Middle Ages Wilma is the name, the last one in the Alphabet. This ties a record for storm formation, and there is more than a month of Hurricane Season to go. I am not concerned that we will run out of names. They are, after all, almost limitless. The Weathermiesters have a plan; they are […]

Piling On My little Spartan got a ticket the weekend of the Big Game. I know about that because a thick packet came in the mail yesterday from the management company, and it contained the citation. I read it carefully as I undid my tie. This was serious business, and the words from the management […]

Uncle Walter If you have ever seen the reporter for the Washington Post who covers the Spook community, I think you would agree that he is almost a caricature of the world he writes about. Old School, that is. Tweedy jacket, wild gray intellectual hair, a sly smile that covers piercing eyes. He looks like […]

Pyrotechnics It is no surprised that the word from the West electrified me this morning. The word is that Tommy Lee, famed sex partner of Pamela Anderson and rock drummer extraordinaire, was tragically burned when pyrotechnics went awry in a show in Casper , Wyoming . A lot of things go wrong in Casper, and […]

The Letter I’m glad I am not heading for Newark today. The monsoon that passed through here over the weekend has stalled over the Northeast, and the water is rising. There are endless delays at the airport, and I cannot think of anything more depressing than being trapped on an airplane, waiting to disembark in […]

Bam I was lying in bed on Monday morning. I was celebrating my Italian heritage and taking the day to honor Columbus , or something, and I got lost in the disaster and dreams, the stories about the mudslides slid into accounts of the earthquake. The buildings were flattened. The children were in schools. I […]

The rain came down in sheets of silver, cascading down from the balconies of Big Pink and pooling in the low spots along the walkways. I had not seen rain this hard and this constant since the monsoon in Korea, the endless sheets of water that fell on the hooch on Yongsan Garrison and made […]

The President popped up to give a major address on the Global War of Terror last night. I had company in town and did not watch. I should have, I think, since I need to stay focused on things. We have been paying too much attention to the weather of late, or rather been consumed […]

Point Zero It’s a forty-minute drive from Lahore east to Wagah. Lahore is a site of ancient learning, and Moghul palaces and the Anarkali Bazaar, atomb of the poet just about the same thing going west from Amritsar, home of the Golden Temple of the Sikhs. It is along the Grand Trunk Road that leads […]

Six Legs and Three Heads Any day I don’t learn something new is one wasted, I think. But I was not completely prepared to learn the new rule-of-thumb in forensic examination this morning. I opened the Times and poured rich, hot coffee into my gullet. The police in Bali found a total of “six legs […]