The President and the Vice President met with the 9-11 Commission yesterday with the predictable jokes going before, you know, the one’s about Mr. Cheney having his hand up the back of Mr. Bush’s shirt, playing Edgar Bergen to the President’s Charlie McCarthy.   But it didn’t seem to play out that way and […]

  They are opening the World War Two Memorial down on the Mall today. They have rushed the job because the veteran population is dwindling, and they want to let them see the tribute. That was the best news, since the rest of the batch contained more reports of the conflict in Iraq.   The […]

  It could be a day with a Pacific theme. If it was warmer I would don an aloha shirt to celebrate the Mutiny of Her Majesty’s Ship Bounty in 1789, and the setting sail of Thor Hyerdahl from Peru to drift across the Pacific, as pre-Inca voyagers perhaps drifted from South America to Polynesia. […]

  I got good news in the mail yesterday. One of my credit cards told me triumphantly that it had increased the amount of credit they were willing to extend to me.   Their faith in the future is a welcome thing, because I am feeling a little jumpy about things today. I heard the […]

  The call to jihad is on the front page of the New York Times this morning. It is not coming from the likely places of struggle.   The Marines are pulling back a little from Falluja. The oil is beginning to flow again from the terminals at al-Basrah. There has been no slaughter today, […]

  It began for me in the evening hours of April 24, 1980. It was the chill of recognition that something profoundly bad had begun, and that there might not be an end to it.   The Brits might date it differently, perhaps to the shrieking ululation of an angry mob clutching at the landing […]

  Paul Revere had it worked out, from an indications and warnings standpoint. If the British forces were coming to Boston by land, his surveillance and reconnaissance people were instructed to put one lantern in the spire at the Old North Church, which he probably just called the North Church.   If they were arriving […]

  I did not sleep well. Perhaps it was the persistent ache from my leg, or the pinched arches that are still getting accustomed to the heavy roller-skate boots. It is warm again, and it is time for blading around the perimeter of Big Pink.   I am listening to Dan Damon on the BBC […]

  There is no disaster from overseas this morning. At least nothing specific to comment on, except the Continuing Crisis.   I have my own little crisis. I have found myself having to rise from grim deliberations to stretch my leg. It is hurting almost all the time now, and not just with the weather. […]

  There is a poem on the refrigerator by Andrew Marvell. He has been dead a long time, and time is one of the things he wrote about. He wrote about the winged chariot at his heels, and is resonates this morning, the first of the year in which the sweat rolls down beneath my […]