Gold Cup I’m in trouble this morning. It is my fault, and I dropped out of touch and off the net. I had a note which offered me free transportation and open bar at Great Meadow out in Loudoun County for the running of the Virginia Gold Cup. There was plenty of work stacked up […]

I’m whipped, but it is all self-inflicted and I am not going to whine about it. The show must go on, and amid the wreckage of a week on the road, the laundry and old dishes and dry house-plants, I have to make a series of go-no-go decision about the day. That is precisely the […]

View full size I tooled out of Chicago in a piece-of-crap Toyota Corolla, rented at the train station downtown. The Dan Ryan Expressway was being rebuilt again, and traffic was frozen in place between endless rows of Jersey barriers. No surprise, really, since the only time to work on the roads is when the frost […]

By seven I knew that there was little else to be known from the 35 th Floor. I had to be back down on the street, or I would assume the aspect of an angel, looking down at the mites that plied the concrete. I am no angel, and I went down to the streets […]

View full size This is starting off as a strange morning. It is May Day, of course, and a holiday for the last Communists down south. I am looking down at the Chicago River, the sun now nearly full up. I normally get up at 0445, whatever time zone it is and go through the […]

View full size I am in Chicago , on the 35 th floor of a proud tower on East Wacker Drive. The nice fellow at the desk gave me a complementary upgrade to a view of the Chicago River . To my right are the two circular towers that are familiar. Hollywood frequently uses the […]

28 April 2007 Snake Hill Road I just got back from Loudoun County’s horse country, where I was living the American Dream: I am thinking of re-inventing myself. I think I might change from urban dweller to country gentleman. I’m not on, of course, and never could be. I was an officer, by act of […]

Symbols Boris Yeltsin and David Halberstam left us yesterday, both in their mid-seventies. They had not much in common, except the proximity of their age, and the undeniable fact that they were among the best and brightest in their respective lines of work. Boris was a swaggering giant on the public stage, and David was […]

The Association How would you divvy up nearly seventy billion dollars? What would you spend it on if you had some of it? The Association wanted to help us know, and they threw one of their memorable conferences last week to provide a showcase of the leadership to talk about where things are going. For […]

Red Tie We spend an awful lot of money on intelligence, and we have been doing it for a long time. Granted, there have been times when there was more and less of it, but for the last five or six wars there has been plenty to accomplish wondrous and horrific things. I irritated some […]