Ask and you’ll find the answer

Written by Joe Pisani
Tuesday, 03 November 2009 09:42

At the entrance to the bookstore, larger than life, was a display for a new book by celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins — the Jerry Seinfeld of nonbelievers and author of such controversial works as “The God Delusion.”

You can’t buy a caramel macchiato these days without bumping into an atheist, trying to convert you to the cause of Godlessness.

“The time for polite debate is over,” an Associated Press story proclaimed. “Militant atheist writers are making an all-out assault on religious faith,” publishing books like “Good Without God” and “God Is Not Great.”

Not everything contagious is bad

Written by Joe Pisani
Tuesday, 27 October 2009 10:48

A friend of mine who grew up in Greenwich and lives in Fairfield married a girl from the Valley, so he’s seen much of the civilized world as we know it. But when he traveled to Vermont recently, he stepped into another dimension. It was not the civilized world – as we know it.

At one point, he and his wife stopped to study the road map, and a local resident ambled over to ask, “Are you lost? Can I help?”

This simple act of unsolicited kindness took them by surprise, which makes you wonder whether we’re too accustomed to having doors slammed in our faces, motorists cut us off on the turnpike and horns honked if we don’t move fast enough.

The hardest thing in the world to do

Written by Joe Pisani
Wednesday, 21 October 2009 09:04

Every day after dropping his wife off at the train station, a middle-aged man drives his Audi to the end of the parking lot, opens the trunk and pulls out a concealed pack of cigarettes.

It sure looks like something sinister is going on. In his hideaway far from the platform, he lights up, sits on the bumper, coughs a few times and then enjoys a good smoke.

I guess he’s not supposed to smoke in the car. He’s probably not supposed to smoke, period. Several minutes later — his morning ritual concluded and nicotine coursing through his veins — he speeds away, a happy man despite the respiratory problems.

Cigarette smokers are a hunted breed, by their families, by their doctors, by non-smokers and by their governor, who raised taxes $1 a pack, hoping to capture $100 million in revenue, cut health-care costs and strong-arm people into quitting.

In theory, the higher tax, which brings cigarettes to $7 a pack, is expected to dissuade 24,000 young people from starting and persuade 10,000 adults to stop. More than 4,700 people die every year in Connecticut as a result of smoking (the national toll is 467,000), and the medical bill is $1.63 billion for the state and $96 billion for the nation.

Growing up witth a sense of entitlement

Written by Joe Pisani
Tuesday, 13 October 2009 11:18

Something I hear a lot, from Greenwich to the Valley, from New Canaan to Milford, from privileged enclaves to middle-class neighborhoods, and from flustered parents complaining about their kids is the word “entitlement.”

“She suffers from a sense of entitlement!” “He thinks society owes him a living.” “I gave her too much.” Or as my mother used to say – referring to my sisters, I suspect – “The more you give these kids, the more they want.”

We Baby Boomers had considerably more than our parents, who were products of the Depression, and we tried to give our kids everything, but along the way, did we endow them with a sense of “entitlement”?

Standing up to bullies and disaster threats

Written by Joe Pisani
Tuesday, 06 October 2009 12:56

While I was wandering through the airport terminal, three hours early for my flight from Columbus, Ohio, to LaGuardia, I stopped at the newsstand for a book of sudoku to keep my middle-aged brain functioning at peak performance.

What caught my eye, however, was a magazine cover that proclaimed, “How to Survive (almost) ANYTHING” -- the “anything” being everything from a tsunami to the swine flu pandemic, to an avalanche, to a drought and various other “unthinkable scenarios.” Be prepared, as the Boy Scouts say.

Solution to health care reform: Don’t get sick

Written by Joe Pisani
Wednesday, 30 September 2009 12:17

Every night at the dinner table after a long day of work, I’m forced to listen to my family discuss health care reform in excruciating detail.

It’s worse than talk radio, but at least I can turn that off. Sad to say, we often end the evening sputtering and stammering and insulting one another.

There are so many questions. Will we be covered? Won’t we be covered? Will there be too many patients and not enough doctors? Will I have to compete with 76 million other members of my generation to find a geriatric specialist in my senior years? Will I have to sell my home and cribbage board collection to pay medical bills?

The smell of autumn’s in the air

Written by Joe Pisani
Tuesday, 22 September 2009 16:11

Every so often, there’s a season we want to forget because it was so miserable. But bad memories never die.

I can still remember that hideous summer growing up in the backwoods of Shelton when a gypsy moth infestation defoliated every tree in the then-known universe. It was like a Stephen King novel.

We spent weeks stepping on caterpillars and listening to the constant sound of them munching leaves. Millions of caterpillars, and there was nothing we could do to curb their appetite. In fact, they were so hungry we feared that humans might become their second course.

Then, there was the long, torturous winter a few years ago when snow was piled more than eight feet high along the sides of our barn in New Hampshire, and the plowing bills, alone, could have paid my daughter’s tuition.

Not to be forgotten was the autumn when the leaves didn’t turn colors but just got brown and fell off the trees because — I can never get this right — there was too much rain or not enough rain. And what about that spring when the pollen count was so high there was a pandemic of runny noses sweeping Connecticut, made worse by a Kleenex shortage.

All about attitude

Written by Joe Pisani
Friday, 18 September 2009 12:03

Every afternoon when I pass through the cavernous corridors of Grand Central, I come upon a middle-aged man in a wheelchair pushed up against the wall, his New York Post across his lap as he stares at the pedestrian traffic passing by.

A little Madoff in us all

Thursday, 02 April 2009 14:44

Is there anyone honest left in America?

Anyone who isn’t so driven by greed and ambition he’d take advantage of everyone else just to get ahead and make a few bucks, not to mention a few million bucks in bonus money?

A lot of people in Fairfield County were sneering and jeering at the AIG employees who got bonuses, and a tour bus of activists recently roamed suburban streets past their homes as sort of a taxpayer catharsis.

And yet I have to believe if executives at the financial institutions involved in our economic collapse found a wallet on the train platform, they’d turn it over to the police without a second thought.

Flair (or despair) for fashion

Thursday, 26 March 2009 09:28

I confess I always wanted my daughters to be doctors, lawyers or just plain old ordinary multimillionaires so I could comfortably retire at 45 and live a life of leisure, fly-fishing in the mountains or roughing it at Mohegan Sun.

Toward that modest goal, I spent months arguing with them about career choices. Never mind what they wanted to do. This was about what I wanted them to do.

It all started when two of them insisted they were destined for careers in “fashion,” which to me means the netherworld of creepy people like Donatella Versace and Kate Moss and a lot of skinny women with so much makeup and eyeliner they resemble the Munsters — and I don’t mean the pretty blonde.