It is Friday the Thirteenth and I am hoping for a great day. I may not get it. It is leaden gray again out there and threatening to rain once more. I swear I am living closer to Edgeware Road in London than slightly north of Route Fifty in Arlington, Virginia. The atmosphere has weight […]

I am a little frustrated this morning. I couldn’t log on to AOL- nothing unusual in that, but there was a pop-up prompt box at my screen-name sign-on that said to “log-on as the master user “for an urgent message from the Service.” I had to think for a moment. The master account screen name […]

It is Monday morning. It is drizzling again, very soft. The clouds are low and dark and pools of water have accumulated on the balcony. My sources tell me there was a hell of a thunderstorm last night and the humidity came in behind it. I don’t know and can’t testify to it. I was […]

“The province of Darfur was given to Rudolf Slatin, and fell to the Dervishes under the Mahdi. Slatin spent fourteen years as personal slave to the Mahdi and his successor, eventually escaped, helped the British Army reconquer the Sudan, and headed the Austrian Red Cross in World War I.” It’s morning and I check the […]

Well, it D-Day again for the 59th time, and I always think of my Uncle Dick launching out of his base in Lincolnshire in support of the troops going ashore. It was not a long-range mission, just over the Channel and back. But he lost one of the four engines on his B-17 on take-off. […]

I was not surprised to emerge from the interior of my shoe-box apartment and see from the balcony that it is raining again here in the nation’s capital. It feels like London here, moist and chill and dark. It is another aseasonal aberration. It should be warm and coming up sunny. It is not, though […]

It is the anniversary of the Battle of Midway, the first Naval encounter fought entirely by airplanes between two fleets who never came within sight of one another. It was the beginning of the end for the Empire of the Sun, and at Stalingrad, Marshall von Paulus was about to surrender his 6th Army to […]

They are giving away amusement park rides out in Sterling, Virginia. I took them up on it this weekend, daring the rain to come and spoil it. I needed to indulge myself, put the wide world aside for a moment since the landscape of the world appears to be shifting, slumping into a new paradigm. […]

It cleared yesterday, the skies suddenly deep and blue and the clouds reverted to soft cotton balls instead of the pervasion damp wool that has blanketed us for a month. I had the top down on the car and the golf clubs at the ready. It is astonishing what a little sunshine can do for […]

I took a class in Geology back in college. It was a hard science requirement imposed on the lit students that I had to kill and it looked like an interesting way to do it. I was impressed by the atomic numbers of the elements, and looking through the microscope at thinly shaved pieces of […]