USS Noa (DD-841)   I met my son and some of his pals at the Army-Navy Country Club yesterday afternoon. I don’t use the Club very much these days, and am a “member absent” by formal classification. I use  the Culpeper dacha as my primary address since the knees started to go south, and the […]

1 Rex Rectanus is coming to Arlington today, but he will have to wait his turn. That is the way of the Government cemetery here, and we are all used to standing in line.   I told you that I would tell you the story of how I came to call Rex a pal- but […]

  I have the official photo and the bio. I have formatted them, and placed them in the archive for publication in the Spring, when I lurch again into the hard copy of the Quarterly. A version is posted to the web portal.   The date has been set for the interment, and it is […]

Let’s put aside the great issues of the day for a moment, shall we, and take a look at something that is going to bite on the ass real quick if something doesn’t happen.   There are a lot of distractions. The President accepted the Nobel Peace Price as a down payment on what he […]

Everybody talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.   That is the old saw, and it reflects a certain resignation to the enormity of our mother planet and her capricious ways. There are eighteen-foot drifts of snow in Iowa, and I imagine they will be doing more than muttering about it […]

I am feeling drained of energy this morning. The sheer number of business proposals we are working now has got out of hand.   I was sitting in a large conference room yesterday, being forced to operate a virtual office via my briefcase and lap-top to demonstrate commitment to the commercial enterprise, which trying frantically […]

(Copenhagen Poster Child) We took one right on the chin on that Sunday, sixty-eight years ago. There are not many who have it in living memory. The ranks thin each year. My pal the Admiral arrived in Pearl in the first week of February of 1942, and the evidence of the catastrophe was still littered […]

(Coming from Copenhagen in the Medieval Warm Period)   Thank God for the New York Times. Without their editorial page I would not know what I was supposed to think, and hence, what I ought to take with a hefty leavening of sea-salt, or just shoot on sight.   I will get to what chorus […]

(The Bridge at Broad Run) It is finally here, the white stuff. Out of sight, out of mind for nearly a year, but it is alling heavy in wet sheets outside the windows of the little farmhouse. There is a travel advisory but I have to travel anyway. I am at the farm, since there […]

(Major General J.E.B. Stuart, CSA) Sic transit Gloria mundi. “Thus passes the glory of the world,” is the formal Latin translation, but it is subject to interpretation by people who know more than just what the words say, strung out in a line.   It can also be read, contextually, as “Worldly things are fleeting,” […]