I made my usual call to the folks late on Sunday. It had been a magnificent day at poolside at Big Pink, and the prospect of what is going to come to pass later this year was easy enough to put aside. I read a few hundred pages of the last Harry Potter book, and […]

The Dog had his best walk of the week this morning, dragging me up George Mason Drive and all the way to the Lubber Run Park. It was further than he had walked all week, by seven times. He was very spry, considering his advancing years, and quite lively, sniffing every post and pole along […]

Three-card Monte is the closest equivalent I can come to. There was more motion than the temperature and humidity could accommodate. We are finally in that shirt-sticky time in Washington when the black interior of the autos bake the back of your suit into deep wrinkles and the road shimmers and the lines of strong […]

They are closing AOCS, the Navy’s Aviation Officer Candidate School. It has been located at Pensacola, FL, anchoring the Redneck Riviera of the Gulf Coast since after World War Two. Under the provisions of the latest Base Reallocation and Closure round, the schoolhouse will be consolidated in Newport, Rhode Island, where the non-aviation officer pipeline […]

USS Wolverine and Lake Michigan Ore Carrier, 1944 I’m happy the North Koreans opened up their reactor to inspection, and I am a little dismayed that the Russians pulled out of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, though Congress had never gotten around to formally ratifying the treaty anyway. It seems like we have lived […]

The Great Pyramid at Giza, 1990 I don’t know if what is lurking in the freezer is any good or not. I could not look, while the event was happening. Instead, I spent the fruits of the latest 22-hour electrical outage caused by a major transformer fire here at Big Pink wandering through a marvelous […]

The moisture is beading up on the inside of the windows at Big Pink. The humidity is approaching a gazillion percent, and the atmosphere is pregnant with change, since as we approach saturation it is going to fall out. The people on the radio claim it is going to happen this afternoon. They being overly […]

Patrick Griffin, circa 1905 The obituary came to me in the mail the other day. It was the actual page from the obituary section of a long defunct publication that flourished in the sepia-toned decades of the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Confederate Veteran was published monthly from 1893 to 1932, […]

OFF TO THE PYRAMIDS – THE BESIEGED TOURIST. A SKETCH BEFORE SHEPHERD’S HOTEL. March 6th,1875. ARTIST: Hennessey. The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of The Peabody Hotel and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg. The Peabody is the Paris Ritz, the Cairo Shepherd’s, the London Savoy of this section.   If you stand near its […]

You remember the poem by Percy Shelly. It was in all the anthologies of English literature back in the day, and it still might be, if it has not been lost in the multi-cultural tidal wave. It would be a shame if it has. It has a cool rhyme scheme, and has a tag-line that […]