I was not crawling deliberately through the trench-line. I got on my knees from mischance, foot slipping on the accumulated leaves of the new century. I would definitely have preferred to walk upright, as they did after they dug these fortifications. They would not have recognized what remains, even if they could find it. This […]

Principles of Accounting Duchess of Richmond: …this year, soldiers are the fashion. Duke of Wellington: [ironically] Where would society be without my boys? The Duke of Wellington was the Man of the Peninsular War, before he beat Bonaparte for the last time and became Man of the Age. I have been in his house, and […]

We are approaching a watershed moment. I am not talking about March madness, or at least not precisely. The basketball tournament will carry is from the last of winter almost to the Cherry Blossom Festival on the Tidal Basin. My son puts it more elegantly, saying that you crack that first beer and the next […]

Great Wave The man on the radio says the skunk cabbage is beginning to blossom on the banks of the Bull Run out on the old battlefield at Manassas. Maybe Spring will come after all. The cold makes me long for travel, and for distant shores. I’m a China fan, and always have been. I […]

Too Big To Hide You will forgive me, or not, that I am longing for warmth and a warm breeze from the Gulf. I had the chill of the security apparatus wash over me yesterday with flurries of snow. A twenty-something special agent came to visit me at the frigid poolside unit at Big Pink […]

The news of Scooter Libby’s conviction came as I navigated down the Palisades Parkway on the western bank of the Hudson River, headed for the City. If I complain about Washington too often, slap me. The infrastructure is older in New York, and there are many more important people there hurtling over it. I listened […]

Thin Client I’m doing an information technology symposium intended for people old enough to know better at a plush campus on the Hudson above New York. It is frigid cold, and I was not ready for it. In the back of my mind I must have thought that the back of the winter had been […]

A Certain Chill I have been in and out of consciousness for the last eighteen hours or so. I don’t get sick often, but when I do, it is a doozy. I got the trial run-through for death two years ago. It was everything right up to the last rattle, and it was quite a […]

The Arlington Civitans put on the swap meet the first Saturday of the month. It is a Red Letter day on my calendar, which I do a year in advance with my trusty Sharpie-brand laundry marker. I don’t know any Civitans personally. They are a species of public-minded people who donate this one Saturday a […]

Social Security I was reading about the markets this morning, listening to the rain beating hypnotically on the window. I turned to Paul Krugman’s column in the Times. He explained how the stock market was going to fall apart. Funny, I thought, I never worried about it when I had nothing invested and a steady […]