Looking at the vast homes in Palmer Woods- particularly the former Archbishop’s 62-room mansion, I could feel the dream stirring. At various times I have felt it palpably. Staying downtown a couple years ago, I looked at some of the Beaux Arts skyscrapers that are vacant now. I walked into the Golden Tower of the […]

There is a lot to process this morning. The basic stats? Easy: 536.4 miles in 8 hours and fifteen minutes, with a net Speed of Advance (SOA) of 64 mph, including two gas-and-comfort stops. Ohio is still flat and Pennsylvania isn’t. There were a lot of miles in a short time, but I escaped just […]

I had drinks and dinner with an old comrade and his lovely daughter last night. We were at Willow, of course, though I mention that only in passing. I will not provide a detailed blow-by-blow on the meal that consisted of the extraordinary award-winning Willow Burger, local hormone-free beef on house-made potato bun garnished with […]

(Brett the bartender created this for The Lovely Bea. The maraschino cherries and lime form the image of a praying mantis, which is not illegal under current Virginia law. Photo Socotra). Old Jim and I were the first ones there. Jim was holding court in his usual seat, and I had the stool on the […]

Remember the greatest soliloquy ever uttered in a baseball movie? I do. It was Kevin CostNer in Bull Durham with the astonishing Susan Sarandon at her most sensual. She says to him, in her persona of Annie Savoy, Kevin’s character Crash Davis gets up to leave: “Oh, where are you going?” “After 12 years in […]

(The New Governor of the Old Dominion, God help us.) The Carpetbagger won down here. The commentators on the media seem reservedly smug about it. It is an off-election, after all with only the two Governorships up for grabs, and the semi-Republican winning up on the Jersey Shore in that reality show they call the […]

Apparently we are a voter identification state in Virginia. I had to fish around in my wallet to find my driver’s license. I am in favor of that requirement. If you don’t have time in your busy day to have a photo ID, I suspect that you might be dead, or incapacitated, or really out […]

(Vincent Van Gogh’s Corridor in an Asylum. It feels like we are all in one these days.) I rose this morning at the farm to start going through the traffic, both messages and the regular vehicular kind. I don’t normally think about checking Trafficland about the trip up to Arlington from Culpeper, but I thought […]

I went to bed too early, changing some of the clocks to prepare to fall back out of Daylight Savings Time. I knew the result of the Big Game, and one of my sons will be very happy. Out of deference to the tyranny of time zones, I will not comment further. Being a man […]

I am not going to even try to tell the story this morning. There is plenty of stuff elsewhere crying out for examination and I just don’t have the energy to pursue any of them with sufficient humor to make it fun. So, let’s take a look at something that was fun. The all stars […]