It is Friday the 13th. I don’t know if you put much stock in the old tale of woe that comes on this combination of days: there are three of them coming at us in 2012, and this is the first. There is some squirrely stuff going on, now that I have a chance to […]

(Spike and Vic at the breakfast table in the Little Village by the Bay last week.) I liked that Mercedes GLK350 well enough that I actually looked for one in the Certified Pre-owned section of the local dealer- the one I walk by when I hoof it to the office. I was lucky- there is […]

(The plates went into the Bay right here, off the breakwater. Photo Socotra) I am dazed. The clock radio was playing classical music, as it normally does with the alarm, and I was inhaling the first Dazbog-brand coffee of the morning before I actually looked at the clock and discovered it was a little after […]

I am a car guy, a hazard of growing up in the Detroit of a certain age, and naturally have welcomed the opportunity to experience a variety of top-sellers in the marketplace recently. An alert reader sent a query this morning about my rating of the Jeep Grand Cherokee, and it is a welcome change […]

Gentle Readers, family and friends, There are two ways to do this, and being me, of course I am not going to chose. I’ll give you both. I will start with the mystical version, then provide the more staid official one that may, with some modification, make the papers. Let me be clear and make […]

“Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain,” goes the line from everyone’ s favorite half black-and-white and half Technicolor movie. But on this day, the first working one of the New Year, after the very first School Night whose strictures I happily ignored, I am having a hard time hitting my rhythm. […]

  It is still dark at the farm this morning. I slept on the red couch, bathed in the brilliant cold blue-white mercury vapor security lamp. It was quiet except for the 3:05 freight on the old Alexandria & Orange line sounding its horn at the grade crossings at Winston, Virginia. It was nearly sixty […]

I am not getting far this morning, nor fast. I am not furious about that, though wary of the first storm of winter which is bearing down on us- I should therefore get to the farm today while the getting is good, and probably take the Police Cruiser rather than the Hubrismobile, though of course […]

I rose at 0330 and could not get back to sleep, so I folded the now-dry laundry from last night’s pre-Willow-suitcase-emptying drill. Part of the frantic hurtling across the Rust Belt I looked blankly at ninety or so personal e-mails, most of which mean nothing. One did. It was an account of a journey to […]

In the pre-dawn ink of the Detroit Metro Region I found myself on a major thoroughfare, moving with deliberate speed in the rental car, peering out, hoping for the dawn to cut the gloom and allow a decent speed of advance toward the Imperial City 560 miles away. I saw headlights coming up behind me […]