The Dragon Lady was seventy-eight when Concorde first flew a commercial route in January of 1976. The Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Chek, the Dragon Lady’s husband, was in his grave just a year. He passed in 1975 and work on his garish blue and white mausoleum was nearly complete in downtown Taipei. When I first saw it, […]

He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth” On Oct. 23, 1983, a suicide truck loaded with six tons of explosives crashed through a barrier and detonated at the four-story headquarters of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit at Beirut International Airport in Lebanon. 241 […]

I am guilty. I write this nonsense far earlier than I should, sometimes without the necessary caffeine coursing through my brain. And my fact-checkers are inept creatures, old pensioners in worn Naval tunics, kahki ones with the giant pockets that can accomodate a whole carton of Camel Straights. I don’t know why I keep them […]

They are doing something very peculiar at the Metro Stations these days. They have people in safety vests handing out a broadsheet of some thirty-odd pages of newsprint. It is stapled together at the spine, and I thought it was advertising or a polemic the first time someone handed it to me. I glanced at […]

It was silent in Boston, where a million blue television screens reflected the eleventh inning Yankee home run that put them out of their misery. Twenty-nine times the Yankees have done that, sending the Red Socks packing, slinking back to the visitor’s locker room to change in silence, eager to get out of Dodge and […]

It is a historic baseball week. Yesterday, the Yankees took a second game from the Red Socks at fabled Fenway Park, and will likely eject the Sox from their chance at the World Series. The Cubs were stunned by the Marlins. It was one of the appalling moments in sports. A fan reached out to […]

The new Governor of California is a muscular Austrian with a playful sense of humor. He once said he admired Hitler. What a kidder! He has been elected for a three year term, if the electorate doesn’t decide to recall him. There is no getting around America’s love affair with show-biz, and here we go […]

The radio says that the Roy half of Siegfried and Roy is showing some signs of improvement after being mauled and dragged by his neck offstage. A dramatic exit, to be sure, and a first in his career as a showman. I feel a little like life has me the same way. It is just […]

It is Monday, and if that wasn’t enough, there is more bad news from the Middle East. But that is an oxymoron. I got up to sleepwalk through the latest accusations against Gropemeister Arnold, riding on his Terminator bus toward the California election tomorrow. Then the tit-for-tat exchange, the suicide bombing in Haifa and the […]

No Preference   The North Koreans, bless their little pointy heads, have announced that they have re-processed 8,000 spent fuel rods from their little prototype reactor at Yongbyon. It is all the embattled theocracy can do to protect itself from the United States. Poor dears. Last I heard, the spent rods were glowing under water […]