Dr. Riedy's Random Thoughts

The trigger for today's essay was a little thing, but it followed a big thing so it became meaningful. Included in the paperwork for a new endodontist I was referred to recently was the low key question of the type of music I'd like to hear while under their care. I checked off "the 60's" and forgot about it. As I snugged into the orthodontist's chair, however, "Surfin USA" followed by other Beach Boys’ hits played gently in the background and made me smile and relax. In contrast, a couple days later, my wife and I joined dear friends for dinner at the trendy, relatively new restaurant, Callie, in the East Village of downtown San Diego. We had arrived shortly after 5 p.m. on a weekday evening, which was good because conversations were still possible. But by the time our dinner selections were being made, the animated and elevated voices of hundreds of guests and their parties made it impossible to hear--much less understand--one another. Indeed, ...

"Please do not put trash into the planters" were the signs staring at me at Sunday brunch last weekend. The outdoor dining area was ringed with attractive planters, several with the same message.Today's story raises the question: why would anyone even need to be asked not to trash an attractive planter in a restaurant? It's a sad commentary on society. We all know the answer, of course, which is that not everyone is considerate of others or of the environment. It might be the person who leaves their dog's poop for others to scoop. Alternately, it might be the restaurant server who sleeps late, or simply doesn't show up at all, is hung over, or arrives at work breathing COVID on his or her colleagues. These behaviors all impose unfair burdens on other workers, hurt team performance and customer satisfaction, and damage restaurant rankings--a trifecta of thoughtless negative consequences. Environmental protection laws, masking requirements and recycling camp...

Part 2: Readers' Responses to Essay: "Coping with Disappointments: Is Taking them for Granted a Healthy Response?" Inbox Mark Riedy Thu, Jan 13, 7:07 AM (1 day ago) Responses to the essay on handling disappointments were plentiful and insightful, as illustrated in Part 1 of this two-part series. In this essay I will provide the full responses of four individuals, ending on an upbeat note. With thanks again to those of you sharing your thoughts with me, it's my pleasure in turn to convey the insights and experiences of four friends. 1. This friend responds faithfully to almost every essay I write, and articulates an unabashedly liberal/progressive point of view on a wide variety of topics--consistently well-reasoned and presented-- typically from a socio-economic-ethical perspective rather than a political one. What follows includes material from two of her responses. "What strikes me most in what you wrote is what is considered “regular” life in this day ...

From: Mark Riedy Date: Sun, Jan 9, 2022 at 7:00 PM Subject: Essay: Part 1--Readers respond to "Coping with Disappointments: Is Taking Them for Granted a Healthy Response?" Dear Friends and Family, One of the genuine pleasures I derive from writing these essays is that many of you, a varying group from topic to topic, take time to offer your comments on my musings. I learn a lot from your experience and insights. I enjoy taking your words and using them to create new essays like this one, in which I can share your feedback with everyone on the distribution list. Without fail, your comments add depth and richness to the messages contained in my original essays and thereby enrich all of our lives. Collectively, we are neighbors helping neighbors. From your comments it became clear I had only scratched the surface of the issue of how individuals cope with disappointment. A quick refresher is that our two grandsons, ages 16 and 19, traveling with us on a cruise to Mexico...

Dear Friends and Family: It is easy to think about what to do with the good things in our lives, those we may have been taking for granted. See my November 29, 2021 essay, "Never Take for Granted a Good Night's Sleep". Identify, embrace and appreciate them. But what about the bad/sad things, and the disappointments and frustrations we may also be taking for granted? What do we do with or about them? These are not simple questions. They arise from an observation, which I consider quite profound, made recently by our 19-year old grandson: "In this era of COVID I have gotten used to being disappointed." Let me put his insight into context before asking for comments from family and friends. Recently, my wife and I were thrilled to be able to corral/entice/bribe/host our two teen-aged grandsons (16 and 19 years old) to join us on a week-long cruise of the Mexican Riviera. As they checked out the list of excursions in Mazatlan and Puerto Vallarta, they picked the...

It has come to my attention that those individuals who have my blog postings automatically sent to their email addresses may end up with one continuous paragraph, mind-bogglingly long and off-putting. I believe, if you read it here on the blog, it may appear with paragraphs as I intended. If you prefer to have the essays more readable, with paragraphs as appropriate, please consider sending me your email address with a brief request to be added to my distribution list. The ONLY thing I post here are my essays. I first email them to a list of just over 450 individuals, and those arrive with proper indentation. The only use I make of the distribution list is to email out these essays. Also, it has come to my attention that when I sent my last email, two individuals (whom I verified had not blocked my emails themselves) did not receive copies of my email. I received an error message that they had rejected them. I know that there have been some upgrades made recently by Apple (or mayb...

RESPONSES TO “ONE FOR THE TEXTBOOKS (OF THE FUTURE)” Thanks to all of you who responded to my essay so quickly and thoughtfully, at times also emotionally. I applaud you for sharing your thoughts with me and the larger group of readers! Before I begin quoting (anonymously) several of the responses, I wanted to refer to an industry newsletter forwarded to me by a friend. In it the author addresses what he considers to be an overvalued stock market. I wanted to share with you the phraseology of his conclusion because I thought it was excellent, not only for his narrower opinion of the future course of stock prices and stock indices, but also for today’s economic and financial prospects more broadly. In brief, he admitted to not knowing how the level of stock prices and indices will finally resolve themselves. However, he was confident it would not end happily. In this “Readers’ Responses” essay I have tried my best to exclude any material I considered political in nature. Part of me ...

Although our retirement fund is managed professionally, I still fret over how it is positioned on an overall aggressive/defensive basis even though it appears to be well-hedged and conservative. My major concern is that IF/WHEN interest rates start to rise again, as they certainly will at some point in the future (a 100 percent safe bet), the market value of those holdings will decline. It’s an arithmetic thing, not a guess. At the same time, as interest rates begin to rise and become more attractive to investors, money may well shift into interest-bearing debt securities and out of the stock market, thereby leading to lower stock values. I’ve oversimplified, but there is some truth in what I say, that if/when rates start to rise the interest-bearing debt in our portfolio will decline in value and so will the stocks. Not happy thoughts. Pulling everything out of the market and putting it under our pillows is not the solution, but the purpose of this essay is not to discuss portfoli...

It is 3 a.m. on the Monday after Thanksgiving as I begin drafting this essay. I just polished off the last small leftover serving of a pineapple casserole, affectionately known as “Aunt Elsie”, our daughter brought to dinner last Thursday. Family lore has it that many years ago, my wife’s Aunt Elsie paid $50 for the recipe and then shared it with the entire family—thus the “Aunt Elsie” moniker. But already I digress. The idea behind this essay flows from the toast I made to our family at Thanksgiving dinner. Basically, I asked everyone to think about the people and things that are important in their lives but that they take for granted. For example, we take for granted that we are a loving family and that as a group we have wholly positive relationships with one another. On holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, when stress levels tend to be higher than average, we still all get along without any negativity. Every grouping of family members within the extended family helps in th...

If Dolphins Could Tell Time Here’s a brain-teaser you can take to your “End of Daylight Saving Time (DST)” party this weekend. DST ends Sunday, November 7, at 2 a.m., and we set our clocks back by one hour. “Spring forward, Fall back”, is all we need to remember twice a year. The brain-teasing question is as follows: In San Diego, will there be more, less, or the same amount of daylight (the time from sunrise to sunset) on Sunday versus the day immediately prior, Saturday, November 6? Think you have the answer? Let me add additional true facts and see if you change your thinking. In San Diego, sunrise will be at 6:11 a.m. Sunday and 7:10 a.m. on Saturday. Sunset will be at 4:52 p.m. Sunday afternoon and 5:53 p.m. on Saturday. To repeat the question: Will the amount of daylight on Sunday be more, less or the same amount as on Saturday? I only pre-tested the question on one person prior to publishing it. She guessed correctly on the third try. The answer is at the end of this essay....

We Never Guess, We Look It Up Born in 1942, I grew up in a much simpler world than the one I live in today, or so I believed during my formative years. From my perspective in 2021, however, the world probably was just as complex and complicated then as it is today. I just didn’t know it. Nor could I. Why not? Because for my generation, most everything we were taught in elementary school or learned on our own—our foundation of knowledge—was to be found on a printed page. If it wasn’t printed and on a shelf at home, in school, in a store or in a library, it did not exist—or so we thought. In contrast, today’s children and young- to middle-aged adults have grown up in an environment where information about the entire world is accessible easily and instantaneously through iPhones and other smart phones. Whereas those of us born during or shortly after World War II thumbed through tables of contents in books, especially encyclopedias, subsequent generations scrolled through Google searc...

From time to time I will publish guest essays, both original pieces (such as a series on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, to be published probably starting in early 2022) and responses to essays I previously published. This is such a response. By publishing it my intent is to give exposure to a thought-provoking response disagreeing respectfully with an essay I had written earlier, a copy of which follows the guest essay. Publication of the guest essay does not mean I agree with the author, nor am I endorsing her point of view. Nonetheless, it is a thoughtful and substantive commentary and I want to give it exposure. The author, Christine (Chris) Brant has authorized me to identify her and provide her email address (christine.a.tales@gmail.com). Her essay follows and the essay to which she is responding is shown following hers. In regards to Mark Riedy's article on Elected Officials possible National Education and Training programs, let me be the first to respectfully present an...

(The Calculation of Credit Scores may be Nuanced, Subtle, Counter-Intuitive) Dear Readers: Please treat this essay as a post-script to my recent essay targeting young adults and their need to understand credit scores. In part from your feedback to the original essay and in part from recent experience with a change in my own credit score, I firmly believe the topic needs to be understood better by all adults, not just young adults. Moreover, there are elements of the calculation that are subtle, nuanced and counter-intuitive, so much so that I strongly recommend parents and grandparents not only share the original essay with children and grandchildren but also review the material in that essay AND in this essay one-on-one with them. Expecting a child or grandchild to comprehend credit scores and how/why it will affect them without hand-holding is quite likely expecting too much. Without your direct help, children and grandchildren probably won’t “get it”. The day I sent readers the ...

With Delta and other variants lifting their ugly heads, a military disaster in Kabul, a huge hurricane in Louisiana and wildfires raging out of control in the Western United States, for my wife and me our greatest refuge and source of joy is our family, immediate and extended. We treasure every moment with them. Last Sunday was one of those family days filled with joy and laughter. Even as we partied, however, stirring in the back of my mind were fears we are nowhere near containing mutations of the COVID-19 virus in this country. I fear the great family times like I will describe briefly below may be at risk again in the future. Late Sunday morning, 13 (immediate and extended) family members gathered at our home to celebrate “birthday palooza”, co-celebrating four June - August birthdays simultaneously rather than stringing them out. A delicious brunch, followed by chocolate cake with individual candles on each slice (COVID precautions), and birthday gifts made for a happy day despi...

If I had used the title with Credit Scores first, I would have lost half of my readers before the end of this paragraph. And yet I firmly believe a parent-child discussion of credit scores, especially if the child is 18 +/- years of age, or irrespective of age is just beginning to use credit cards, is second in importance only to “the talk” about the birds and the bees. Also, it is less awkward. Moreover, the credit score discussion is especially crucial if the young adult is heading off to college or a junior college as an incoming first year student—away from parental oversight and where there are at least two great opportunities for them to screw up. First, flunk out of school. Second, fail to manage the payments on their two or more (probably recently new) credit cards properly and/or to make their apartment rent payments in full and on time, if they live off campus. Such a failure is the equivalent of flunking out of the financial system almost before you get into it. Many adult...

Please pardon the expression, but “Unsalted food tastes like crap” should have been the real headline for this essay. On the bright side, of course, it is much easier to exercise portion control when meals and snacks are essentially pleasure-free. The two-plus weeks since I went cold turkey and adopted a low/no sodium diet regimen for health reasons seem like two of the longest weeks of my life—I have not touched a saltshaker except to pass it on to others. Nor have I had a potato chip or fried snack product ending in the letter “o”, like Dorito, Frito or Cheeto, over the entire time. Although no one responded to my last essay with cherished family recipes for no and low salt meals, several responses did identify herbs and spices that add zest to otherwise bland food: “Ground pepper, limes, cumin,turmeric and cayenne bring dishes to life and can make any veggies taste sublime.” Other suggestions: lemon, vinegar, garlic, pepper and herbs all add flavor, and try Spike salt free seasonin...