I hope that Leni Riefenstahl’s one hundred and first birthday was memorable. I hope there was a glass of champagne and several naps. She is the last one left, the last one who had a major role in how those awful decades played out, and she was a cog in the machine that casued so […]

East of the Allegheny Tunnel on the Pennsylvania Turnpike you return to the part of the Eastern Continental Divide that drains down into the Chesapeake Bay. I glanced down at the trip meter on the odometer. I was over a thousand miles on this trip. It started yesterday and I was beginning to think that […]

Bill Clinton turns 57 today. He used to be President of the United States, if you recall, a great big Teddy Bear of a guy. I miss him sometimes. I had a marvelous time yesterday at lunch, revisiting his time in the Oval Office. God it was fun. We were at The Tune Inn, a […]

WASHINGTON- I am scrolling through the New York Times on my laptop and listening to the BBC World Service. The eager beavers are already hard at work in the world across the time zones to the east, where the day has been in progress for some hours. As the sun rises here and the sky […]

Idi Amin Dada is dead, finally, at 78, or 80, depending on what you hear. He never knew precisely when he was born. But that is the way record keeping was for the subjects of the dying Empire. He had been on life-support since July 18. He suffered from high blood pressure and went into […]

It’s payday, and that is going to juice up the weekend. Money is energy sometimes. Ben Afflick has plenty of that. He is 31 today:filled with juice, young, movie-star good looks and blessed with millions to care about him. Julia Childs is 91. She still has enough juice to get by but not a lot […]

WASHINGTON-It was sixty-eight year ago on a day just like this on the banks of the Potomac- muggy, oppressive- that Japan unconditionally surrendered an empire taken by force and which they held for three years and 250 days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It had been three days since the incineration of Nagasaki. Washington […]

It is Atomic Week, a bunch of anniversaries which are passing almost without comment. We ought to remember. Today is the day that the Russians cooked-off their first Hydrogen device in 1953. They didn’t have rockets then that could reach across continents. We used bombers, flown by men. There are only 34 B-29 Superfortresses left. […]

Pied a terre is French, I think. Being an illiterate in multiple languages I always work in context and thought the phrase meant a “piece of earth.” Like you would have a “piece of earth” in town. That was close enough for Government work, but I was informed recently that it actually means “a foot […]

I saw Osama down at the pool yesterday. He was having a beer in a big red plastic cup and seems to be doing well. He was worried about a couple issues, though, and I offered to sponsor him for a Green Card. Not that Osama. I’m talking about the son of the Jordanian Army […]