Gentle Readers, Vic will be traveling today, further and longer than I would like. It will be one sealed tube after another, hurtling from tri-graph to tri-graph: IAD to LAX to SYD and eventually into CAN. There, once arrived in the Antipodes, I am supposed to offer useful commentary on how a nation of twenty […]

The Battle of Midway, 4-7 June 1942, was still going on all those Junes ago, and two Junes later, on this day, the immense invasion of the Continent surged in steel and flesh across the Channel. The first was a halt to the long retreat. The second was the beginning of the end. A glass […]

Stress did it, maybe. I am partly paralyzed still, shooting pains radiating down the right side of my neck and into my shoulder. That and the change of season, and being outside and in the water. But how could the joyful, rhythmic motion through the chlorinated water, weightless, have caused this? It is counter-intuitive. Motion […]

SS General Sherman Getting out of bed took a concerted plan this morning. Everything is fine, south of the waterline, but the critical zone between shoulders and hair is partly frozen. A stiff neck is a polite term for it. Hot water may be part of the answer. Before trying that, I glanced through the […]

USS Pueblo at Pyongyang, DPRK Well, you ask, what does the strafing of the American intelligence collection ship by Israelis have to do with the opening of Korea to trade by the West? Is this anything that matters on a Saturday morning with the summer before us, ripe and filled with promise? We know that […]

It is the Queen’s Birthday here, which is to say that the land is in a festive mood, though it is not actually the Queen’s birthday, but an excellent three day weekend that has left Canberra deflated like a limp balloon.   That took me aback, a bit. The Queen actually turned eighty-one back on […]

The little church is around the corner of Madison Avenue, at E. 29th, just barely. When it was new, one hundred and fifty years ago, it was on the outskirts of the city with nothing but farmland and trees to the north. Now, of course, it is southern Mid Town Manhattan, and walking distance from […]

I was walking around on eggshells as the Peruvians sawed away merrily on holidays and during quiet hours, as established by Condominium Regulation. I remember living in base housing and having some old by-the-book-bastard call the Shore Patrol on you for infractions of the regulations. Like cutting the lawn before ten in the morning, or […]

AGI SSV-493 Balzam off Pearl Harbor 1983 The news this morning includes a fanciful tale from Moscow that runs like something from the Cold War. Allegations that former FSB agent Andrei Lugovoi whacked former Soviet KGB officer Litvenenko by means of nuclear poisoning has spiraled into a blather of obfuscation, which includes dark references to […]

Americans are famous for living in the moment. I am in one now, swilling coffee in my aerie high above the pool on the west end of Big Pink. I am dealing with the effects of a power surge from the big electrical storm that fried the amp on my home theatre system. I am […]