We are bearing down on Halloween here in New England. There are some great stories from campus, about a haunted suite in one of the curious old buildings.   I’ll give you the short of it; which is to say that a sad girl killed herself there and never left. The college is a small […]

I brought too much crap, again. You would think that I would be getting the hang of this traveling thing by now, but apparently not. The Vermonter is pulling out of the stop at BWI airport by the time I got my stuff strewn around me in some order.   Business class is one of […]

23 October 2008   If…   If only AOL had not done something to their version of webmail, I could insert a picture of the smoking hole where the Marine Barracks near the International Airport in Beirut had been, 25 years and a few minutes ago.   I don’t know what they are up to. […]

22 October 2008   Sunspots     It wasn’t the carbon dioxide. It was sunspots.   Thank God. It wasn’t my fault. I am not responsible, and I can go back to worrying about creeping socialism. It is a good thing. The Carbon Nazis were on the point of dictating the minutia of how we […]

I take my editorial responsibilities seriously, like a single malt Scotch, neat.   Accordingly, I was hard at it long before dawn, compiling the Winter Edition of the Daily Bugle, the flagship publication of a professional organization of current and former Secret Squirrels.   It is a delicate business. We tend to be a very […]

Vic is not on vacation, alas, nor on Hiatus, would that it were. I have spent the weekend writing relentlessly upbeat articles for the Winter issue of the Quarterly, and will not inflict them on you.    It is hell being Jimmy Olsen Cub Reporter for a minor metropolitan publication.  It is Monday and I feel […]

Soviet DELTA III Launching SLBMs I have not been out of the Tunnel Eight very much in the evening of late. Things were so nuts in the office starting in early summer that I felt lucky to get home and walk the long block with my Heavy Hands swinging, cook some dinner and go to […]

  The Celebrated Galloway Manure Spreader, Patent Pending   Dodgers vs Phillies, or Obama vs McCain.   I tried both, being a civic-spirited type. As is true with all compromises, didn’t do well at either.   The Dodgers had to win- for them there was no tomorrow, but in the end it did not matter. […]

26 October 2008   Absentee in Person   I couldn’t stand it any longer. The sun was shining brightly down on North Glebe Road, and the temperature was supposed to soar into the low eighties. I got up from the desk at lunchtime yesterday, took the elevator down to the lobby and walked out of […]

14 October 2008 Lipstick I got one of those good ones in the e-mail yesterday. It was pithy and on target, which is the key to effective humor. It was a list of common terms from the market, revised to meet the new reality. The one that left me gasping was this new definition: STOCK […]