My family has a long relationship with trees. My great grandfather was a tree cutter in (today’s) Ukraine. Our daughter’s name derives from the Hebrew word for “oak.” Three trees, haphazardly growing in a diamond, marked the backyard baseball of my elementary school days, their weak trapezoidal geometry an accurate reflection of my baseball abilities. Stewart Brand’s relation of the Oxford University main hall forresters in The Clock Of The Long Now made me rethink long-term systems reliability.

I like trees. But until New Year’s Eve, I never had one in my personal care.

Which is how I came to…

In a year when few things went as planned, including losing all of the time I spent on business travel, in airports, and on beach vacations where I’d be reading, I managed to finish 47 books in 2020. I ventured into much more music, business, and new author territory. I also focused on reading authors who aren’t like me — cis, white, straight, male and American — and discovered some superb new worlds, real and imagined.

To conclude the plague year, this list goes to eleven:

37. “Tropic of Kansas,” sci fi, Christopher Brown, Finished October 8.

Dystopian novels are…

It’s frequently just one wire that separates joy from despair. This was first made evident to me in Princeton E-Quad basement lab, where a lab partner’s elaborate breadboard was tagged with a note from his quasi-evil partner saying “Moved one wire, have a great weekend!” The wire in question was of course the most obvious — the power lead — and in the days before we snapped pictures with our cell phones to document simple life configurations, this was the thinnest acceptable terminator line.

I’ve turned that lesson of looking for the most obvious defect into a small hobby of…

It’s been nine months of Zoom bass lessons — enough time to gestate some new ideas for getting the best, simplest rig together to be able to take a lesson, play along with a music source, and occasionally jam with some remote friends.

Here are the problems:

• I want to be able to play my bass and have a studio microphone so I can talk to “the other end” — whether I’m counting beats or singing intervals in a lesson or talking to the drummer (not that drummers listen but still)
• I need to be able to hear what’s happening…

This is a story I submitted ten years ago to a fledgling sports magazine as part of a sports fiction contest. Neither the magazine nor story did very well, but the shinny hockey pictorial essay in the November 29 New York Times made me revisit it, update it, and decide to share it on the day that indoor hockey has been postponed in New Jersey. We will all hold onto our game faces a bit longer.

February

“Less than a gallon of blue paint” is the answer that pops into my head. My left hand is holding a red Borgata…

I am a list maker; it helps me put boundaries around projects and set short term priorities. It’s also useful for organizing long-running projects, whether house maintenance or thinking about how I’ll approach my Movember campaign. Starting at the head of the year, I make notes about men’s cancers, mental health, and personal stories that motivate and inform my involvement with my singular fundraising effort for the year. Along with my leather journal of ticket stubs and concert notes, it’s something upon which to reflect.

At the peak of pandemic concerns, cancelled summer plans, a sore lack of live music…

Advisory boards are a great opportunity to meet people with completely divergent interests, experiences and backgrounds. You’re herded together in a nice hotel room or around a polished corporate conference room table (when such things are allowed), the saddle point of some common institution intersecting your very different skills parabolas. Our love for technology and Princeton brought Rishi and me together on a half dozen occasions and I was always impressed by his seeming ease of being an arbiter of online king makers, taste makers and makers in general.

This past year, in the course of assembling my annual themes…

Frank Zappa and I have a complicated relationship, made perhaps a bit more personal this week. His music is vulgar, obtuse, jazzy and free, but full of stereotypes and tropes that were difficult in the 1970s, let alone half a century later. Listen to his guitar playing, and sense the boundaries of rock and roll that the Mothers of Invention pushed, and there is latent genius.

I keep intersecting Zappa, a few times a decade, always in clusters. After friend and former roommate Bill completed my basic Zappa education with late night play-throughs of “Joe’s Garage,” things were quiescent for…