Ranger 6 crashed into the moon forty years ago, one of the survey craft to help get us ready to land on the moon. My Uncle Jim designed the camera systems that sent the images back to earth digitally, prior to its lunar demise. It was quite a development, but he was very cagey about […]

“Your e-mails will be passed on to those who can make decisions.” That is what the host said on the BBC World Update. I was up early because the morning show was all about spooks and journalists and policymakers. Once a junkie, always a junkie. There is an uneasy balance amongst these tribes on both […]

It is winter and I wondered what the hell I was doing, out on the road. My motto in Washington is “If it’s snowing, I ain’t going.” Yet here I was, snow crunching beneath my wheels, the front end of the Sebring seeking its own way through the packed snow. I had thought about this […]

My friend was interesting in seeing the re-release of a classic film. Washington has been bereft of a legitimate Art House for cinema since the Biograph in Georgetown went out of business a few years ago. The Biograph had been a little one-screen neighborhood theater that couldn’t make it in the multiplex world of mega-thearters […]

It is the heart of January here, cold as Hell, a small city in Michigan I used to pass through on occasion. I thought about that little town on Friday when the goose-bumps began to freeze on my skin. I was looking at the semi-trailer that came to Big Pink with the Murphy Bed. But […]

So I wasted the day yesterday waiting for my bed to get here. It was very Thurber-esque. I thought about the memorable opening line: “I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father.” We had to read the Thurber story as part of […]

I watched the State of the Union Address last night,, my job as a concerned voter. I was still a little agitated from the afternoon and remarkably alert considering the hour. I watched the Dan Rather filter on the address, but even CBS had a hard time spinning the message, since it was all the […]

I just walked in from Garrett County, poorest in the state of Maryland and thus the wealthiest in West Virginia if it were annexed. Which it could have been. Garret County forms the panhandle of Maryland, a Neverland of the Free State high in the mountains. Every place up there proudly sells crabcakes, the state […]

It is eight degrees in Frederick, and about that in Fairfax. There is a breeze, too. Wind chill will be way below zero. I think I can do the day on Metro today, stay safe underground on my journeys around Washington. It is a useful thing, considering how cold it is going to be. Pipes […]

OK, I’m a traveling man. Or was. I enjoy the motion, and have a limited attention span which enjoys stimulation. I can be happy enough staying in one place and I like my ruts as well as the next. I have not traveled officially since a strange trip to a conclave of Indians on the […]