Peak Oil I did not have the energy to leap out of bed this morning. I crawled to the kitchen to put on the coffee, and then crawled down the hallway and slithered back up into the bed. It is nice there, under the eiderdown, with the windows open and the fresh breath of spring […]

Life Boat It is May Day, the great unofficial labor holiday of the Left. I can’t celebrate because I have to work. On mornings like this I am tempted to inventory the survival gear and prepare for the moment that we have to step off the deck of the great liner and into the life […]

National Anthem It is Saturday in Washington. I had more than the usual few minutes to read the Times and look through the Post. Things are grinding along with the slow-motion action of a system that is impervious to urgency, implacable in its inertia. Apparently the next big thing here is going to be a […]

Green I have a confession to make. I woke up green. I could see the color on my arms, and spreading across my face in the mirror. This is not a good development for a man who lives in a building known as Big Pink. It clashes. There is nothing to do but accept the […]

It did not have to happen, and that is the tragedy about it. The melt down at Chernobyl occurred after an exercise in which the crew monitoring the Number Four Reactor shut down the cooling loop to test their emergency procedures. Number Four got away from them, and the result was the worst nuclear disaster […]

House Resolution God Bless the Associated Press. Whoever was working the night shift filed the story at 4:31 this morning, two hours after I awoke, dazed, with the clock radio blaring. I don’t know how that happened; the controls are all on top of the little contraption from Sony, and in pawing at it I […]

If you were in the northern part of central Europe sixty-one years ago, you would be anticipating the end. The Allied armies were poised to link up at the Elbe River, and Germany was just about done. People were getting ready for what was next in most places. The conference to determine it had been […]

The Crossroads of Big Pink is the lobby, and in the congestion around the Concierge desk it is not uncommon to see several animals tugging on their leashes at any given time. Most of the dogs are pretty mellow, and have become accustomed to the bedlam in the late afternoon, when the mail has been […]

Back Up I had out-of-town guests- Corporate ones- and I could have done a better job of hosting them if I had input to their schedules. But of course I did not. That was controlled by executive secretaries in some other state, and a company alliance with a major hotel chain. It could be worse. […]

It is a round hundred years this morning since the earth moved under San Francisco. The quake lasted for a minute or so, and the ground slipped along the fault line for about 25 feet, releasing the tension that tugged on the rock and soil. The movement was fairly brief, and the adjustment was the […]