(View of Camelback Mountain from Donovon’s Steakhouse, Phoenix)   I was sitting in the kick-off session yesterday in the vast hall. The lights were down, and the convention planners had caused massive speakers with gigantic sub-woofers to be hung from the ceiling high above, and the air actually moved with the rock music they had […]

The Phoenix Suns beat the Lakers last night, 118 to 109, with a ferocious attack on the basket at the end of a game that featured a wobbling three-point lead at the beginning of the 4th quarter.   Few people outside Arizona’s Valley of the Sun understood how critical this win was, since it is […]

(Plan of the Soviet War Memorial. Photo Socotra)   The long axis of the memorial is approached through trees, and the first thing to see is a statue of a grieving woman, mother, or Russia herself. Flowers were strewn at her feet. It is a soft approach to the bombast that follows. Before the monument […]

I was in a business that had some of these features, and it still boggles the mind. My associate took it all in- she could read the descriptions while I had only a rudimentary idea of the commentary that went along with it. All I could imagine was that nothing whatsoever was what it appeared, […]

I turned to my associate, who was examining a SIGINT collection van near the Central staircase. “Say, why don’t we go upstairs and see how a police state works?”   She shrugged. This all ended the year she was born. “May as well,” she said. “If we don’t remember, it will happen again.”   Copyright […]

She leaned over to me and said that we would detrain at the Magdalennestrasse and take the steps up to Frankfurterallee, which is the main drag past the Stasi complex. As we left the train, I glanced at the great rectangles of public art that lined the opposite walls of the platform, highlighted by the […]

(Abandoned US SIGINT Site at Teuflesberg, British Sector, West Berlin)   They whisked me out of Tegel without complication yesterday morning to Munich, and four movies later the AB-330-300 touched down at IAD.   Apparently the particulate matter from the plume tops out at FL28, and we cruised directly over it at Flight Level 36, […]

(Zentrallufthaven Templehof. Photo Socotra)   I got back to the room at the Armony before four, and collapsed on the bed. My attempt at a Rave was over. I was happy I had seen some of the night-life, and that the lives of the new generation are not demonstrably different than that of their elders, […]

(Caberet, Berlin Style. Photography by Jim Ferreira) I suddenly realized what a pathetic dependent creature I am. The Internet is down at the Hotel Armony and I am suddenly in Germany. Without it I cannot contact my associate in the building next door, and may actually have to deal with the German people and their […]

The plan was to dine in the Turkische fashion,but we didn’t. It was the desire of my guide to have me dine on the most famous Döner in Berlin, which is the Dönerkapital of the known universe. I was humbled. I had to ask what a “Döner” might be, since everyone except me in this […]