People who live in the high latitudes are a little nuts in the summer. The daylight hours peak in June, and the stimulation of all that sun and warmth upon the Northern brain is almost overwhelming. I knew people who lived in Nome, Alaska, and they said they thought nothing of cutting the grass before […]

I got a note on the box yesterday after wandering in from a volunteer Board Meeting. My participation had required getting up far too early on a lovely Saturday, and driving across the District to the Maryland border to a volunteer Board meeting. The area used to be a slum, but is blossoming with new […]

I had dinner with the Admiral last night at a nice place out in Great Falls. We drove out the Dulles Access Road, antiseptic as it slashes through the glass boxed operating units of the defense contractors. We bailed out just past the toll plaza and took Route 7, which is an old road that […]

The jury did not take long to convict Mr. Jose Padilla in Miami. One of the jurors delivered her opinion on the matter in Spanish, her preferred language, which ends the long legal limbo of the Brooklyn-born jihadi who the government said wanted to vaporize Chicago. It seems that the American mortgage melt-down rattling the […]

Have you been to Graceland? Do you have the ability to open your heart to the King? It is thirty years today that Elvis left the building for the last time, and there is a legion of fans holding candles in front of the gates to The Mansion. Over a thousand Elvis impersonators are coming […]

Truck bombs killed the Yazidis in northern Iraq this morning. Sunni men are responsible, apparently, some sort of revenge for an internet video of a local woman being stoned. It is supposed to be pretty vicious. Her crime was dating a co-religionist of the bombers, and naturally the response was to blow to tiny bits […]

There are problems with the Shuttle, broken tiles again, the thing that killed the crew of Columbia. The people in Utah are talking about drilling a third shaft 1600 feet into the rock to look for the lost miners, though sadly it appears a remote hope. In town, the word has spread that Karl Rove, […]

Edwina’s husband Dickie was a hero of the Empire. He was born three years after his great grandmother Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the year before her passing, and thus appeared at the zenith of the greatest common aggregation of peoples the world has ever known. He was a catch when he grew to manhood. The family […]

I am not panicking this morning, though financial matters of both tactical and strategic levels woke me early. I was comforted by the massive infusion of cash into the markets by the Federal Reserve. Still, being uncomfortably alert so long before breakfast, like Louis Carroll, I was prepared to believe at least three impossible things. […]

I already made a resolution to stay out of mines. The stories from Utah about the men lost 1,400 feet below the surface in the darkness give me the creeps when I think about all that rock overhead, like being in the crypt of the Great Pyramid. I am trying to stay away from bridges, […]