Friday the Thirteenth It’s a day people look out for. Filled with symbolism. Make plans cautiously. I am not talking about the gusting wind, which could reach 40 knots, nor the rain that will make the Beltway slick. I am just happy it is not snowing. Some folks reach far back in our ancestral memory […]

Slaughterhouse Five So it goes. Kurt Vonnegut is dead at 84. It is an appropriately gray day in Washington to hear the news that the author of “Slaughterhouse Five” has left us. I have the book on my desk right now. It is a fancy edition form the Folio Society, on acid-free paper and a […]

If you are going to get anything done in Washington, you need someone important to cover your actions. Power is too widely dispersed, which was the brilliance of the founders. They knew that inaction on the part of the government was, generally speaking, better than a rash that act that would alter the constitutional separation […]

Death and Dishonor Tehran, 1979 There is death, of course, which is the Great Democrat and comes to us all in time. There is also dishonor, which is an increasingly tenuous term in the age of Britney and Paris and Kevin Federline, or whatever his name is. Fame of any sort seems to pay the […]

You know the feeling. You are driving down I-95, the dreary part of the multi-lane slab near Fort Meade. Some moron is blocking the fast lane, creeping past traffic. There are seven lanes of concrete going this way toward the imperial city, and he has to be in this one. Your sleek imported chariot is […]

Woman’s Work Detail of the Woman’s Memorial at Gettysburg I stared in disbelief at the white stuff falling from the sky this morning. It cannot be real. I washed my car this week, and most of the salt has been washed off the pavement. It is corrosive stuff, and eats the vehicles alive. I had […]

The cold is back, bitter and ironic, and the shutters rattle on the windows from the chill leaking in the windows at Big Pink. It is a broken promise of Spring, cold enough to snow, if there was enough moisture. This blast out of Canada is dry, though, and only shakes the bows heavy with […]

It is a relief that this part of the crisis has been defused. President Ahmedinejad was magnanimous in handing back the captured sailors and Royal Marines as �a gift to the British People.� He has a lot of style, the President does. He made the surprise announcement yesterday at the end of one of the […]

Based on an interview with Vic Socotra, great-great nephew of Patrick Griffin. Genealogical information was compiled by Barbara Foley Nakaska in 1963. She was Patrick’s great-niece,  and  heard the stories first hand. The old Irish Confederate- 1905 Patrick Martin Griffin, one of the most colorful figures to have fought in the Battle of Raymond, was […]

They’re Back I had a rental car in New York last month, and the nice lady at Hertz did not have the stripped-down model I reserved in accordance with company policy. She kindly gave me one equipped with a GPS receiver mounted on a stalk that protruded like an alien from the console in the […]