December 25, 2023
Good morning!
It IS Christmas morning, yes it is… it came all the same.
Oh the noise, oh the noise, the noise, noise, noise, noise! (Seuss)
- It has been, thankfully, a season filled with fruit cakes — both the traditional New England variety, delivered on the day before Christmas Eve by a friend and faithful reader, and…
- … the phenomenal Panettone, the Italian delicacy, provided both by good friends, and then, as a bonus, by the Newlyweds a few days ago.
- Yum! Don’t buy impostor Panettone from a supermarket or a big box store… get it from a legit Italian baker, such as Cosetta’s in downtown St. Paul, MN.
- The difference in quality is incalculable.
- As for the traditional British recipe — from a morsel benefiting from six years of aging to this year’s vintage — it will help assuage these next 45 days of darkness.
- Whom should we thank for the ubiquitous, narrow, choose any direction you want, turn lanes in the middle of the highway?
- Who engineered these modern wonders where drivers traveling in opposite directions, often at high speeds, vye for a turn before crashing head-on into each other?
- Have you had enough of Tchaikovsky already?
- The Nutcracker is unusual in that the story and the ballet were written (created? invented? imagined?) before the music.
- The ballet people went to the by-then-famous and prolific Pyotor and asked for music perfectly choreographed and synchronized to their ballet, not the other way around.
- It was to be his 71st major and perhaps most performed work, following Swan Lake, The 1812 Overture. The Tempest, and Sleeping Beauty, to name but a few.
- Very much worth a watch/ listen… and give it at least 45″ before changing the channel:
Delightful!
- Since it’s Christmas Day (not even Scrooge worked!) we’ll keep this relatively brief.
- The Harvard Business Review has published an excellent article, “Use Strategic Thinking to Create the Life You Want”. (Strack, Etc., et al., 2023)
- A snippet:
- The ancient Greeks saw two main dimensions of a great life: hedonia (a focus on pleasure) and eudaimonia (a focus on virtues and on meaning). More recently, scholars have pointed to the importance of social connection. A
study of more than 27,000 people in Asia found a strong correlation between being married and being satisfied with life, while a
study that has followed 268 Harvard College men from 1938 to the present, and was expanded to include their children and wives, as well as a study that has followed 456 residents of inner-city Boston since the 1970s, also expanded to include children and wives, found that meaningful relationships were the key driver of long-term happiness. The late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen agreed: In his classic HBR article “
How Will You Measure Your Life?” he wrote, “I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.”
- Read the entire article:
Relationships
- Read the entire article:
