I hate the WalMart. Oh, maybe that is a little extreme for the emotions that the place provokes in my bosom. I have shopped in a couple of them, and once got a couple of money orders from one when I was in need last year with the local outlet of my bank closed on […]

The closest company- human company, that is, are the Russians next door, on the east side of the farm road. That probably accounts for my tendency to talk to the radio, or to the critters. I had been talking back to the radio about the jobs numbers for June released by the Bureau of Labor […]

My pal Jerry sings. It is not that he is a whistle-blower- that role is reserved for someone else in the Choral Arts Society, but this was his view from the riser where the choir sits of the big 4th of July celebration on the National Mall: He has been doing this for sixteen years, […]

I was talking to the mouse in the mailbox when I arrived at Refuge Farm. I had been contemplating the coup d’etat in Cairo and the Zimmerman trial in the predictably slower-than-normal pre-holiday flight of cars from the imperial city. I frankly do not know what to think about either, except that Mr. Zimmerman’s life […]

(Dreamscape. Image courtesy of Jamajurabaev. Rights reserved.) So, at one o’clock the barrage started as prelude for what has come to be known as Pickett’s Charge, 150 summers ago on the fields of Gettysburg. Day Three. It must have seemed like a dream, waiting to walk that mile into the guns and expecting to die. […]

The ghosts are legion in the fields around Culpeper, a long-suffering village that endured occupation by both armies in the first years of the war. The town hosted a couple hundred thousand troops from both sides over the winters of 1862-3 and 1863-64. Longstreet’s Corps wintered over in the vicinity of the hamlet of Winston, […]

(Natahsa’s first cauliflower of the season.) I stopped to talk to the Russians late in the afternoon in the forecourt of their 1910-vintage farmhouse. Bisquit the Wonder Spaniel had a new haircut for the Dog Days to come, and Sasha raced around from the front to bang the gong announcing a vistor. The skies could […]

It is not too soon in this muggy summer season to complete the gridiron disappointments to come. In that number, I naturally include my beloved Wolverines, the perennial disappointments of the Detroit Lions, and the abject failure of the Washington Redskins. Rather than a man in motion, it has been a decade for some, and […]

 no broken arrow, no broken fears. no broken sorrow. no broken years. each all gone at full strength. as the studied length of the day became its own measure of campaigning what was offered and gained, probing and writing history at every last step of the way, morning and night every day, laughing at […]

(General James Mattis, a tough Marine dismissed from his CENTCOM Command for his views on Iran. Photo AFP). “From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the […]