I am hooked on the television thriller �24� again. They aired another couple episodes of the new season last night. I went to bed with the image of a suit-case sized nuclear device being detonated in Los Angeles, someplace. It is just a small one, and I remember the technology from other times. The rest […]

I am perched on the balcony, looking quizzically at the sky. The jet stream is toying with Washington, crossing up and across from the Gulf. Meanwhile, there is something fierce and awful happening out west, arctic sub-zero in Colorado and freezing rain from Texas to Illinois, but there is nothing here but uncertain drizzle. Could […]

The Accidental Wilsonian I am a sucker for museums. I like ’em big, like the British Museum, or the Air and Space Museum. I like ’em found by the roadside, and exult in the tacky attractions that dot the old pre–interstate routes west across America. Best of all, I like the small and intimate museums […]

Resurrection I was deep in the Shenandoah Valley on a cold winter morning. I’d left Arlington in the dark, using a flashlight to see if there was coolant in the reservoir on the truck. As the sun came up behind me, the air assumed a crystalline clarity. Still and heavy, it would have been a […]

Back in Battery There is an old Naval phrase that has come to be part of my daily syntax. “Back in Battery” originally was an artillery term that described a gun that had completed its recoil cycle and was ready for firing again. Common usage now uses the phrase to mean ‘ready to go,’ or […]

The salmon was excellent, I must say, and the host was generous in filling my wineglass with an exuberant chardonnay. It led to one of those delightfully garrulous dinners of whimsy and history. I will not reveal the participants, since plausible deniability is one of the pleasant fictions that maintain this string of cartoon balloons […]

Late Night  My son got tickets to Late Night with David Letterman, and after a slightly odd family luncheon, we struck out to attend the Wednesday show with the twelve leading NASCAR Drivers, Viggo Mortenson, a Tatooed Lady and the rock band Daughtery.   I think the lead singer in the latter had been on […]

It was an eleven dollar cab ride from Mid-town down to South of Houston, under bright and sunny skies. Immediately after we exited the vehicle and walked in the door of the restaurant, the security guard stopped me. I had not picked up a yellow ticket. “Forgive me,” I said, slightly disoriented. “I am from […]

Aircraft carriers are not metaphors for failed policies. They are enormous aggregations of steel and brass and electrical cable. The ex-USS Intrepid, a carrier of the WWII Essex Class, is in trouble. Not only is it hard aground in the muck of the Hudson River, but it is being held up as an example of […]

There is a phrase in business that signifies when the dickering is over, and the deal on the table is the last one that is coming. “Is that your best and final?” “Yes, it is.” That is what Mother Nature gave us yesterday: the best and final day of a glorious autumn. Leaves of rust […]