(World Cup Football is not for herbivores. Photo Rueters). I as interested to discover that cannibalism is alive and well in the FIFA World Cup. I was sitting in a packed Willow yesterday afternoon around cocktail hour. Old Jim was clearly irritated by the crush of Fish & Wildlife people who kept bumping him as […]

There is tremendous good news this week. The United States Climate Reference Network is operational, and the folks who run it at the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. Actually, it has been operational since 2008. It is some of the better money the taxpayers have provided the climate community. It is is a network of […]

I arrived at the Farm without a story- or rather, the knowledge that I had chores to do, which is the very stuff of life, but unremarkable, given the dimensions of the challenges we confront overseas and here at home. So I decided to ignore them and got out of the Emerald City early and […]

(The “spellbinding mock history of the Department of Agriculture’s most secretive and vital agency.” A novel by Jim Geraghty. Photo Amazon). I was looking around for a trash book to read after I pounded down the Monster Hunter’s International series earlier this month. I have a stack of great suggestions from my reading pals- but […]

(Krispy Kreme-brand hybrid grass flip flops. They help to lower temperatures by creating organic sinks for carbon dioxide and permit the top of the wearer’s feet to tan naturally and evenly). All the needles were pegged this morning. I had to turn the news-and-weather-on-the-eights streaming off the computer. Even the news that I was not […]

There is a derecho of sorts sweeping through the world, knocking the old order aside and leaving some astonishing wreckage in its wake. As part of that, I wanted to make a couple corrections. An alert reader tried the Bloody Mary recipe from 02 January of this year. I don’t know why it took that […]

(Noted Islamist Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in a screen capture from ya Libnan.) This is about as bad as it gets. A pal with a nose for how things are going- he was a senior intelligence officer in the Emirates a while back and understands the regional alignment- is conceding what we knew as Iraq […]

I could not sleep in Arlington, a dramatic counterpoint to oversleeping yesterday at the farm. I came back up around mid-day to get a decent swim and huddle with some former co-workers about the future at Willow. Old Jim was there, enjoying a tuna slider with hot sauce and the welcome warmth of the day. […]

Ah, summer is bearing down upon us- and it will be welcome. They say it will be a week in the 90s- enough to make the coolness still resident in the pool bearable. An hour in the water left me shivering on Saturday, and a quicker swim on Sunday still left me with depressed core […]

This is sort of crazy. It is Father’s Day, of course, and I looked around for the cell phone and realized we interred Raven’s ashes almost two years ago. Still, there is that inclination to grab the phone and do something, check off that box in the phantom “to do” list. Oh well. So, with […]