Black Cloud Back from the road, I was crashing through the correspondence on the computer and finally gave up. Too much information to process. Black clouds from the hurricane headed this way. Controversy over the war, and black clouds on the prognosis for peace. There was acrimony about how it was going, and why it […]

The Airbus-319 and I arrived at Dulles with an authoritative thud late in the afternoon. The tires gave a squeal that was audible in the passenger compartment, and I could feel the fuselage flex around me. �Navy pilot,� I thought, used to flying the steep glideslope into the controlled crash required to land on a […]

Kilos I am on vacation, which is to say that I do not have my media suite arrayed to properly pump the alarming news of the world direct into my cerebral cortex, of oblongata or whatever they call the place where the bad news goes for short-term retention. It doesn’t stay long, that is for […]

Oxygen I’m in the smoking lounge at a major airfield. I am watching the power drain on my idiotic company laptop. My company has been purchased by the French, and the people that make the laptops have been bought by the Chinese. I am a few time-zones away from where my travel cup of once […]

By nature, I am a bit of an alarmist. It was a tendancy aggravated by a career in the mayhem business. Sometimes I think I am getting over it. I would get more agitated about technology if I wasn’t employed by a company that peddles the stuff. Working makes time slow down. We are delivering […]

I was up early to see the world end as predicted by President Ahmadinejad. I was not early enough to see the dawn break over the Gulf; that would have meant not going to bed at all. I had the alarms set, though, so that if some wave of catastrophe were spreading west and east […]

Joe Rosenthal died yesterday, two days before the end of the world, which is scheduled by the Iranians for tomorrow. Joe was the guy who took the picture of the Marines raising Old Glory on top of Mount Suribachi on the volcanic Pacific island of Iwo Jima. He was 94 years of age, and didn’t […]

Leathers The jacket turned out to be a problem. Fall is coming, and I want to be ready for driving with the top down. I thought I had the answer when I got a lead on a nice brand-new A-2 leather jacket, just like the one that Uncle Dick wore when he was in the […]

Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of Detroit is enjoying her fifteen minutes of fame this morning. She is turning the millstones of justice out in the Heartland, grinding up the government’s contention that it can sort through the sea of calls and messages to identify those who wish to destroy us. There are partisans on both […]

Strongsville I awake this morning in middle America, where the highway arcs south and east from Lake Erie to link to the mountains of Pennsylvania. This is terra incognita to me, though I have crossed it fifty times or more on the concrete, hurtling from Virginia to Michigan. The Turnpike is a sealed system, complete […]