Oh, you better believe it. The swim trunks are out, the towel is at the ready. An electrifying book is in the tote bag along with a fresh Bic lighter and the sun block I rarely use.   I have the new pool pass in the plastic sleeve and am fully prepared to meet the […]

(DPRK Army Vice Chief of Staff and Socotra, 1995, Pyongyang) We are on the verge of a holiday, as you know, and I have a recipe for deviled eggs I want to give you. But I am literally all aquiver this morning, so bear with me. All the nerve ends are firing, seemingly at random. […]

Everything in the little unit was intended to fold, and I built the room out in the style of a Navy officer’s stateroom. You were there on the coldest day in recorded Arlington History when the Murphy bed and its thirty boxes arrived by truck.   When that project was complete, the bed folded into […]

  It was Day Two of the big defense Information Technology show, and people were getting a little glassy in the booths on the display floor. There were 250 booths, big and small, though mostly the latter, and everyone had, by now, seen most of the give-aways and given the elevator speeches a few hundred […]

(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 […]