(Clockwise, Upper Left to Right: Jon-without avec pommes frites and his zeppelin-sized humanely raised, hormone-free slow cooked thinly sliced Steamer Round of Beef on Kate Jansen kemmelweck roll, garnished with deep-fried olives, fresh-grated horseradish and caramelized onions. The usual suspects. Pommes Frites with gravy. The long bar. Photos Socotra). Saturdays are hard- particularly the last […]

Sorry- I couldn’t resist using that phrase this morning. I ran across it when doing some research on the massive Allied force that landed in Normandy seventy years ago. There was so much to talk about then- the roundness of the number of the year and the diminishing number of the veterans who participated being […]

So, the usual suspects were gathered at the apex of the Amen Corner at Willow: Old Jim in the anchor chair, Chanteuse Mary flanking him, Jon-without and TLB looking radiant, me and New Steve on the distant end. There was also an assertive woman from the Refuge Department of F&W who insisted on talking across […]

(World Cup Football is not for herbivores. Photo Rueters). I as interested to discover that cannibalism is alive and well in the FIFA World Cup. I was sitting in a packed Willow yesterday afternoon around cocktail hour. Old Jim was clearly irritated by the crush of Fish & Wildlife people who kept bumping him as […]

There is tremendous good news this week. The United States Climate Reference Network is operational, and the folks who run it at the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. Actually, it has been operational since 2008. It is some of the better money the taxpayers have provided the climate community. It is is a network of […]

I arrived at the Farm without a story- or rather, the knowledge that I had chores to do, which is the very stuff of life, but unremarkable, given the dimensions of the challenges we confront overseas and here at home. So I decided to ignore them and got out of the Emerald City early and […]

(The “spellbinding mock history of the Department of Agriculture’s most secretive and vital agency.” A novel by Jim Geraghty. Photo Amazon). I was looking around for a trash book to read after I pounded down the Monster Hunter’s International series earlier this month. I have a stack of great suggestions from my reading pals- but […]

(Krispy Kreme-brand hybrid grass flip flops. They help to lower temperatures by creating organic sinks for carbon dioxide and permit the top of the wearer’s feet to tan naturally and evenly). All the needles were pegged this morning. I had to turn the news-and-weather-on-the-eights streaming off the computer. Even the news that I was not […]

There is a derecho of sorts sweeping through the world, knocking the old order aside and leaving some astonishing wreckage in its wake. As part of that, I wanted to make a couple corrections. An alert reader tried the Bloody Mary recipe from 02 January of this year. I don’t know why it took that […]

(Noted Islamist Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in a screen capture from ya Libnan.) This is about as bad as it gets. A pal with a nose for how things are going- he was a senior intelligence officer in the Emirates a while back and understands the regional alignment- is conceding what we knew as Iraq […]