(The Fence)   With the battle raging in Gaza, it is hard not to think of fences, and intractable problems and sorrow. There is no solution I am aware of to that situation, except that we are tethered to the problem by history as surely as the Palestinians and Israelis are shackled to it by […]

(Lawrence Olivier as Richard V- 1944)   If I had to go somewhere this morning- and I do- it would be in a police cruiser, rather than slogging across a vast cold field of mud. Even in the back of a squadcar would be preferable, in a pinch.   It is cold but not to […]

(LT James Panetta, USNR with VADM Dan Olver, USN-Ret. Photo by Vern Fisher, Monetery Herald)   I was busy enough that the news seeped into my consciousness. I was juggling two e-mail streams, the personal one and the business one. The latter was kicking my butt, since there are five task orders to deal with […]

  (Bill and the President Elect in happier times. Photo copyright NYT)   It seemed simple enough- if you want to get a seat at the table, or maybe some preferential treatment, all you have to do is grease the right palm. We are taught about it in our annual compliance training, one of the […]

(Ana Belen Montes, True Believer)   From the Urban Dictionary:   1. denile  (noun) The next-best alternative when someone can’t spell “denial”. 2. denile (noun) Not a river in Egypt, e.g., When a person denies a proven fact, you just say to him: denile is not a river in Egypt!   I find myself having to climb out of […]

(Pacific Ocean Shoulder Patch) It is almost like yesterday, with old times new once more. I don’t mean literally, since yesterday was thoroughly mundane, and filled only with the regret that the buzz-saw of business will start again on Monday.   It is about older times, and they are not forgotten. The ships met in […]

There it is. I have written those numbers for the first time as fact, not fiction, and it is new and falls off the fingers with a slight hesitation. It has been in the box under the tree for so long that we feel a little guilty to put it on, stretching it over our […]

(4.6 Liter V8 P-71 Package)   I don’t know about you- I am going green and all that, even though I don’t think we have a choice in the matter. It is going to mean saying good-bye to a lot of things, just as we are going to say farewell to the poor battered old […]

(Chinese Helicopter comes aboard DDG-169 Wuhan, Indian Ocean- China Daily news, photo by Xinhuanet)   We have got this poor bedraggled year by the short hairs, we do. One more day for tax purposes, three weeks to the Big Change, and end of the Long Goodbye to Mr. Bush.   There are stirrings out there in […]

(The Makeshift Memorial)   It has been more than seven years since United Airlines Flight 93 went into the ground on the south-central plateau of Pennsylvania. There is no formal monument at the petered-out strip mine where it crashed. It is lot closer to one of those home-made highway memorials. The reclaimed soil is covered […]