Remember the nick-name we all shared for the local pharmacy and consumables store? We called it the ‘Five and Ten,’ which referred to the coinage commonly used in those stores. Nickles and Dimes were what were used for small necessary purchases. Those days are long ago now, and we simply call them by the name […]

There are no words that can encompass the spectrum of emotion that attends the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. Certainly none are sufficient from our modest farm in rural Virginia. We will not try. We must note that although she reigned in another nation and managed, with dignity, the transformation of the greatest Empire that […]

We were looking through the archives for economic tipping points after DeMille scowled at us down by the Fire Ring yesterday. The Lady in Red on the flat screen had mentioned we might have the first day of weather that looked a bit like Fall today, though she smiled and said summer would return for […]

(You want history? Here is some of it in person. At left is Virginia “Jinny” Martin, widow of the Director of the Navy’s Criminal Investigation Service. We were working on a cook book of her favorite recipes to whip up if husband Barnie called from work in Istanbul to say he was having a delegation […]

It is a holiday today as you may have heard. It is supposed to be commemorating the value of “labor,” and thus as a nation we are taking the day off to celebrate it. Other nations around the world do the same thing, though they celebrate a sort of energetic response earlier in the year. […]

It was not a Hitchcock movie, we will grant you that. And the first thing we read in the group session this morning was about reports of blood clotting in citizens who got the Moderna vaccine to protect us from whatever that pandemic thing was. So, all in all, we are down to looking for […]

I was sitting in the little office they gave me on the E-Ring of the Pentagon talking to one of the people who were attempting- partially successfully- to keep me sane in the face of a new job. Like most of the career, it was accidental in nature with no discernable scheme or plan to […]

We tried to stay up for the Speech last night. It was billed as being something historic, and the general sense in our wizened crowd was that it was something to which we had a civic duty to monitor. Due to the importance attached to the President’s remarks, we did not bother to identify what […]

(This image is from a gray day on the Texas coast just a few years ago. The long gray shape is that of an aircraft carrier named for the first Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal (CV-59). When her steaming days were done, she was sold to an enterprising scrapping company for $1. She is […]

(Word spread yesterday of the passing of a world leader whose time in this world made a difference in ours. Some of our current history is part of an effort to reverse Mikhail Gorbachev’s legacy. We are publishing a book about how that all worked!) We were surprised to see the news spreading yesterday. One […]