I like dogs. I don’t happen to own one at the moment, which is a function of pure laziness on my part. I excuse myself by saying that I have been traveling too much, and that my life is too chaotic right at the moment to take on a responsibility of caring for another being. […]

Technician #0523266 It would be easy enough to slip into the breathless accounts of the latest war, or wars, depending on what you see and read. The Lebanon mess has trumped the news from Iraq, with thousands of ISF troops scouring the countryside for Hezballah rockets before the enforcement of a cease-fire. They say that […]

< class=”style2″>28 August 2006 Beer Call Times are hard for the Navy. The ground war in Iraq is drawing all the loose change from the Department of Defense. The Army is going to have to replace all its vehicles, out of schedule, and that is just one of the unforeseen costs of managing a determined […]

Ding Dong It is not time for dancing, not yet, but that is not stopping the people of Miami from stepping out. They are in the streets, in celebration of the moment the Wicked Witch is dead. Actually, power had been temporarily delegated to Uncle Fidel’s brother, Raoul, another of the perpetual Saints of the […]

Special English I first ran into Special English in East Africa. It is a dialect of our mother tongue, used mostly by the Voice of America to spread the message of truth and justice to those for whom English is not a first language. It is sort of elegant, once you get used to slowing […]

Tomorrow is the end of the month. I realized it when I got a command from the Credit Union to change passwords, not that they had been compromised or anything, just a prudent act. I complied, bubiously, and looking at the date of the transaction, realized that July is about in the dustbin and August […]

Little Kate I hate to say it, but Don Rumsfeld was right. He has been much maligned of late, but he has been absolutely correct. Not about what you would think immediately. I am thinking about what Thomas Pynchon called the rainbow of gravity in his marvelous and troubling novel that treated the legacy of […]

Epiphany The temperature was rising back toward normal in Washington, which is to say that cold front had passed away to the chill waters of the north Atlantic, and the warm, wet Gulf air was awirling back, damping the shirt between the shoulder blades. I was getting disoriented at the desk on the sixth floor […]

I heard about a troop of volunteers, who don greasepaint and travel to areas of the world with real needs to cheer up the kids. Give them a diversion from the crushing misery of daily reality. I assume there are big feet and honking horns. The organization calls itself “Clowns Without Borders.” I salute them, […]

Each day you do not learn something, you die a little. I was fortunate to learn several things before breakfast, which puts me on par with The White Queen in “Through the Looking Glass.” She had a conversation with the White Queen, a woman of extraordinary rendition who claimed to be “One hundred and one, […]