It just keeps getting better and better, or at least weirder and weirder. Word this morning was that Park Service personnel had placed cones on a state-maintained highway in South Dakota to prevent motorists from pulling off the road to look, at a distance, at the busts of the greatest Presidents carved into the side […]

The Turf Tiger tractor got a name yesterday. I could tell you about it, or wax hysterical about what is happening in that strange city inside its concrete straightjacket seventy miles to the northwest. I mentioned that one of my buddies had been on the road for the last week, and is looking now at […]

(Madam’s profile is a landmark in Adams-Morgan in DC, and though controversial, remains open despite the budget crisis). If you had been on the road this week, someplace headed across the vast spaces of the interior of this Great Land you would have missed a lot, and missed exactly nothing. Despite the political theater, our […]

(Tex is triumphant over the new self-serve suds delivery device, known as “the Champagne Bucket.” The big government shut-down is affecting everything. I strolled into Willow after a day spent in the pursuit of moderation. I exercised moderately, getting my shirt off to capture the last rays of the season, and thought only moderately about […]

(Aftermath of the violent afternoon on Constitution Ave in Washington DC, 3 October, 2013.) Is it just me or is everyone a little nuts here in Washington? I was doing something constructive yesterday afternoon and was not plugged into the global information grid- or, better said- I just wasn’t paying any attention to it. I […]

(Tex shows off the new draft beer taps at Willow. This is a great day for the Republic. Photo Socotra.) It was a little after five, and we were at our places at the Amen Corner of the Willow Bar. “So, did you hear Tom Clancy is dead?” “Yeah. 66 years old, the son of […]

“Silvio Berlusconi has plunged Italy into another political crisis. It’s a wake-up call for Europe and a reminder that, despite what the recent German election campaign suggested, the euro crisis is by no means over yet.” – Gregor-Peter Schmitz writing in Der Spiegal WTOP’s class-enclosed nerve center (“Traffic and Weather on the Eights!”) was telling […]

(This is the image from the cover of the program for the Change of Command at the National Maritime Intelligence Integration Office and Office of Naval Intelligence. Sam explained why that was in his remarks: Naval Intelligence knew the fields from which the Kamikazes flew, provided the vectors to intercept them on their course toward […]

There is some nonsense happening back up inside the Beltway- I am listening to the traffic-and-weather-on-the-eights with a sense of schadenfruede this morning as the light spreads over Refuge Farm, deep in the heart of Culpeper. Not that I am going to escape the capital entirely this week- there is a ceremony in Maryland this […]

  Gentle Readers, The trees are on the verge of changing at Refuge Farm. We were huddled around the First Fire of Fall last night, terrified. The temperature on the deck had dropped, and the last salmon and chicken and steak morsel was being mopped up with good red wine. We were almost paralyzed by […]