(Hotel Eddystone near the Masonic Temple. Nothing worth anything is left in the well-built structure. Photo Socotra.) Well, the conference wraps this morning and it is soon going to be my happy feet tapping on the gas pedal of some anonymous rental on the concrete strip north. It is more than a little emotional. Not […]

(Book-Cadillac Hotel, in the Day.) Day three in Detroit marks the beginning of the season of discontent. The easy stuff has been done, the free parties are over, and the prospect of breaking it all down and heading on to the next thing looms. My comrades were starting to fade, as was I, but there […]

You could feel the energy at the Conference- not the one the NAACP was having down the massive halls of the Cobo Regional Convention Center, but the Defense Information Technology convocation. The Director made an appearance by the miracle of video-teleconference. As you might imagine, the take-down of Osama bin Laden and the posturing of […]

(Demonstrators outside the Cobo Convention Facility during the NAACP annual fundraisers, 01 May, 2011. Photo Socotra.) The word came through several sources- tweets, twitters, newsbreaks, e-mail to personal devices, and it was short and sweet. The Man was dead, shot to death in a firefight in a posh mansion forty air miles from the Pakistani […]

You know where my thoughts are this morning. I would have told you the details about my pal Mac’s meeting with a much younger Queen of England, but he reminded me of that meeting in an e-mail, which I noted will require another encounter at Willow. Then, rushing around to over water the plants, leave […]

(Union Jack’s Public House, Ballston Neighborhood, Arlington, VA. Photo Union Jack’s.) The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left Buckingham Palace by helicopter to commence their married life. At least that is what the Beeb said this morning. I breathed a sigh of relief that I am now able to let the tangled affairs of the […]

(Us Marines stand with captured Korean battle flag, 1871, near present day Inchon.) Mac and I paid Elisabeth-with-an-S and she gave me one of those smiles that keeps me coming back. We walked out of Willow’s rich wood bar and down the steps onto the brick patio. “My usual parking place,” said the Admiral with […]

(The SS General Sherman burning. Photo courtesy of the DPRK Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum.) Elisabeth-with-an-S came by, topped up my Grenacha with a practiced twist of her lithe wrist and kept moving. The belt of extraordinarily intense storms that scoured the South were passing through, and the bar of the Willow had filled up […]

(USS Pueblo, TAEG-2 as she appeared when commissioned in 1944. US Army Photo.) I always get a little unhinged in time when I hang out with Admiral Mac. His merry eyes dance across the decades, sweeping me out of this bold new decade in a slightly threadbare almost post-American century. We are hanging in, but […]

(Admiral Mac is out and about again in the Spring weather. Photo Socotra.) They say there is truth in wine, and I am a fervent believer in the principle. I managed to extricate myself from the office and walk under the delicate blue skies and head down to the Willow around the cocktail hour. From […]