I was in motion, on foot and by train. I was not paying much attention to Barry Bonds and his quest to pass Babe Ruth on the home run list. I was pointedly not thinking about the reason the long holiday weekend had been created.  I decided to reserve my thoughts for the Lost and […]

SOX I heard the word in the afternoon, sometime before the two o’clock meeting on Security. The jury in Texas convicted Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay on all counts in the Enron melt-down. I was happy to hear it. They were thorough-going bastards. There had been a book about the Enron management team. “The Smartest […]

Hoffa Cupcakes The consensus is hardening. Al Gore was right all along. Global Warming is a reality, and even old curmudgeons like myself are climbing on the Green Bandwagon, just as the cost of oil is making it possible for private entrepreneurs to proliferate technologies that could save us. Columnist Thomas Freidman thinks that there […]

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The Boys are pretty amazing. I remember when they were small, and even before they were around at all. Now they are tall lean creatures with their own lives and opinions. They were flipping up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. in the upper unit at Big Pink.  I almost said �dialing,� which is absurd, since […]

Chamber of Commerce So, this was like a WAY weird week… I got dragged into a Federal court, not on charges, thank God, I couldn’t afford a lawyer right now with the company on the ropes…and I am so behind on the e-mail that I feel like I am drowning….I opened one from a buddy […]

I knew it before I reported. I am terminally male, and a white one at that. I am not a good pick to be  member of a jury. I am crippled by my career, which was spent in the intelligence world. No defense attorney in his right mind would put me on a jury. But […]

Prisoners Prisoner Montoya was in the courtroom when fifty prospective jurors filed into Courtroom 600, on the 6th floor of the Albert V. Bryan Federal Courthouse in Alexandria. I was surprised at that. But I confess that I was surprised at just about every step in the process that had brought us together. There were […]

I am commanded to report to room 302 in the Federal Court for the Eastern District of Virginia this morning, not later than 0845. There is no place to park, they say, and recommend public transit to arrive. I have an alternative to my civic duty, which is a $100 fine or three days in […]

The National Guard It eluded me last week, the significance of the stories in the press that indicated they are calling the National Guard home from Iraq. In 2004, the Guard and mobilized reserves were over half the fighting force on the ground there. Army sources indicated the Guard would largely be phased out of […]