Big John They went at it again last night, the young men versus the authorities. Ten nights they have come out of the housing blocks with the darkness and begun to burn automobiles and structures. Now the nightly rampage has spread from Normandy to  Marseilles . Nearly a thousand cars were torched last night, if […]

All that Glitters Friday was huge . Everyone was dressing up in their glittering finery. It is the end of Ramadan, of course, so there are more than a billion people letting off some steam. By the time I was figuring out which sober dark suit to wear to the big ceremony, the insurgent attacks […]

Little Italy The immigrants are rioting for the eighth day in Paris . They are burning cars, and causing disorder in some twenty jurisdictions around the vibrant heart of France . They are reported even to be shooting at the police, who have been instructed to be quite stern with them. Rioting is nothing new […]

Paradise Valley I was heartened to read that there will be a big turn-out for the internment of Rosa Parks in her adopted city of Detroit. The ceremony is already in progress back east as the fog rolls in here on San Diego Bay. The Reverend Jackson will speak the eulogy, and the Clintons are […]

Connections I was just about to the head of the line at Security when I realized I was naked. This was not the dream where you appear in front of a crowd in the nude, to great ridicule. This was painfully real. I looked back over my shoulder ad the people standing stoically in line […]

This was starting as a normal day, with dog, except that the time is wrong and I have to pack and get ot of here. I had gone around to all the clock except teh one in the car and the truck to make sure that I was not as disoriented as I could be. […]

Coming Ashore Hurricane Wilma has finally made up her mind and is coming ashore today. She took her sweet time beating up Mexico , but now she is moving purposefully toward the Citrus State , hitting the Keys now, pushing a storm surge at high tide of up to eighteen feet. She is moving at […]

The Long War I was reading Congressional Testimony this morning. Yeah. It was that bad . The rain was coming down, pattering on the cement outside. It was cold and dark, and the immediate reason I was no awake was some idiot at the rental house across the street from Big Pink was making a […]

When I am in London, and by that of course I mean the little square-mile plot of the formal City of London, I always visit Nelson. He is down in the crypt, in the center of it, in a gigantic sepulcher of graceful classic proportions. It is quite a contrast from Wellington’s tomb. The Iron […]

What do you Know? The news made me squirm, being uncomfortably close to home. Two Federal employees, one a retired Captain like me, were busted for leaking classified information. Leaks happen here all the time, but there are unofficial rules for doing it. That concerns me, but not like this. The information that was disclosed was […]