It has become second nature. You hear that bad weather is coming and rush to the store to stock up on bottled water, canned and other non-perishable foods. You check your flashlight batteries.

For a few days, we are all survivalists. Why? Because we are resigned to the idea that bad weather equates with a loss of electrical power.

What happens is the fortunate have emergency generators hooked up to their freestanding houses. The rest of us just hope for the best, but with real fear of days without heat.

It happened most severely in Texas in February 2021; during Winter Storm Uri, which lasted five days, 250 people died. Recently, during the Blizzard of 2022, 100,000 people in Massachusetts endured bitter cold nights when the electricity failed. There were more power failures in the most recent ice storm.

There are 3,000 electric utilities in the United States. Sixty large ones, like Consolidated Edison, NextEra Energy, Pacific Gas and Electric, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, supply 70 percent of the nation’s electricity. Nonetheless, the rest are critical in their communities.

All utilities, large and small, have much in common: They are all under pressure to replace coal and natural gas generation with renewables, which means solar and wind. No new, big hydro is planned, and nuclear is losing market share as plants go out of service because they are too expensive to operate.

The word the utilities like to use is resilience. It means they will do their best to keep the lights on and to restore power as fast as possible if they fail due to bad weather. When those events threaten, the utilities spring into action, dispatching crews to each other’s trouble spots as though they were ordering up the cavalry. The utilities have become very proactive, but if storms are severe, it often isn’t enough.

Now, besides more frequent severe weather events, utilities are facing the possibility of destabilization on another front, due to switching to renewables before new storage and battery technology is available or deployed.

The first step to avoid new instability — and it is a critical one — is to add transmission. This would move electricity from where it is generated in wind corridors and sun-drenched states to where the demand is, often in a different time zone.

Duane Highley, president and CEO of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, which serves four states in the West from its base in Westminster, Colorado, says new west-east and east-west transmission is critical to take the power from the resource-rich Intermountain states to the population centers in the East and to California.

“Most existing transmission lines run north to south. They aren’t getting the renewables to the load centers,” Highley says.

Echoing this theme, Alice Moy-Gonzalez, senior vice president of strategic development at Anterix, a communications company providing broadband private networks that make the grid more secure and efficient, sees pressure on the grid from renewables and from new customer demands (such as electrical vehicles) as electrification spreads throughout society.

“The use of advanced secure communications to monitor all of these resources and coordinate their operation will be key to maintaining reliability and optimization as we modernize the grid,” Moy-Gonzalez says.

Better communications are one step in the way forward, but new lines are at the heart of the solution.

The Biden administration, as part of its infrastructure plan, has singled out the grid for special attention under the rubric “Build a Better Grid.” It has also earmarked $20 billion of already appropriated funds to get the ball rolling.

Industry lobbyists in Washington say they have the outlines of the Department of Energy plan, but details are slow to emerge. Considered particularly critical is the administration’s commitment to ease and coordinate siting obstacles with the states and affected communities.

Utilities are challenged to increase the resilience of the grid they have and to expand it before it becomes more unstable.

Clint Vince, who heads the U.S. energy practice at Dentons, the world’s largest law firm, says, “We aren’t going to reach the growth in renewables needed to address climate without exponential growth in major interstate transmission. And sadly, we won’t succeed with that goal on our current trajectory. We will need significant federal intervention because collaboration among the states simply hasn’t been working within the timeframe needed.”

Better keep the flashlights handy.

Microsoft is buying, subject to regulatory approval, Activision Blizzard for $69 billion. The Internet of Things is white-hot and likely to remain so.

If you want to whistle at that humongous sum for a company that makes games, you may have to add many octaves to the known musical scale.

Yes, high-tech is chasing trivia. The imperative at work here is if you don’t get your latest game into the market, someone else will. The threshold of entry is low and the rewards are astronomical.

If you are talking innovation and creativity, you are talking the internet. That means whole areas of society aren’t progressing as fast as they might and should. There is asymmetry.

The internet firmament is driven not by market demand, but by a business dynamic that exists in the world of internet entrepreneurism: Innovate and create because the internet can create great wealth — and take it away, too.

Most non-internet companies — and I talk to a fair number of CEOs — say they are innovative and that they are innovation-driven but, in fact, they aren’t. Most companies don’t need to innovate the way the internet giants do. The metaverse is demonstrably an unstable place.

Most companies are looking for stability, for a plateau where they can manage what has been created while adding to it cautiously, often by acquisition. They confuse innovation with evolutionary improvement. The last thing they want is the kind of destructive innovation that characterizes Silicon Valley.

The febrile need to innovate in the internet world is unique to that world. This because internet companies are all on a treacherous slope; failure can come as fast as success. Remember MySpace, Nokia, Palm, and Wang?

The internet is global, and it is intrinsically favorable to monopoly. In the internet world, first past the post takes the prize money — all of it.

When you have market caps that value a company at $1 trillion, and all of that is dependent on the next innovation not overtaking you, you are going to throw money and talent at innovation because the alternative is known. Whenever possible, you are going to buy up your competition, hence the Microsoft purchase.

With all of the money, all of the glamor, all of the talent, there also is fear that some kid in a garage somewhere will invent the next big thing.

I submit that for the non-internet world the business dynamic is very different. Most CEOs of public companies, snug in their C-suites and buttressed by huge salaries, are seeking a quiet place; a plateau where profits grow but there is some business serenity. For example, Boeing doesn’t want new airframes, it wants upgraded models.

They won’t admit to it, but many businesses long to be rent takers (known collectively as rentiers). They want a steady income with small risk.

Unfortunately, the business culture, including that spawned in business schools, aims to channel ambition into the rent-taking model. We have a business culture where ambition is channeled toward climbing to the top of the established order, not creating a new order.

There are many excellent minds managing established companies, often established many decades earlier, but there are few who yearn to create something wholly new.

The great names of management are many, but the great names of true innovation are few. Almost always, they have to break away from the established to create the new, to alter the world.

My friend Morgan O’Brien, the cocreator of Nextel, and now the executive chairman of the pioneering wireless company Anterix is that kind of innovator who saw new horizons and went for them.

Today’s standout inventor is Elon Musk. He began as an internet whiz with PayPal and has blazed the innovation trail like none other since Thomas Edison, more than a century earlier. He has changed the world underground with new concepts of subways, changed surface transportation by going electric, and changed space with his rockets.

Thirty years ago, I wrote the weakness of U.S. companies is that they are happy to make silent movies when the talkies have been invented. Today, the established auto manufacturers are hell-bent to make electric pickup trucks now that new entrepreneurs are in the truck market with electric trucks. They never wanted to abandon the internal combustion engine, just improve it a little at a time.

If the dynamic of the internet and its constant innovation is missing in most American businesses, it needs to be grafted onto the business body politic. Must the internet be behind every innovation of consequence? Ride-sharing and additive manufacturing (3D printing) are all computer-driven — software at work.

The challenge for the business culture is to harness ambition – it is never in short supply — and point it not toward the greasy pole of promotion, but toward the firmament of innovation.

If Taylor Swift sat next to me on a bus – an unlikely confluence — I wouldn’t know that she was a famous singer, an idol to millions of young people (who call themselves Swifties), and especially to young women. But I have fallen for her big time.

Popular culture – with which I’ve never been very familiar, even when I wrote about movies and the theater — has given me a wider-and-wider berth as time has passed. Truth is that I am more familiar with the evolution of technology than I am with the history of pop music, more comfortable with Turner Classic Movies than I am with this year’s releases.

This from a man who was paid by the London Dispatch to follow Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton around London when they were making “Cleopatra” — and making whoopie — in 1962.

I might mention that when I did catch up with the most famous lovers of the day, they were lunching in a pub near where I lived in the leafy Dulwich area of South London. They were everything you would want of lovers: They glowed, held each other’s eyes, and were so clearly in the thralls of enchantment that I didn’t call for a photographer, or in any way fulfill my assignment for the newspaper. It was an active dereliction of duty, but they were so compelling.

The Romantic poet Lord Byron — who knew a thing or two about adulterous love — described an adulterous pair as “happy in the illicit indulgence of their innocent desires.” Taylor and Burton seemed to be lost in their affair, and then it was adultery — they were both married, although later they wed, twice.

So much as I have been aware of the couplings of the rich and famous since those days, I have thought of them as tawdry. If you had seen Taylor and Burton in love, you would have dined at the table of the gods: love, fame, wealth, and talent in one sublime package.

Enter Taylor Swift. I had gleaned indirectly — the way one picks up information about subjects that don’t really interest one — that she has had a string of lovers and almost ritually wrote songs about them. Self-indulgent, I thought. So many not very good modern singers seem to sing about themselves and their luckless love lives. Sing what you know, as it were.

So how come I’m head over heels for Swift? I have said I don’t know what she looks like, and I don’t believe I would recognize her music — that is until I listen to the lyrics.

I met Swift and fell for her on one of those websites that aggregate quotations. I tell you the woman is a poet, a remarkable poet of love and its turbulence.

Just take just these lines from four different songs:

“Who could ever leave me, darling/But who could stay?”

“You’re not my homeland anymore/So what am I defending now?”

“You kept me like a secret/But I kept you like an oath.”

“Cold was the steel of my axe to grind/For the boys who broke my heart/Now I send their babies presents.”

They are so elegant and so true that they belong up among the great lyrics of the great love songs of the musical theater, the world of Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, and others from the golden age.

I don’t expect to meet her, nor do I have any special desire to. But if I did, I would say, “Keep writing, Taylor. You comfort young hearts and light up old ones.”

Election Day isn’t celebrated, and for most of us, voting is inconvenient. So much so that only presidential elections draw a decent turnout. In 2020, a record year, 66.8 percent of the electorate voted.

The ballot box towers in significance in its consequence, but it seems banal when you traipse to a church hall, an armory, or a high school to do the deed.

Also, people in line to vote act strangely, suspecting each other of being a supporter of the rascals who have either made a mess of things or the rascals who will make a mess of things.

Given these things, and without regard to the present standoff in Congress over the For the People Act, it would seem to me that voting by mail, or even electronic voting, makes sense. We do most things of consequence electronically. The failsafe ID for voting in most states is a driver’s license. The Republicans are against voting by mail and electronic voting, but in most states, you can renew a driver’s license by either means. Kafkaesque?

For Joe Madison, the legendary Black broadcaster and human and civil rights activist, voting is vital, and the ability to cast your vote easily and without duress is sacred. Further, he believes that contrived exclusion from the polls is a major felony against people of color.

Madison is prepared to put his life where his mouth is: He began a hunger strike for voting rights on Nov. 8, 2021.

During his college days, Madison was an all-conference running back on the football team, but now he is emaciated. He is following a liquid diet like one his friend Dick Gregory, the late comedian and civil rights activist, developed for his hunger strikes.

Madison told me he falls asleep at odd times and wakes up during the night. There is physical discomfort. Although he is getting to the point where the stress is showing, he plans to continue his hunger strike.

I have known Madison for over 20 years. I can hear the weakness in his voice. He is still doing his live radio talk show on SiriusXM Radio daily from 6 a.m. until 10 a.m. Eastern Time. As someone who has done four hours straight on radio, I can attest that in the best of health, it is a workout.

Madison sees the current battle over voting rights in the Senate and the Republican-controlled state legislatures’ push to restrict voting rights as reminiscent of the end of Reconstruction when the South began to push back against Black voting rights granted at the end of the Civil War. “It included poll taxes, literacy qualifications, and property ownership, and led to lynching and the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan,” Madison said.

He told me he is worried for the future of his children and grandchildren if voting rights should be abridged again. He has three daughters, a son, five grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. He wants the vote to be free and fair for them and their children. That is why he is staring death in the face and hoping that the Democrats will prevail, and good sense will triumph, he told me.

Madison studied sociology at Washington University in St. Louis where, in addition to being a football player, he sang solo baritone in the college chorus. On graduating, Madison went into civil rights work. At age 24, he became the youngest director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Detroit.

Madison began his broadcasting career in Detroit in 1980 and moved to Washington in the 1990s, where he mixed broadcasting with activism in a slew of causes.

I met Madison when he was protesting slavery in Africa and went to Sudan to free slaves. He wants the world to know how critical the voting rights legislation is to the African American community. “If we don’t get that bill, it could cost the Democrats both houses and the White House. African Americans may just be so fed up that they stay home and don’t vote,” he said.

Madison supports moves to modify the filibuster to bring about Senate passage. He is very hopeful the legislation will pass, and recalcitrant Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W. Va.) and Krysten Sinema (Ariz.) will vote for changes to the filibuster.

You don’t have to agree with Madison to admire him: A man with the courage of his convictions, measured by the endangerment of his health.

I remember the feeling in newsrooms back in the 1960s, as many journalists began to have doubts about the Vietnam War.

In those big workspaces where newspapers come together and broadcasts are assembled, the Vietnam War was taken by journalists to be the good guys versus the bad guys — the way it had been in the two world wars and the Korean War. But by the mid-1960s, the media was turning against the war.

Some reporters went to Vietnam, the rest of us edited and sometimes melded several files from the war.

Initially, coverage reflected simply what the U.S. commanders were saying in daily briefings from Saigon. As our colleagues on the ground in the war zone began to tell a different story from the official one, editors and writers far from Vietnam began to change their views. Enthusiasm turned to doubt, followed by anti-war sentiment. The media, in its way, had found its conscience.

Media doubt accelerated as the war dragged on and turned to something close to hostility. I was privy to this because I circulated as a desk editor between three newspapers: the Washington Daily News, the Washington Evening Star, and the Baltimore News-American, finally roosting at The Washington Post.

The American Newspaper Guild passed an anti-war resolution at its annual convention in Dallas in 1969. This side-taking disturbed many journalists. It wasn’t objective, but it passed anyway.

Today, the media landscape is different. There are many more partisan outlets in broadcasting and fewer strong, local newspapers. And there is the whole new world of social media, which defies monitoring. Still, the reporting is done by the mainstream media, and from this all else flows.

While the attitudes of the mainstream are important, they aren’t as commanding as they were in the time of the Vietnam War — in the time when the nation watched the evening news with total belief and hung on every word from Walter Cronkite.

I have a strong sense of that same struggle between the professional requirement for objectivity and the private conscience is testing the media today just as it did in the days of the Vietnam War.

Can we still cover the divisions of today as an event, as we do most things, or is it morally different?

There is an emerging consensus that journalists collectively — and a more disaggregated group couldn’t be imagined than the irregular army of nonconforming individualists who make up the Fourth Estate — are concerned about the survival of democracy. The very basis of our freedoms, of our pride, and even of our history as a free nation capable of the orderly and willing transfer of power is at stake. You can’t work in media now and not feel the sense of the nation going off the rails.

It is, I submit, a turning point when journalists of conscience can’t fall back on the old rules of objectivity, giving one opinion and countering it with another. To give the other side, when you, the writer, know the other side is a contrived lie, is to give credence to the lie and further extend its malicious purpose.

You can’t give the lie the same credence as the truth or you will hide in false equivalence and fail the public.

Even journalists I know who are socially and politically conservative are signing on to the idea that they must take a stand for the truth.

The Big Truth being that Joe Biden won the presidential election, verified over and over again by recounts and court findings. The false equivalence would be to repeat the Big Lie and say at the end of a report, “But supporters of Donald Trump assert the election was rigged.”

When you know that the future of our democracy is in the balance, as a journalist, you feel it is time to take a stand; not to stand with Democrats, but to stand with the truth.

It wasn’t front and center at the climate change summit, COP26, in Glasgow, but it was whispered about informally, in the corridors, and over meals.

For politicians, it is flammable. For some religions, it is heresy. Yet it begs a hearing: the growth of the global population.

While the world struggles to decarbonize, saving it from sea level rise and the other disasters associated with climate change, there is no recognition officially anywhere that population plays a critical part.

People do things that cause climate change from burning coal to raising beef cattle. A lot of people equal a lot of pollution equals a big climate impact, obvious and incontrovertible.

In 1950, the global population was at just over 2.5 billion. This year, it is calculated at 7.9 billion. Roughly by mid-century, it is expected to increase by another 2 billion.

There is a ticking bomb, and it is us.

There was one big, failed attempt to restrict population growth: China’s one-child policy. Besides being draconian, it didn’t work well and has been abandoned.

China is awash with young men seeking nonexistent brides. While the program was in force from 1980 to 2015, girls were aborted and boys were saved. The result: A massive gender imbalance. One doubts that any country will ever, however authoritarian its rule, try that again.

There is a long history to population alarm, going back to the 18th century and Thomas Malthus, an English demographer and economist who gave birth to what is known as Malthusian theory. This states that food production won’t be able to keep up with the growth in the human population, resulting in famine and war; and the only way forward is to restrict population growth.

Malthus’s theory was very wrong in the 18th century. But it had unfortunate effects, which included a tolerance of famine in populations of European empire countries, like India. It also played a role in the Irish Great Famine of 1845-49, when some in England thought that this famine, caused by a potato blight, was the fulfillment of Malthusian theory, and inhibited efforts to help the starving Irish. Shame on England.

The idea of population outgrowing resources was reawakened in 1972 with a controversial report titled “Limits to Growth” from the Club of Rome, a global think tank.

This report led to battles over the supply of oil when the energy crisis broke the next year. The antigrowth, population-limiting side found itself in a bitter fight with the technologists who believed that technology would save the day. It did. More energy came to market, oil resources were discovered worldwide, including in the previously unexplored Southern Hemisphere.

Since that limits-to-growth debate, the world population has increased inexorably. Now, if growth is the problem, the problem needs to be examined more urgently. I think 2022 is the year that the examination will begin.

Clearly, no country will wish to go down the failed Chinese one-child policy, and anyway, only authoritarian governments could contemplate it. Free people in democratic countries don’t handle dictates well: Take, for example, the difficulty of enforcing mask-wearing in the time of the COVID pandemic in the United States, Germany, Britain, France, and elsewhere.

If we are going to talk of a leveling off world population we have to look elsewhere, away from dictates to other subtler pressures.

There is a solution, and the challenge to the world is whether we can get there fast enough.

That solution is prosperity. When people move into the middle class, they tend to have fewer children. So much so that the traditional populations are in decline in the United States, Japan, and in much of Europe — even in nominally Roman Catholic France. The data is skewed by immigration in all those countries — except Japan, where it is particularly stark. It shows population stability can happen without dictatorial social engineering.

In the United States, the not-so-secret weapon may be no more than the excessive cost of college.

You may have noticed that gift gifting was a bit more difficult this holiday season. Those two mighty standbys for the gift-givers, perfume, and neckties, have moved from the ‘always welcome’ list to the ‘What was he or she thinking?’ list.

Perfume – oh, that never-surprising but always-delighting gift – isn’t the gift it used to be. The problem is scent wearing by women has fallen off, as health concerns about volatiles in the air have grown and casual dressing, especially in the time of pandemic, is de rigeur.

Pity – luxury perfume was the unchallengeable gift. It was giving on the strength of  its brand, like Miss Dior or Chanel No. 5. Labels really counted in fragrance giving. You were ill-advised to try anything out of the usual. If you espied something called, say, Rocky Mountain Rose, you were advised to eschew it.

The best and easiest to give was Joy by Jean Patou. The fragrance advertised itself as “the most expensive perfume in the world.” Bingo! You couldn’t go wrong if you had the bucks. I used to give a small bottle of Joy to my office manager every year and was thanked with oohs and aahs, even though she knew what was coming. She explained that a woman’s real use of Joy wasn’t so much in wearing it (and she wore it with pleasure), but in displaying it – showing her friends how much her significant other loved her. I rush to say that wasn’t my role in her life.

Neckties were the perfect gift for the man who might have everything. A man couldn’t have too many, and a new one in the style of the day was genuinely welcomed to the sartorial collection.

The necktie is rapidly going the way of spats, detachable collars, and Homburgs, to oblivion.

So shed a tear for the necktie and its infinite giveability. You could play the brand game, but there was no need for that. An obscure neckwear maker, doing a good job with the silk or wool, would be just as fine an accoutrement, as a luxury name like Givenchy or Ralph Lauren. The outstanding exception to this rule was some fabulous work of art by Liberty of London. That would earn deep approval, a friendship cementer.

As a generalization though, an unknown name in neckwear was just as good as the names of the great designers. To those in the know, the best place to buy ties at a reasonable price is, for reasons unknown, at hotel gift shops. Good ties at great prices.

Ties were in their day so important that good restaurants and clubs had selections of ties to fix up men who came with – Shock! Horror! — an open-necked shirt. The proprietor of a famous Manhattan restaurant of yore, La Cote Basque, told me he wouldn’t serve a king if he wasn’t wearing a tie. La Cote Basque has long gone and so that poor man was never put to the test of facing down royalty.

I wear a bowtie. I have Tucker Carlson – yes, that Tucker Carlson — to thank for that change in my appearance, that bit of sartorial shtick. When I met Carlson, long before he found, as one writer said of someone else, the cramped space to the right of Rupert Murdoch, he was a funny, likable conservative who had just left a CNN talk show and authored an amusing book about the experience of being TV chatterer.

I had him as a guest on my television program, “White House Chronicle” on PBS. He was known as a bowtie-wearer and, as a joke, I donned one. I got so many favorable comments that I’ve taken to wearing them instead of the long, silk emblems of the once well-dressed man.

Shame, I say, on the retreat of perfume and the near extinction of the necktie. Women don’t smell so elegant, and men look unfinished.

I have seen the future of urban life and it wasn’t quite what I expected. It was whizzing all around me in New York City on a recent visit.

My wife and I were there to do that most Christmassy of things: See Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas Spectacular starring the Rockettes. It is great and you should see it if you can, but it isn’t what bowled me over.

What bowled me over figuratively and a couple of times almost literally was the new urban mobility.

I saw the future of city transportation, dashing all around me every time I ventured to cross a street. Like cities the world over, New York has installed bicycle lanes, but they have been taken over by what might be described as Space Age people-movers in astounding configurations.

These denizens of the new mobility hurtled by on electric bicycles,  electric unicycles, electric skateboards, electric, gyroscopic one-wheeled skateboards, and, of course, those ubiquitous electric scooters. I didn’t think it was the end of civilization as I have known it. Instead, I longed to be a good deal younger so I, too, could join the transportation revolution.

You may not like this new order, and almost certainly if you are over 50, you’re not ready for it. However, it is here, it is happening, and it is the first exciting thing in cities, perhaps since traffic lights.

The future of urban transportation isn’t what supporters of public transit, such as myself, have been advocating for decades: More buses and trains.

City visionaries, like Scott Sellars, city manager of Kyle, Texas, a small but rapidly growing city of 60,000 located between Austin and San Antonio, are looking beyond what they call “destination public transportation” to new ways of moving people or, more exactly, new ways of letting people move themselves.

Kyle has made the bold decision that the future of city transportation belongs not to buses and trains, but rather to ride-sharing companies. It has contracted for Uber to become the city’s main public transportation mode. Sellars explained the concept on Digital 360, a Texas State University weekly webinar on which I am a regular panelist.

Sellars told me Kyle has a subsidized contract with Uber to take care of those unable to afford its fares. Residents qualifying for assistance get a voucher and an app on their cell phones and can make any local journey for a standard $3.14. There are even vouchers for the unbanked. But there isn’t a way yet to use the service if you don’t have a cell phone or access to one.

To avoid having to take lanes away from cars, Kyle has been able to build an alternative system called the Vybe, which is 12-feet-wide and can accommodate all people-movers, including golf carts, bicycles, and all those electric-powered wheels which are now running around New York. There are charging stations for golf carts and other electric transporters on the Vybe. The Vybe runs most places people might want to go and doubles as a right of way for utilities of all kinds.

While many of us have thought the smart cities were going to be about super-electric connectivity, few of us realized the first tranche of city smartness would come with new forms of transportation, usurping or challenging the car, bus, and train.

The transportation revolution isn’t confined to the surface of cities. Elon Musk’s Boring Company continues to plow ahead with fast, subterranean tunnels, now being implemented in Las Vegas and studied in Los Angeles, Miami, and many other cities.

Look up, too. There is a profusion of companies working on drone-like, urban sky taxis which will whip you from your home to an airport or office tower.

Above the ground, on the ground, and under the ground, urban mobility is itself on the move. Hold onto your hat.

Every year, I write about Christmas. But none of my Christmas columns has given readers more pleasure than this one.

You will find them in any outlandish place: the misfits. They are the people Arthur Miller wrote a wonderful short story about in 1957, which was made into a less wonderful 1961 movie starring Marilyn Monroe.

The trouble with the movie was that Marilyn didn’t belong in it. The original story was simply about a group of men who didn’t make it in society and lived on life’s perimeter. They were classic misfits: men who had too many wives, too many bad love affairs, or too many drinks; or disgraced themselves variously in their professions or families, and sometimes their countries.

You will find the misfits in faraway places, like Nome, Alaska or Key West, Florida. And you will find them scattered in the Australian outback or hanging on in some corner of Africa.

That gets me to my tale.

My misfits were in a corner of Africa in 1957, in Ndola, which proudly called itself the commercial capital of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

Ndola wasn’t a garden spot: No one picked up the atlas and said, “I want to settle in Ndola.”

In fact, Zambia wasn’t one of the parts of Africa that Europeans selected for settlement, like Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) or Kenya. People went to Zambia to mine the copper, to farm, or to trade — most people, that is. The misfits just gravitated there, much as I did, looking for a congenial place to hang out.

And what a bunch of misfits we were!

There was Percy Powys, the scion of a good family in Wales. His misfortunes, he said, began when he took a Piccadilly whore home for dinner. His parents decided he needed to make a new life in Africa; they shipped him off to Johannesburg.

Three wives, several executive jobs, and oceans of gin later, Percy was working in construction. A tough, weathered man of uncertain age, he always reminded me of Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s  description of one of the captains in “Two Years Before the Mast”: a man “made of steel and whalebone.”

Most misfits don’t have wives or girlfriends. The company of women is disturbing to them — a reminder of what they don’t have or what they had had too much of.

In this sense, Geordie (which is a regional nickname for a person who comes from Northeast England) was different. He had a wife, although nobody saw much of her.

Geordie sometimes worked on the railways. He had been a commando, a London bus driver, and a lot of other things. He had a seventh-grade education and the distinction of being the only one of the misfits who was blacklisted by the police in every bar in Ndola.

Geordie was a rough man with elegant taste: He loved Scotch, Italian opera, and chess — and he could combine all three. He would play a Verdi opera on his phonograph, play chess with me, and all the while consume prodigious quantities of tea laced with Scotch. The more he drank, the more he turned up the volume on his phonograph. Then he would grab me by the shoulders and shake me, yelling, “Do you believe that a human being could compose something so beautiful?”

Sometimes, at the latter part of the tea party, Geordie would become so consumed with his need to communicate the beauty of Verdi that he would go out into the street, grab an unsuspecting passerby’s wrist in a hammerlock, and drag the poor devil inside to listen to opera. It didn’t seem to be an effective way of spreading a love of opera, and often resulted in unpleasantness with the police.

Geordie was a serious misfit and one of the greatest men I have ever met.

There were others, like Peter Robertse, an Afrikaner who spoke with an Oxford accent and had been a Spitfire pilot in The Battle of Britain. His country had expectations for him in the diplomatic corps. But after Peter removed his pants at a diplomatic reception in Rome, he started down the long road to Ndola, where he worked intermittently in construction. At night, when he had drunk too much gin, he would relive The Battle of Britain and would rage on until he passed out.

Then there was my friend George Parkes, whom this tale is really about. He was an Armenian, who was built like a steel spring, and had a tremendous joie de vivre — a joy which had gotten him through one marriage and innumerable jobs in many countries.

At 35-years-old, George was full of schemes that didn’t quite come off. One of his schemes was to import dried fish from Lake Tanganyika and transport it to Ndola, where he would become a dried-fish millionaire. Another was to buy diamonds in the Congo and to transport them to Johannesburg, where they could be sold — all to be done without alerting the governments of the countries that lay in between.

I think it was just the romance of smuggling that appealed to George. At the time I knew him, he was selling cars.

As for me, I had set out to make my fortune in journalism. Unaccountably, I found myself laying drains in Ndola.

One day, George came to me in a state of high excitement. He told me that he had sold a car, and we had to celebrate with his commission.

But we wouldn’t celebrate in the raunchy dives of Ndola. We would drive to the next town, Kitwe, where we had heard tell there was a great French restaurant. And we would put on suits, abandoning the ubiquitous khaki which was our uniform.

What is more, George had a girl for the occasion: a beautiful English rose named Jean. She had followed a man from London to Africa only to find out that he had a wife. So, Jean was a sort of honorary misfit — and the only woman admitted to the company.

We bathed, we shaved, we took suits out of our closets that we hadn’t seen in a year. In a state of almost unbearable joy, we drove to Kitwe in a borrowed car.

All the way, George kept saying, “My father always said that Christmas is when you have five pounds in your pocket.” We had 15 pounds and it was Christmas, indeed.

We were much taken with the restaurant. We ate splendidly and drank French wines. We felt invincible, as one does on festive occasions.

And we were much taken with the idea of declaring Christmas whenever we wanted to. We tried to sing a carol, but we weren’t very successful. So, we took a different tack: I recited verses from “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.”

As our halcyon time wound down, a stranger stopped at our table and said, “I’ve never seen three people enjoying themselves so much. I’ve paid your bill. I had some luck myself today.” With that, he departed.

It was Christmas in spades. It was also July.

Richard A. “Dick” McCormack, a commanding figure in the energy industry for five decades, died last month aged 90.

When I first met Dick, I felt, “That is an executive; that is a leader.” It was a feeling I had no occasion to change after nearly 50 years of friendship and shared adventures.

We met, as I recall, at a press event in 1973 at the Georgetown Club in Washington. Dick was a young vice president at Combustion Engineering, then a major presence in steam technology and the burgeoning nuclear industry. The others were Westinghouse, General Electric, and Babcock & Wilcox.

It was a bustling, vibrant time for the nuclear industry. Dick, a Stevens Institute of Technology engineering graduate who had served as a Navy officer, was in the business of selling power plants.

Two of his sales stand out: the twin San Onofre nuclear reactors in California and the Ravenswood fossil fuel-fired plant in Long Island City, New York. Those sales were in the time of the energy crises and all energy was good.

Dick was tall and good looking in a man’s-man kind of way. His grin was emblematic of his whole can-do persona: It was the grin that made you feel everything was possible. The force of his presence was such that people wanted to be on his team, help with his projects, and be in his company. Dick made everyone feel important.

He was lured away from Combustion Engineering in 1974 to become president of General Atomic Power Systems Company, then owned by Gulf Oil and Royal Dutch Shell. Nuclear power was a hot ticket and the oil companies wanted in on it.

General Atomic was promoting gas-cooled reactors, and the future looked bright for what many believed would be a winning technology.

Nuclear power lost its sheen after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. Dick left General Atomic and began a life as a serial entrepreneur, mostly in cutting-edge energy projects, including energy storage through chemical reactions, utility plant safety, and green renovation of homes.

His consulting included a massive study of gas-cooled reactor technology for the Department of Energy. I worked with Dick and David Fishlock of The Financial Times on the executive summary.

We worked together on two other projects. The first was an attempt to bring independent and dependable facts and analyses to the ongoing energy crisis in the 1970s. We conceived an energy institute which would be a repository of facts. Irrefutable truths.

It was a time of wild conspiracy theories about energy and its technologies. Ralph Nader, for example, said nuclear reactors could burst open like rotten melons. Others said there would be incredible mutations near reactors, with two-headed babies for starters. It was believed that the oil companies had flotillas of tankers lying off the East Coast, waiting for prices to rise. Also, it was believed that the oil companies were inhibiting water vapor technology that would double the mileage for any car.

Dick and I went about raising money for the institute. We visited C-suites of oil companies, electric utilities and their suppliers. We got turned down repeatedly, but Dick always cherished the idea.

I am glad to say that the DOE’s Energy Information Administration performs today much as we had hoped the institute would.

Another project of ours involved Dick’s desire to launch a newspaper in Hartford, Connecticut. I was a director and small investor.

Dick believed in whatever he was working on no matter its chances of success. Those who joined the newspaper project were swept along, including Harold Evans, the legendary editor of the British daily newspaper The Times. Those who joined the newspaper project were swept along, including Harold Evans, the legendary editor of The Times, the British daily newspaper. When I visited Evans at the newspaper’s offices in London, he said, “Any friend of Dick’s is a friend of mine.” He, too, had been swept along, although he knew little about Hartford or American newspaper publishing.

None of us regretted our investments or the hours we put into that project. Working with Dick was payment enough.

He ended his extraordinary career working in association with U.S. Generating. Throughout his life, he supported many charities and even helped resettle Syrian refugees.

He adored his wife and big family: five sons, one daughter, eight grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. His namesake son worked for me in Washington as an outstanding editor and reporter on my newsletters. I count him as dear a friend as I counted his father.

In Dick, the energy world had a general who sometimes served as a foot soldier.