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 […]

Lions of Spring I hope to feel the warming breeze of Spring soon, wafting up from the Gulf across Texas and Louisiana and across the upper South. The President is headed down there today, to say “Howdy!” to the people in New Orleans and ask how they are doing. It is the deadline for filing […]

The Villa of the Mysteries I fell asleep in my brown chair by the window at Big Pink last night. I was reading a revisionist assessment of the art and architecture of buried Pompeii, the pretty little town on the shoulders of Mount Vesuvius that went to ashes in a single day in year 79 […]

The snow fell yesterday, a piddling amount by upper Midwest standards, but it still pole-axed the city. I expect it will melt soon enough, and this is actually just the mirth of the heavens, giving us this crappy white stuff when we should be looking around for the first daffodils to start poking up from […]