You can’t buy love, so they say. But can you buy a customer? If you can, how do you do it and what does it cost? This is a question that I think about from a number of angles. One of my jobs at Graff-Pinkert is to help people buy and sell businesses in the machining field. I don’t use the term broker because I see my role not so much as a matchmaker but more as counselor, an advisor to both buyer and seller as they go through the arduous task of developing and completing a transaction that has…
Author: Lloyd Graff
What do I want to write about in the last blog of 2020? Baseball, naturally. My Chicago Cubs traded their Most Valuable Player, pitcher Yu Darvish, to the San Diego Padres yesterday for four prospects and a journeyman pitcher. It signaled the end of a six-year streak of playoffs or at least contention, that changed the way the world had always looked at the Cubs as lovable losers. It is likely the stars of the 2016 World Series winning team will be mostly gone soon, perhaps even before the 2021 season begins. I know you probably couldn’t care less about…
The Aegean Sea is 186 miles wide, separating Greece from Turkey. The countries have a different alphabet and language, and for a thousand years they have hated each other. But today’s blog is about two Turkish doctors and a Greek veterinarian who came together to rescue us from COVID-19. The story starts with Uğur Şahin, whose parents moved to Cologne, Germany, from Turkey to work at the Ford factories in the mid-1960s when Uğur was 4 years old. At a young age, Uğur committed himself to developing a cure for cancer, and became a doctor and scientist. His wife, Özlem…
Scott Livingston spun a dreidel for me on one of his CNC Swiss machines and sent it to me for Chanukah. It probably rotated at about 3,000 RPM on an L20 Citizen, turning round stock into the traditional square, spinnable top. My dreidel has a body made from aluminum, but Scott’s family company, Horst Engineering, in Hartford, Connecticut, also makes them from titanium and stainless steel. The stem of the dreidel is turned from solid ground bar stock, the thread connecting the stem to the body is rolled on a Hartford thread roller. It also has a cross hole. The…
I wanted to share one of my best blogs, and amazingly Siri showed me this one without even asking. A few of the numbers are off by 5½ years, but I don’t care. The sentiment and conflicts are just as true today. I am celebrating today for no good reason – except the best reason, I’m alive to celebrate 2140 days after my crucial heart artery, the left anterior descending (LAD), was completely obstructed. That should have ended my life, but it didn’t because a Muslim doctor in a Catholic hospital inserted a stent into a 63-year-old Jewish guy whose…
The catalogs of November clog the mailbox. Who needs another sweater in quarantine? I feel fleeced already. Yet occasionally a catalog does wander in that really does offer unique merchandise and the aroma of genuine value. I read and re-read the Garrett Wade catalog last night and then presented it to Risa, who also got into it for a half hour before bed. It has no gadgets, no apparel, just interesting stuff that you could imagine holding onto for decades or giving to a grandchild who would probably think you were nuts. But then they start to use the item…
The election is over and still the country is divided. No. Not Trump vs. Biden. I’m talking about getting together for Thanksgiving. COVID-19 has messed up holiday planning. My wife Risa and I have not physically been with our California family for almost a year. We see each other on Zoom frequently and talk over the phone several times a week. We send lots of photos, do game nights, and even have an occasional party, but there is no popcorn via the Internet. We long for the hugs, the breakfast coffee together, the kids walking into our bedroom to schmooze…
I was buying bagels for my lunch, and on my ride to the deli I started listening to an NPR interview of Terry Gross speaking with writer Jerald Walker, who Gross described incessantly as having grown up on Chicago’s Southside. Well, so did I, so I was drawn into Walker’s recollections of moving into a White neighborhood which quickly changed to all Black in the 1960s. It might well have been very close to where I grew up a few years earlier on Euclid Avenue. Michelle Obama grew up on Euclid also, 15 to 20 years after me. Walker showed…
The Los Angeles Dodgers’ nearly over-the-hill starter Clayton Kershaw makes more money in a year than the entire Tampa Bay Rays team that battled them in the World Series. So does their star outfielder Mookie Betts. It isn’t fair, but neither is life. Tampa Bay’s unknown star Randy Arozarena, who arrived in Tampa in August from the St Louis Cardinals’ minor league system, makes approximately 1% of what Betts makes, but he outplayed him in the series and set records in the preceding playoffs. Prior to October, the highlight of Randy’s life had been jumping off his fake boat along…
One of life’s mysteries for me has been the scarcity of great t-shirts. I am not a clothes hound. My dad liked clothes. He had his suits tailor made by unintelligible Italian tailors who held pins in their mouths while they were talking. Once, he took my brother Jim and I to pick out suit fabric. We inspected bolts of luxurious fabric for our own future custom suits. I remember picking a ridiculous brown plaid. I rarely wore the suit. It never really suited me because it had padded shoulders like my father favored, to make his slender frame look…