President Truman was right about Washington when he said “if you need a friend, get a dog.” It was kind of a sore subject. The dog had ended his visitation with me and returned to life with the ex, whizzing away into the darkness. It was lonely in Big Pink with no one depending on […]

Deceased: August 31, 2006. Glenn Ford, laconic, soft-spoken actor who played leading roles in many westerns, melodramas and romantic films from the early 1940’s through the 60’s, died yesterday at his Beverly Hills home. He was 90. A laconic, soft-spoken actor with an easy smile, he played leading roles in many westerns, melodramas and romantic […]

I’m not depressed, though the atmosphere is. I’m actually feeling pretty good, all things considered. I am not going anywhere in the rain or the rising wind. The tropical depression that is the remnants of Hurricane Ernesto will be arriving at Big Pink through the rest of the day. The good people at the National […]

Black Cloud Back from the road, I was crashing through the correspondence on the computer and finally gave up. Too much information to process. Black clouds from the hurricane headed this way. Controversy over the war, and black clouds on the prognosis for peace. There was acrimony about how it was going, and why it […]

The Airbus-319 and I arrived at Dulles with an authoritative thud late in the afternoon. The tires gave a squeal that was audible in the passenger compartment, and I could feel the fuselage flex around me. �Navy pilot,� I thought, used to flying the steep glideslope into the controlled crash required to land on a […]

Kilos I am on vacation, which is to say that I do not have my media suite arrayed to properly pump the alarming news of the world direct into my cerebral cortex, of oblongata or whatever they call the place where the bad news goes for short-term retention. It doesn’t stay long, that is for […]

Oxygen I’m in the smoking lounge at a major airfield. I am watching the power drain on my idiotic company laptop. My company has been purchased by the French, and the people that make the laptops have been bought by the Chinese. I am a few time-zones away from where my travel cup of once […]

By nature, I am a bit of an alarmist. It was a tendancy aggravated by a career in the mayhem business. Sometimes I think I am getting over it. I would get more agitated about technology if I wasn’t employed by a company that peddles the stuff. Working makes time slow down. We are delivering […]

I was up early to see the world end as predicted by President Ahmadinejad. I was not early enough to see the dawn break over the Gulf; that would have meant not going to bed at all. I had the alarms set, though, so that if some wave of catastrophe were spreading west and east […]

Joe Rosenthal died yesterday, two days before the end of the world, which is scheduled by the Iranians for tomorrow. Joe was the guy who took the picture of the Marines raising Old Glory on top of Mount Suribachi on the volcanic Pacific island of Iwo Jima. He was 94 years of age, and didn’t […]