Star Ferry Oh, it is a strange morning. It has been so strange for so long that the magnitude of what is happening now is lost to context. Israel is engaged in a two front war, bombing Beirut International. My car salesman is named Mohammed, and he is from Palestine. He is concerned. His family […]

My cab driver the other day was from Mumbai, or properly, a village about an hour a way. I asked him if he was Hindu, thinking that the great south of the subcontinent was mostly of that faith. He said, no, he was a Muslim. He dropped me by the pool at Big Pink, where […]

They let Grammy-winner Li’l Kim out of jail the other day. She is the biggest selling female rapper in history, and a feisty young woman. She dodged a purely metaphorical bullet, unlike some of her male contemporaries, when she was locked up last year for lying about a 2001 altercation between her entourage and some […]

Parallel Universe It is a curious thing to me that the only place that stainless steel can be bent into the perfect curves to meet the frame of an old muscle-truck is in the wilds of Loudoun County. One would think that there would be a facility to bend stainless steel located closer to the […]

I am not going to writing this morning, not in the way I am used to. I have to go to the District, and get the Black truck back from the Speed Shop in Falls Church and I am taking a few personal days. That meant an early up and a scan at the Company […]

The Great Collector The legendary Charlie Allen was up on the Hill before the imperial city flushed out for the Fourth of July Holiday. He sat with great composure at the table in front of the raised dias where the members sit. His face was imperturbable, lined with crises that go back to the early […]

Luck of the Draw It is the start of an extraordinary weekend. With Independence Day falling next Tuesday, an enterprising vacationer could have left work a little early yesterday, and scooped up five days off at the cost of only two vacation days. That may be why the city seems a little thin today, a […]

Hussongs Cantina I am fed up with the water. The rains stopped two days ago, but now it is all flowing downhill. The Potomac is brown as clay, and rolling along through the trees on Roosevelt Island. The Authorities are evacuating people along the stepper banks of a dozen rivers to the north, in Maryland […]

Benign Infection The rains have stopped, for now, and most of the flood is beginning to recede. The yammering news last night claimed this was the worst spate of rain in three hundred years, according to the records that were not wet. It is curious that the Federal buildings that are closed this morning include […]

We drowned yesterday, the hardy ones who looked at the trains that could not run, and the rising waters in the subway tunnels, and climbed into our cars to head for the capital. The Federal Government announced that it was going to open as usual, though it understood if some of us had some issues […]