The Great Collector The legendary Charlie Allen was up on the Hill before the imperial city flushed out for the Fourth of July Holiday. He sat with great composure at the table in front of the raised dias where the members sit. His face was imperturbable, lined with crises that go back to the early […]

Luck of the Draw It is the start of an extraordinary weekend. With Independence Day falling next Tuesday, an enterprising vacationer could have left work a little early yesterday, and scooped up five days off at the cost of only two vacation days. That may be why the city seems a little thin today, a […]

Hussongs Cantina I am fed up with the water. The rains stopped two days ago, but now it is all flowing downhill. The Potomac is brown as clay, and rolling along through the trees on Roosevelt Island. The Authorities are evacuating people along the stepper banks of a dozen rivers to the north, in Maryland […]

Benign Infection The rains have stopped, for now, and most of the flood is beginning to recede. The yammering news last night claimed this was the worst spate of rain in three hundred years, according to the records that were not wet. It is curious that the Federal buildings that are closed this morning include […]

We drowned yesterday, the hardy ones who looked at the trains that could not run, and the rising waters in the subway tunnels, and climbed into our cars to head for the capital. The Federal Government announced that it was going to open as usual, though it understood if some of us had some issues […]

Leaks The rains were horrendous rains yesterday. The moisture the News had been warning us about finally arrived Sunday morning, and dropped sheets of water like the monsoons I remember from Northeast Asia. I liked the monsoon season. I am used to the rain the American Midwest: brusque storms, hurtling from west to east, dump […]

The blonde woman on the other side of the desk was lean as whipcord. She looked like she might be reformed from something, the fat rendered away in some sort of fire. Smoking, certainly, but she also had the complexion of someone who might have spend a long time in dim light, and an expression […]

Box Office It is the summer solstice, time to gather at Stonehenge and celebrate our Druid ancestors and swill some liquor. I once had the chance to spend a youthful solstice in Scandinavia, and ran into the pines with a likely companion to cavort in the light that lasts all night. Goes with the genes, […]

SPY-1 I have never seen the newspapers in Seoul in such a dither. They are concerned with the way the US and the Japanese are reacting to the Taepodong-2 rocket that is on the pad in North Korea. The Southern Koreans appear to be in a deeply delusional state. The press is saying that they […]

Junteenth It was the 19th of June, 1865. The blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico glittered in the brilliant sun. The sand was white as sugar on the barrier island. Major General Gordon Granger, late of the Army of the Cumberland, read General Order #3 to the people of the former Confederate city of […]