There was a genuinely demented man around the corner from the uniform store at the corner of 11th and New York Ave. I separate the genuine from the artificial for the practical reason of personal safety, or at least unexpected dry-cleaning expenses. This man was just around the corner from the Greek property on I […]

For Official Use Only   The bad news is that they are coming back. They will be here in September, and I think we can expect a brief respite over Labor Day, but they are going to be here in earnest come the second week of the ninth month. H.L. Menken said one time that […]

  I was talking to a freind and just saw the closed caption under his boyish beaming visage. Accordingly, I was able to judge the words and not the rhetoric while matching it to his facial movements.   It was a pretty wild ride through the evening. There is no question that Al Sharpton brought his […]

  I am not an equestrian. It doesn’t make me a bad person. I am just a suburban kid who didn’t often run into the species who has faithfully carried us for millennia. There is a troika in the history of Man, and it involves the human and the horse and the dog.   We […]

  It has been a long time since I worked someplace that invited me to wander aimlessly at lunch.   When I worked at the Pentagon, I ran, but to run anywhere interesting you were a sweaty mess when you got there. I tried running to some of the historic places in the district, across […]

  The word is that the U.S. is starting the long pull-out from South Korea.   It is about time, I thought, and ordered a glass of the house Chardonnay. We have left most of the cool places in Asia. It is an appropriate time to give back Camp Red Cloud under the long range […]

  It is well and truly summer now. Sweat is rolling down my torso and the fan is roaring, vainly trying to shred the humid air.    ï¿½Sixteenth today it is,” thought Leopold Bloom in 1904, or at least bespeckled James Joyce would have us believe that he did. One century ago a young Joyce […]

  I am confronted by the prospect that I must work five consecutive days in a row.   I am filled with horror at the prospect. The diversions are all gone. I think I have to be in New Jersey toward the end of the week, which means travel and work. There is not enough […]

  We were picking through the plastic bags, trying to sort out whose groceries were whose. There was a report of a car bomb in Baghdad, and the assassination of another government minister. The former wouldn’t have blipped the scope on the daily violence here in the capital, except for the implications of the latter. […]

  It was the second day of the Weekend of National Mourning for President Reagan.   I was exhausted from hauling the golf-bag with my son over the Old Course in solemn commemoration. He is now a government employee, of a sort, an intern at my old agency. Since we were now both at enforced […]