I have a bunch of earnings reports to read and as I work from home, I can’t get Scarlatti’s Sonata in D minor, K.64 / L. 58 / P. 33 out of my head. He wrote it sometime around the year 1740 and it was printed in Volume II of a book of keyboard sonatas he published in 1742. Harpsichord, clavichord, piano, guitar … it just sounds so catchy no matter the instrument on which it is performed.
I could hardly sleep Friday night because of excitement. It felt like Christmas as a kid, when all that joy, happiness, and anticipation are bundled together. Only much, much greater. Imagine you had been waiting on Christmas to arrive for more than thirty years.
Many of you watched me put off this purchase for decades as I prioritized investing over consumption, but it is now here: Aaron and I finally settled on our “forever” piano. We purchased a Bösendorfer 230VC model with the Enspire Disklavier Pro add-on and a custom-inlaid Macassar ebony wood around the soundboard. It is being manufactured near Vienna, Austria for us and should arrive in the next year.
We continue to make progress on the house in New Albany. The Louis XV piece I mentioned arrived from the antiques dealer and I won two paintings at auction today. Meanwhile, I found two potential investments I really want to own but need to wait on the price.
After careful consideration, Aaron and I decided that the Kennon-Green & Co. office will feature mixed media works by Carol Benson-Cobb, a wonderful artist located in Dallas, Texas.
After a long period of neglect, Nintendo launched Metroid Dread, a return to the classic side-scroller model for the legendary franchise. Developed by Spanish video game studio MercurySteam, the sales figures are extraordinary.
Merry Christmas! I hope all of you are doing well and that your celebrations were filled with happiness, laughter, and good food! For our part, this year marked the 20th Christmas that Aaron and I have spent together. Like every one of those other Christmases, it was one of the best days of my life (despite the unusual circumstances and challenges this year has brought). We decided that with the world feeling so uncertain, and the need to remain socially distanced from others, it would be the perfect opportunity to stay home, wear knitted sweaters and jeans, and enjoy a classic early-to-mid twentieth century dinner; pure, old-school comfort food that envoked a sense of warmth and safety, friends and family, prosperity and peace.
We recently discovered that in 2017, the SpaceLab9 booth at New York Comic Con sold an extremely limited edition Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Ultimate Vinyl collection etched to look like the famous sweet rolls from the game. The collection, which was limited to only 95 copies, contains the full 52-tracks found in the game. The moment we learned it existed, we knew we had to have it. After some searching, in June 2020 we were able to track down one of those boxed sets. We immediately bought it for our music collection.
Over the past year, one of my favorite tracks to listen to while I work is an instrumental piece by Iranian-born composer, producer, instrumentalist, and performer Sami Yusuf. In referring to his genre of music, Yusuf calls it “Spiritique”, which blends Eastern and Western sounds into something new and different.
Several incredibly talented people collaborated on a disco-style track called “Kill the Lights” that Aaron and I have been listening to on endless repeat. The build-up to the chorus and explosion of happiness is great, especially when the volume is turned up, the sun is shining, and you’re getting stuff done. You can’t help but dance. It’s probably going to be the song we remember most from Spring 2020 (even thought it was released several years ago and just flew below our radar). There is just so much joy in it.
Unreal Engine 5 – one of the big video game development engines upon which the modern gaming industry is built – has been revealed. It looks spectacular. This is going to allow much smaller studios to develop titles that would have only been possible with far higher budgets and resources only a few years ago.
