Summer Reading August is calling out to us all. It is the tantalizing glimmer of slim fingers at the end of a nut-brown hand, tanned to perfection by hours under the July sun. The index finger beckons to a last delight before the State Fair of summer is about to have its last hurrah, and […]

A Shield Against Heaven There really aren’t any new abominations in the world. They are just endlessly recycled. War is as old as the species, though we have put some spectacular wrinkles on the technical side of it. Still, as Mr. Zarakawi demonstrated prior to his timely demise, there are some acts of personal brutality […]

I like dogs. I don’t happen to own one at the moment, which is a function of pure laziness on my part. I excuse myself by saying that I have been traveling too much, and that my life is too chaotic right at the moment to take on a responsibility of caring for another being. […]

Technician #0523266 It would be easy enough to slip into the breathless accounts of the latest war, or wars, depending on what you see and read. The Lebanon mess has trumped the news from Iraq, with thousands of ISF troops scouring the countryside for Hezballah rockets before the enforcement of a cease-fire. They say that […]

< class=”style2″>28 August 2006 Beer Call Times are hard for the Navy. The ground war in Iraq is drawing all the loose change from the Department of Defense. The Army is going to have to replace all its vehicles, out of schedule, and that is just one of the unforeseen costs of managing a determined […]

Ding Dong It is not time for dancing, not yet, but that is not stopping the people of Miami from stepping out. They are in the streets, in celebration of the moment the Wicked Witch is dead. Actually, power had been temporarily delegated to Uncle Fidel’s brother, Raoul, another of the perpetual Saints of the […]

Special English I first ran into Special English in East Africa. It is a dialect of our mother tongue, used mostly by the Voice of America to spread the message of truth and justice to those for whom English is not a first language. It is sort of elegant, once you get used to slowing […]

Tomorrow is the end of the month. I realized it when I got a command from the Credit Union to change passwords, not that they had been compromised or anything, just a prudent act. I complied, bubiously, and looking at the date of the transaction, realized that July is about in the dustbin and August […]

Little Kate I hate to say it, but Don Rumsfeld was right. He has been much maligned of late, but he has been absolutely correct. Not about what you would think immediately. I am thinking about what Thomas Pynchon called the rainbow of gravity in his marvelous and troubling novel that treated the legacy of […]

Epiphany The temperature was rising back toward normal in Washington, which is to say that cold front had passed away to the chill waters of the north Atlantic, and the warm, wet Gulf air was awirling back, damping the shirt between the shoulder blades. I was getting disoriented at the desk on the sixth floor […]