(Early Electric Razor) It is a Federal Holiday, as you well know, but there is no rest for the wicked. I would have to burn a “floating holiday” in order to honor my Italian heritage and sit on the couch at home and recover from the 1,600 miles on the road this week. Not that […]

(View From the Bluesmobile Dash) I don’t know if it would have changed my mind any. It was the right thing to have a car up here, and driving my own made things a lot less complex.   Not one TSA screener asked to look in my back filled with electronic devices- Blackberry, cell phone, […]

(Jackie Gleason as Bus Driver Ralph Kramden)   This is a magical time of the year, as you probably have noticed. My favorite sports are in full flower. It is sweater weather, and there is football, college and pro, and baseball has worked it’s seductive best.   The weekend did not go so well for […]

(October at Brandy Station) I’m down at the farm, and the coffee is not bad. It was a marvelous drive in the Bluesmobile down here, feeling the congestion of the city fall away. Early casualties of the season, the first leaves, danced across the road and the sun did not beat down, it embraced. Football […]

(Flag folded for retirement ceremony) There was a phrase we were supposed to utter to the Officer of the Deck when we left the ship. I as delighted to find that there was more than one as time went by. It was a nuance of language, important only in the relative terms our captivity to […]

  (Parking Meters)   I have some friends- bless them- who volunteer in Hospice programs. Those groups help the terminally ill confront the inevitable with peace, comfort and dignity.   It is among the most selfless of volunteer activities, and the hardest. All of the sturm unt drang of life is burned away for the […]

It is pretty cool, having a secret holiday.   Oh, all right. It is not that secret, not like some mystical rite that is conducted in some inky basement at Langley, or below the flood-plain of the Potomac River at Bolling Air Force Base.   It is little known, though, I will grant you. We […]

(Olde English “D” of the Detroit Tigers Major League Baseball Franchise)   If we were not technologically challenged, Muhammed would probably have tweeted the progress of the double-header in Detroit.   He is our life-line to the Motor City, though he does not live there any more than the rest of us. He is out […]

(The Shelf Reliance One Year Food Supply)   Many reputable authors disagree about what humankind should expect on Dec. 21, 2012, when the Maya’s “Long Count” calendar runs out, marking the end of a 5,126-year era.   Some are predicting widespread catastrophe. There is a movie about 2012 that will debut in November- you can […]

(Flight Deck of Pan Am Flight 103)  I wish Bill Safire was here to help frame the debate about what to do about Iran. Man, he could turn a phrase.   I don’t think anyone will ever top that “Nattering Nabobs” line he crafted for Vice President Agnew, a nolo contendere crook of the Nixon […]