(KOBAYASHI ISSA, 1763-1828)   UKI-GUSA TO MISHI MA NI IKE  NO KORI KANA   While I looked at the lilly-pads The pond Froze – Issa   I have a pal who elected to stay in Japan rather than leave, once his tour in World Famous Fighter Squadron 151 was done. He has risen to become […]

I still have my Route 16 Centurion patch- one of the most elegant ever embroidered by the crafty Nipponese in the Honcho-ku outside the main gate at the Yokosuka Naval Base. You could have patches made a lot of places in the Far East back then. Korea was cheap, the P.I. cheaper still, but there […]

(Patch design inked in the Cheju-do Modified Location (Modloc) during Exercise TEAM SPIRIT 1979) A pal is reading about the run-up to World War Two through the pages of a biography of Dwight Eisenhower. He wrote to me, marveling at the Louisiana Maneuvers, a vast set of exercises conducted by the U.S. Army in the […]

Time to go. Time to leave Vancouver and the Games of 2010; time for this damned winter to be banished; the moment for some of us to head overseas for semesters far afield; time for others to leave places that had been home for a long time, and strike out in a new direction.   […]

(Heckle, sans Jeckle, surveys an uncertain future)   I have a pal who is an attorney and lives in Oz.   There are enough contradictions inherent in both profession and location that I marvel at how life can be lived so far away form the Imperial City. He tends to be a liberal and I […]

(The Wheeling, WVA, Suspension Bridge, Completed in 1849) It is blowing like crazy out there. We are 1/16th of an inch south of the monster storm that is dumping a foot on new York City. South of the snow, anyway, but we are collecting the wild swirl of the circumference of the storm. Gusts to […]

  I heard the young smart folks on NPR last night dissecting the health bill, something I was forced to confront for the first time after the big open summit held by the Commander-in-Chief and televised on C-SPAN.   That was the promise when all this started long ago, when the world was warm. I […]

We got no snow last night.   The smart people on the media had been telling us to brace for rain transitioning to something solid over night. Maybe four inches was what they said, though the temperatures made that prediction a bit of a crap-shoot.   Of course, that amount of snow would have been […]

(Red Army detachment sings on road  march, 1920. Image copyright Billie Love) I feel the former and bleed the latter, though not at the moment. I live in a State that leans Red, though, my neighborhood is resolutely Blue.   I have been uncomfortable with the whole Red-Blue thing. We were all so militantly anti-Red […]

  I was going to do something significant this morning and now I cannot for the life of me determine what it was. The tension in Korea? The Cross-straits relationship between the PRC and Taiwan? The failing of our democratic institutions? Olympic Ice dancing?   I am tired of thinking about ice. There must be […]