“The province of Darfur was given to Rudolf Slatin, and fell to the Dervishes under the Mahdi. Slatin spent fourteen years as personal slave to the Mahdi and his successor, eventually escaped, helped the British Army reconquer the Sudan, and headed the Austrian Red Cross in World War I.” It’s morning and I check the […]

Well, it D-Day again for the 59th time, and I always think of my Uncle Dick launching out of his base in Lincolnshire in support of the troops going ashore. It was not a long-range mission, just over the Channel and back. But he lost one of the four engines on his B-17 on take-off. […]

I was not surprised to emerge from the interior of my shoe-box apartment and see from the balcony that it is raining again here in the nation’s capital. It feels like London here, moist and chill and dark. It is another aseasonal aberration. It should be warm and coming up sunny. It is not, though […]

It is the anniversary of the Battle of Midway, the first Naval encounter fought entirely by airplanes between two fleets who never came within sight of one another. It was the beginning of the end for the Empire of the Sun, and at Stalingrad, Marshall von Paulus was about to surrender his 6th Army to […]

They are giving away amusement park rides out in Sterling, Virginia. I took them up on it this weekend, daring the rain to come and spoil it. I needed to indulge myself, put the wide world aside for a moment since the landscape of the world appears to be shifting, slumping into a new paradigm. […]

It cleared yesterday, the skies suddenly deep and blue and the clouds reverted to soft cotton balls instead of the pervasion damp wool that has blanketed us for a month. I had the top down on the car and the golf clubs at the ready. It is astonishing what a little sunshine can do for […]

Bob Hope is 100 years old today, he made it to the century mark and somewhere a lot of people are smiling. Elsewhere they aren’t and it looks like the 3rd Armored Cav is going to be sticking around Baghdad a little longer than planned. Another American was shot dead yesterday, and at this rate […]

I took a class in Geology back in college. It was a hard science requirement imposed on the lit students that I had to kill and it looked like an interesting way to do it. I was impressed by the atomic numbers of the elements, and looking through the microscope at thinly shaved pieces of […]

It had rained for four days. It rained on me in Washington and the stationary front hung like a great balloon tethered over the East Coast and it poured down on us in New York and Massachusetts and all the points between. Yesterday was Memorial Day yesterday all over America, but I went to Arlington […]

I’m up. My fingers don’t feel very agile this morning. My brain is a monolithic mass. I have put on something for breakfast. It is cloudy with a 60% chance of rain. It is 57, colder than it should be, and rain is likely for all the days of the weekend. We will be traveling, […]