I heard about a troop of volunteers, who don greasepaint and travel to areas of the world with real needs to cheer up the kids. Give them a diversion from the crushing misery of daily reality. I assume there are big feet and honking horns. The organization calls itself “Clowns Without Borders.” I salute them, […]

Each day you do not learn something, you die a little. I was fortunate to learn several things before breakfast, which puts me on par with The White Queen in “Through the Looking Glass.” She had a conversation with the White Queen, a woman of extraordinary rendition who claimed to be “One hundred and one, […]

The Sea Dog My pal Boats is the kind of guy we used to call “a sea dog.” It is not disparaging. Far from it. It is a little bit like the dramatic first sentence of Moby Dick. The narrator says “Call me Ishmael,” and then it is off to the hunt for the White […]

Bringing it Home I know that America does not float serene in a sovereign sea. You know it, too, whenever you get in a cab, or creep up to the cashier in a parking garage. I do not think I thought about it as much when I lived in the suburbs, and was better protected […]

The Israeli Defense Force was starting work as I went to bed last night. The dawn was just coming up there, and the independent fire units were processing targets as battlefield intelligence queued them up. I turned in as they turned it up, and the clock radio gave me the status of the day’s work […]

Star Ferry Oh, it is a strange morning. It has been so strange for so long that the magnitude of what is happening now is lost to context. Israel is engaged in a two front war, bombing Beirut International. My car salesman is named Mohammed, and he is from Palestine. He is concerned. His family […]

My cab driver the other day was from Mumbai, or properly, a village about an hour a way. I asked him if he was Hindu, thinking that the great south of the subcontinent was mostly of that faith. He said, no, he was a Muslim. He dropped me by the pool at Big Pink, where […]

They let Grammy-winner Li’l Kim out of jail the other day. She is the biggest selling female rapper in history, and a feisty young woman. She dodged a purely metaphorical bullet, unlike some of her male contemporaries, when she was locked up last year for lying about a 2001 altercation between her entourage and some […]

Parallel Universe It is a curious thing to me that the only place that stainless steel can be bent into the perfect curves to meet the frame of an old muscle-truck is in the wilds of Loudoun County. One would think that there would be a facility to bend stainless steel located closer to the […]

I am not going to writing this morning, not in the way I am used to. I have to go to the District, and get the Black truck back from the Speed Shop in Falls Church and I am taking a few personal days. That meant an early up and a scan at the Company […]