I was headed for a drink with a pal last week over in Arlington’s Ballston Canyon and I noticed the Flat Top grill was closed. Things are a little unsettled over there, the most concrete example of the change in the housing market. They have taken the chain link fence down around the old Immigration […]

You reap what you sow, and dinner is what you put in the pot on the stove.   Any farmer or cook knows that, but we are so disconnected from the world on which we walk that we forget. We live in the eternal “now.” Wiggling out of short-term problems with easy (and short-term solutions) sets […]

I got a call yesterday from a reserve colleague who was trying to drum up interest in what is going to be an Operation Paperclip re-union in October. I was interested, naturally, but a little confused by the news that it is going to be in Alexandria, Virginia. You can understand why. I always think […]

People who live in the high latitudes are a little nuts in the summer. The daylight hours peak in June, and the stimulation of all that sun and warmth upon the Northern brain is almost overwhelming. I knew people who lived in Nome, Alaska, and they said they thought nothing of cutting the grass before […]

I got a note on the box yesterday after wandering in from a volunteer Board Meeting. My participation had required getting up far too early on a lovely Saturday, and driving across the District to the Maryland border to a volunteer Board meeting. The area used to be a slum, but is blossoming with new […]

I had dinner with the Admiral last night at a nice place out in Great Falls. We drove out the Dulles Access Road, antiseptic as it slashes through the glass boxed operating units of the defense contractors. We bailed out just past the toll plaza and took Route 7, which is an old road that […]

The jury did not take long to convict Mr. Jose Padilla in Miami. One of the jurors delivered her opinion on the matter in Spanish, her preferred language, which ends the long legal limbo of the Brooklyn-born jihadi who the government said wanted to vaporize Chicago. It seems that the American mortgage melt-down rattling the […]

Have you been to Graceland? Do you have the ability to open your heart to the King? It is thirty years today that Elvis left the building for the last time, and there is a legion of fans holding candles in front of the gates to The Mansion. Over a thousand Elvis impersonators are coming […]

Truck bombs killed the Yazidis in northern Iraq this morning. Sunni men are responsible, apparently, some sort of revenge for an internet video of a local woman being stoned. It is supposed to be pretty vicious. Her crime was dating a co-religionist of the bombers, and naturally the response was to blow to tiny bits […]

There are problems with the Shuttle, broken tiles again, the thing that killed the crew of Columbia. The people in Utah are talking about drilling a third shaft 1600 feet into the rock to look for the lost miners, though sadly it appears a remote hope. In town, the word has spread that Karl Rove, […]