Coming Ashore Hurricane Wilma has finally made up her mind and is coming ashore today. She took her sweet time beating up Mexico , but now she is moving purposefully toward the Citrus State , hitting the Keys now, pushing a storm surge at high tide of up to eighteen feet. She is moving at […]

The Long War I was reading Congressional Testimony this morning. Yeah. It was that bad . The rain was coming down, pattering on the cement outside. It was cold and dark, and the immediate reason I was no awake was some idiot at the rental house across the street from Big Pink was making a […]

When I am in London, and by that of course I mean the little square-mile plot of the formal City of London, I always visit Nelson. He is down in the crypt, in the center of it, in a gigantic sepulcher of graceful classic proportions. It is quite a contrast from Wellington’s tomb. The Iron […]

What do you Know? The news made me squirm, being uncomfortably close to home. Two Federal employees, one a retired Captain like me, were busted for leaking classified information. Leaks happen here all the time, but there are unofficial rules for doing it. That concerns me, but not like this. The information that was disclosed was […]

Middle Ages Wilma is the name, the last one in the Alphabet. This ties a record for storm formation, and there is more than a month of Hurricane Season to go. I am not concerned that we will run out of names. They are, after all, almost limitless. The Weathermiesters have a plan; they are […]

Piling On My little Spartan got a ticket the weekend of the Big Game. I know about that because a thick packet came in the mail yesterday from the management company, and it contained the citation. I read it carefully as I undid my tie. This was serious business, and the words from the management […]

Uncle Walter If you have ever seen the reporter for the Washington Post who covers the Spook community, I think you would agree that he is almost a caricature of the world he writes about. Old School, that is. Tweedy jacket, wild gray intellectual hair, a sly smile that covers piercing eyes. He looks like […]

Pyrotechnics It is no surprised that the word from the West electrified me this morning. The word is that Tommy Lee, famed sex partner of Pamela Anderson and rock drummer extraordinaire, was tragically burned when pyrotechnics went awry in a show in Casper , Wyoming . A lot of things go wrong in Casper, and […]

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 […]