This is me last night celebrating with two of my four grandchildren, Zoe (left) and Sophie.
Since it’s my birthday, 83. I’ll indulge myself (and bore you, my readers) with what my wife of 49 years calls “burbling.”
What have I’ve learned.
You have to start with health. I’m healthy. I’ll do everything I can to stay healthy — which means daily tennis, only eating selected crap, carefulness, especially down stairs. And naps.
Early tennis, breakfast and an hour nap will put me into a state of heightened energy. Impossible to describe. With it, i can solve any problem, get every boring chore done and conquer the world. (Or at least my tiny world.)
After my health, I eye my family. They’re all healthy, intelligent and commonsensical.
Rupert Murdoch, a fellow Australian publisher, is 94. He is spending his old age in court battling his family. For what? For control of his empire. How can he possibly care? He’ll be dead. I won’t be. I’ll be around to relish the mess Fox predictably becomes.
Good things?
Good: Curiosity. Ask Why? and you’ll learn and learn. Pay attention and you’ll learn the best opportunities are there for the taking. Ignore what you hear and you’ll learn a wisdom that has regularly haunted me — what I call A Failure of Imagination.
I didn’t buy the second floor in our New York building. I didn’t buy the gorgeous property down the road.
I had all sorts of “reasons.” In hindsight, they were nothing more than a failure of imagination.
Those great opportunities come along once or twice in a lifetime. If you don’t seize them, they’ll haunt you on your 83rd birthday.
All the other “opportunities” like buying the “normal” stuff like stocks and real estate, you do to make a living, to pay the bills. You buy them not because you love what you bought.
You love what you start. That crazy gardening business. That crazy software business. That crazy publishing business, with my wonderful partner of 20+ years, Gerry Friesen.
You are you own worst enemy. Nobody can shoot you in the foot as accurately as you can. Gerry protected me from myself. Thank you., Gerry. Partners are good. Get yourself a great one.
Though they’re gone up — Palantir, CoreWeave, Meta, Netflix and Nvidia — they’re not ours. We can’t control them. They suffer the slings and arrows of a cruel world — the world we seem to be in at present. Nvidia will muddle through the nonsense that Washington relentlessly throws at it.
For agita, I’d rather have my own slings and arrows to muddle through.
I like having a long morning shower and thinking ways to make my family’s lives better. I often fantasize about “Things The World Really Needs.”
99% of the gadgetry we use every day could be improved. They’re called opportunities to start your own thing.
Lately, I wrote down my best tech, travel and life tips. I’ll publish the big list in coming days.
For today:
+ Be even more careful than ever. Motorized bicycles in New York City can put you in hospital for six months. I hit two deer this year. Deer killed a woman passenger when it flew through her windscreen and got her with its hooves. I now drive at 40 on country roads. That seriously annoys the cars behind me.
+ Get yourself all the vaccines you can. There’s an updated Covid shot. Even the CDC is recommending it.
+ Buy yourself an Apple watch. Get the model with GPS. It will dial Emergency Services if you fall or are in an accident. It just saved my friend, Michael Edwards’s life. He was swimming in the Pacific Ocean off Sydney, Australia, got washed up on rocks. He used his Apple Watch to call the Emergency helicopter.
Thee are three Apple Watches — one that is GPS with a built-in phone. It will call all by itself. There’s another that has GPS, but needs a nearby iPhone to call. That’s the one I have. That’s the one that you should have. And then there’s one that’s just a nice watch.
+ Stop reading. Stop watching TV. Ticket sales are down 50% since Trump declared himself chairman of the Kennedy Center. Add that to his six bankruptcies and you get a strong idea about his vaunted “management” skills, or lack thereof. A tariff war makes no sense either.
+ Attend a No Kings rally this weekend. There’s 2,000 of them all over the country this weekend. Susan and I will be at the Chatham, NY rally. You’ll find out more at No Kings.org. Here’s the map showing all the Saturday rallies.
Going to the dentist today. Nice birthday present. He made the appointment for two thirty. Say it slowly and you’ll see that’s when Chinese people go the dentist. My grandkids like that.
We recently drove by the local cemetery. “How many people in there are dead?” I asked. They knew the answer: “All of them, Papi.”
See you tomorrow. – Harry Papi Newton
