They are closing AOCS, the Navy’s Aviation Officer Candidate School. It has been located at Pensacola, FL, anchoring the Redneck Riviera of the Gulf Coast since after World War Two. Under the provisions of the latest Base Reallocation and Closure round, the schoolhouse will be consolidated in Newport, Rhode Island, where the non-aviation officer pipeline […]

USS Wolverine and Lake Michigan Ore Carrier, 1944 I’m happy the North Koreans opened up their reactor to inspection, and I am a little dismayed that the Russians pulled out of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, though Congress had never gotten around to formally ratifying the treaty anyway. It seems like we have lived […]

The Great Pyramid at Giza, 1990 I don’t know if what is lurking in the freezer is any good or not. I could not look, while the event was happening. Instead, I spent the fruits of the latest 22-hour electrical outage caused by a major transformer fire here at Big Pink wandering through a marvelous […]

The moisture is beading up on the inside of the windows at Big Pink. The humidity is approaching a gazillion percent, and the atmosphere is pregnant with change, since as we approach saturation it is going to fall out. The people on the radio claim it is going to happen this afternoon. They being overly […]

OFF TO THE PYRAMIDS – THE BESIEGED TOURIST. A SKETCH BEFORE SHEPHERD’S HOTEL. March 6th,1875. ARTIST: Hennessey. The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of The Peabody Hotel and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg. The Peabody is the Paris Ritz, the Cairo Shepherd’s, the London Savoy of this section.   If you stand near its […]

Patrick Griffin, circa 1905 The obituary came to me in the mail the other day. It was the actual page from the obituary section of a long defunct publication that flourished in the sepia-toned decades of the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Confederate Veteran was published monthly from 1893 to 1932, […]

You remember the poem by Percy Shelly. It was in all the anthologies of English literature back in the day, and it still might be, if it has not been lost in the multi-cultural tidal wave. It would be a shame if it has. It has a cool rhyme scheme, and has a tag-line that […]

I rallied briefly on Monday to complete the paper for the Aussies, fresh off the airplane and running on fumes. The effort disrupted my body’s attempt to get back in this hemisphere. I sent it and then collapsed, barely coming out of the fog until this morning. I am not sure the travel is worth […]

The Dog is a more regular fellow than I. He was happy enough to se me just after Midnight, part of a complex canine maintenance plan that spanned two oceans and two continents. He knows nothing of jet lag, and was up again this morning just after six. He was in the dark at the […]

Gentle Readers, This is the last communication from Down Under. Winter to summer today, Canberra to Sydney, Sydney to LAX and then on to Dulles once the Immigration folks are done with me in LA. This has been painful but useful. It helps to calibrate one’s place in the universe (small, and mostly irrelevant). It […]