I am at the farm and bemused. I was going through office stuff before attempting the drive back to the Emerald City. I toggled over to check my private mail as a diversion, and was stopped in my digital tracks. A pal had sent a picture from long ago and far away and wondered at […]

The Black Forest Fire is now 75% contained, they say, with slightly over 500 homes destroyed. If one of those were mine, the “slightly over” rounding error would piss me off, just as are some of the property owners who have been prohibited from re-entering the area to see what they have lost. There are […]

(Map of the Black Forest conflagration in which nearly 500 homes were destroyed. Photo Modis on earth image by Google). I wish I could say it is good to be home, but it is not home, not precisely. The unit had all the lights on, a profligate waste of energy strongly encouraged by my amiable […]

Wednesday was a good day for a funeral. It was partly cloudy overall but mostly sunny at Fort Logan National Cemetery where the family gathered to say good-bye to Bill. It was a good turnout, and the honor guard of Veterans, most of them older folks, men and women, was provided from the ranks of […]

At a La Quinta somewhere in the sprawl of Denver. I know for a fact that I am near the Ft. Logan National Cemetery- the GPS in the rented Cadillac told me that as it directed my through the afternoon snarl of traffic around the downtown, though I could not tell you with any precision […]

I am halfway somewhere else this morning. There is a fire near Denver that concerns me, that and the possible deracho front similar to the one that hammered us last summer that is headed this way. I hope to be above it all by mid-day, though. There is a family funeral- my cousin Bill- that […]

10 June 1951 I am sixty-two this morning. I thank Big Mama for that: it was Sunday in Detroit, and early, and as was the case in those days, they shooed Raven away and told him to go get a cup of coffee and a slice of pie. Raven told me many years later it […]

(You may know James Ewell Brown- “J.E.B.” Stuart by his portrait as a fiercely bearded warrior. This one shows his other side.) Trust me, I have been all over the map this morning on matters of real national urgency. There is something so banal and yet completely sinister going on in Your Nation’s Capital that […]

“Though some mass extinctions happen quickly, most take hundreds of thousands of years. So how would we know whether one was happening right now? The simple answer is that we can’t know for sure. What we do know for certain, however, is that mass extinctions have decimated our planet on a regular basis throughout its […]

(Album cover of the most widely sold record in history: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.) You might be under a rock, and if so, I apologize for turning it over. Things are much more comforting in the dark sometimes, which is where we were until the latest pair of revelations hit. The twin […]