered chaotically in horizontal regiments, sometimes covering the screen. Then, without anodyne application, the problem would disappear. And just as unpredictably, reappear. Further investigation revealed that these video measles increased or decreased as a function of manual pressure exerted on [...]
There is very little to recommend California’s Interstate 5 except straightness and speed.
In a midsummer’s sunset somewhere south of Buttonwillow, I am rolling at 80, glazed by oncoming lights and nearly listening to bad luck and worse love on a Country FM out of Visalia. I lift, drink, and am under an inch in [...]
mephitis mephitis: North American striped skunk
The odor of skunk is very different up close than it is far away. A wee bit-o-skunk is sharp and somewhat lemony…stinky, definitely apprehendable, but not outrageously offensive. Full-skunk, however, clouding thickly outward from the furry hotness of a thoroughly swacked pet dog, is an altogether different experience. It [...]
In the summer of 2002, Ann and I were in Sevilla, walking back to our lodging after a typically late dinner. It was midnight, but the twisty, cobbled lanes were not entirely deserted. As we entered a three-way street junction, lit only by a few faraway home lights, two young men on a [...]
