The Letter I’m glad I am not heading for Newark today. The monsoon that passed through here over the weekend has stalled over the Northeast, and the water is rising. There are endless delays at the airport, and I cannot think of anything more depressing than being trapped on an airplane, waiting to disembark in […]

Bam I was lying in bed on Monday morning. I was celebrating my Italian heritage and taking the day to honor Columbus , or something, and I got lost in the disaster and dreams, the stories about the mudslides slid into accounts of the earthquake. The buildings were flattened. The children were in schools. I […]

The rain came down in sheets of silver, cascading down from the balconies of Big Pink and pooling in the low spots along the walkways. I had not seen rain this hard and this constant since the monsoon in Korea, the endless sheets of water that fell on the hooch on Yongsan Garrison and made […]

The President popped up to give a major address on the Global War of Terror last night. I had company in town and did not watch. I should have, I think, since I need to stay focused on things. We have been paying too much attention to the weather of late, or rather been consumed […]

Point Zero It’s a forty-minute drive from Lahore east to Wagah. Lahore is a site of ancient learning, and Moghul palaces and the Anarkali Bazaar, atomb of the poet just about the same thing going west from Amritsar, home of the Golden Temple of the Sikhs. It is along the Grand Trunk Road that leads […]

Six Legs and Three Heads Any day I don’t learn something new is one wasted, I think. But I was not completely prepared to learn the new rule-of-thumb in forensic examination this morning. I opened the Times and poured rich, hot coffee into my gullet. The police in Bali found a total of “six legs […]

The Roberts Court I am uncertain about when to report to the office, this first day of the Roberts Court . They confirmed him yesterday, with all the beleaguered Senate Republicans supporting, and half the Democrats. I heard Senate Minority Leader Reid talking about it yesterday, while I was parked at a light on Route […]

It took a couple weeks to get the mighty engine of democracy up and humming. But it is back now, and fully up to speed. There is so much happening, now that everyone is on the job, generating words on paper and over the air. It was a poignant day of deep beauty. As beautiful, […]

Pitching In The oil refineries are beginning the chemistry-set process of starting up again, but it is a slow process. Everything has to be checked out, the pipelines the valve, the tanks, the cracking towers. It will take a while for distilled product to get back in the pipeline. There are shortages in the immediate […]

Rage in the Machine The waters are receding. I checked the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration homepage, suspicious, and was pleasantly surprised to see the banner over the map of the Atlantic Ocean that there was no tropical cyclone activity. This morning there is nothing coming our way, but turning to the Pacific, I saw […]