Exporting democracy to Arab Countries...

This now should read like selling freezers to the Eskimos, especially after what's going on today in Iraq. After the misguided invasion of Sadam's Kingdom in 2003, we just destroyed the (tyrannical) cement that was holding that three-piece country together and, today, it's finally self-fragmenting as I predicted it would.

Just like Yugoslavia breaking into pieces, we'll see very soon at least a separate Kurdish entity and an Arab state, unless we see the entire region shatters into many more nations, tribes or sectarian factions.

So, should we intervene? Certainly not and if we ever sent “boots on the ground”, it should be the “dirty quintet”: Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice and Tony Blair!

Saving on running shoes?

We see something new every day. Today, as I was wrapping up my morning run, I ran into a young man, running barefoot. I had never seen this before.

He was on the asphalt road as I was, and while I had seen people running with finger-shoes, that are already close to wearing nothing, this athletic looking runner was in direct skin-to-road contact.

I know that barefoot running is part of a wide movement called "natural running" inspired by the Tarahuma folks in Mexico, and that it became fashionable in the last decades, but it's not quite for me. I still like to first have the “rubber meet the road”!

Learning by going out...

Learning has always been and always will be a continuous process. Every time we go out, for a walk, running some errands or just in front of the house staring at the mountains, the birds or the trees, we learn something.

From the smallest detail we see, to the cars that drive by, but most importantly, from the people we talk to, we keep on gathering tidbits of information or learning nuggets of news that will make our day.

We don't need to travel 6,000 miles away. Just poking our head outside of the comfort of our home daily will teach us an incredible amount of knowledge. We need to go out and engage people more often. This is part of our required, continuing education curriculum!

When architects re-invent the wheel

The contemporary look is back in Park City's new homes and the alpine design on the way out. As always, architects,who seem to hit the creative block, have this inbred need to re-invent the wheel and throw the baby and the hot-water out of the window.

Gone are sloped roofs that drain well and overhang that protect from the summer sun. In are flat roofs that puddle up before they leak, and huge windows that work wonders to fry-up their occupants and rev up the air-conditioning system.

This doesn't prevent the same architects of torturing their new-found designs into being “environmentally sound”, even though I have my doubt about that quality, and to churn out designs that have nothing timeless about them and will age as quickly as their previous incarnations concocted in the 70s. The more (bad) things change, the more they stay the same!

Goodbye cassettes, diskettes, CDs..

. A large move is the perfect opportunity to cleanse a home inventory, bring it up to date or up to the ages and in synch with modernity.

Yesterday, I began to clean up my office and ran across an impressive number of old and never-used cassettes, video tapes and other VHS (rember these). Same thing with 3.5” diskettes and thank god, I found no floppy disks anymore (those went away 12 years ago following a penultimate move).

Multimedia, back-up and software CD had to go too! What's next? Music CDs of course, that are still hanging in my home by the skin of their teeth. At that rate, I wonder if I might not be... next!

Can happiness be dialed up and down?

Over the weekend, I watched a few films that have made me think about the quantitative dimension of happiness. This has left me with one fundamental question.

Is happiness a solid value without gradient? In other words, can we only be 25% happy or an almost full 93% unhappy? On the opposite end, is there only 100% happiness and 100% unhappiness and nothing in between?

I think the later is true. It's like an on or off switch with nothing in between. Either you're happy or you're not. Realizing this makes me happy!

Why (many) ski resort residents act crazy?

Note that I haven't quite said “are crazy.” This is an observation that I've begun to make as we settled less than three months ago, into our new neigborhood that is just 700 yards away from our old house.

We found a lot of weird folks living near us and I must say that, near our previous home, there were some too, albeit slightly less. Now, do you care to hear my theory behind this?

Pretty simple. Many people who live in desirable areas of ski reorts are well to do, have everything and often believe that the more they can show in terms of house, car, recreational toys and lifestyle, the smarter and the happier they are.

By adopting that way of thinking, they suddenly reach the deep end of the insanity pool and, by normal sandards, simply act crazy. Avoiding that destiny can easily be achieved by constantly remembering where we're coming from, who we really are, and where we're headed at the end of this earthly sojourn.

Let's keep it that way!