Ding Dong It is not time for dancing, not yet, but that is not stopping the people of Miami from stepping out. They are in the streets, in celebration of the moment the Wicked Witch is dead. Actually, power had been temporarily delegated to Uncle Fidel’s brother, Raoul, another of the perpetual Saints of the […]

Special English I first ran into Special English in East Africa. It is a dialect of our mother tongue, used mostly by the Voice of America to spread the message of truth and justice to those for whom English is not a first language. It is sort of elegant, once you get used to slowing […]

Tomorrow is the end of the month. I realized it when I got a command from the Credit Union to change passwords, not that they had been compromised or anything, just a prudent act. I complied, bubiously, and looking at the date of the transaction, realized that July is about in the dustbin and August […]

Little Kate I hate to say it, but Don Rumsfeld was right. He has been much maligned of late, but he has been absolutely correct. Not about what you would think immediately. I am thinking about what Thomas Pynchon called the rainbow of gravity in his marvelous and troubling novel that treated the legacy of […]

Epiphany The temperature was rising back toward normal in Washington, which is to say that cold front had passed away to the chill waters of the north Atlantic, and the warm, wet Gulf air was awirling back, damping the shirt between the shoulder blades. I was getting disoriented at the desk on the sixth floor […]

I heard about a troop of volunteers, who don greasepaint and travel to areas of the world with real needs to cheer up the kids. Give them a diversion from the crushing misery of daily reality. I assume there are big feet and honking horns. The organization calls itself “Clowns Without Borders.” I salute them, […]

Each day you do not learn something, you die a little. I was fortunate to learn several things before breakfast, which puts me on par with The White Queen in “Through the Looking Glass.” She had a conversation with the White Queen, a woman of extraordinary rendition who claimed to be “One hundred and one, […]

The Sea Dog My pal Boats is the kind of guy we used to call “a sea dog.” It is not disparaging. Far from it. It is a little bit like the dramatic first sentence of Moby Dick. The narrator says “Call me Ishmael,” and then it is off to the hunt for the White […]

Bringing it Home I know that America does not float serene in a sovereign sea. You know it, too, whenever you get in a cab, or creep up to the cashier in a parking garage. I do not think I thought about it as much when I lived in the suburbs, and was better protected […]

The Israeli Defense Force was starting work as I went to bed last night. The dawn was just coming up there, and the independent fire units were processing targets as battlefield intelligence queued them up. I turned in as they turned it up, and the clock radio gave me the status of the day’s work […]