The Aristocrats It was almost too hot to sit by the pool yesterday. I think it is the first heat alert of the year. The heat index will be over 100 degrees through today and into tomorrow. I am praying that the air conditioning keeps working. If it doesn’t, I am going to have to […]

TW3 There was a marvelous television show that aired when dinosaurs ruled the world. It was a sort of faux news show collided with the black-out humor of Ernie Kovaks. They called it “That Was the Week That Was.” It was fairly popular, and became known as TW3. This week could qualify for that. I […]

Quick Silver I remember when the thermometer broke when I was a kid. There was a thin column of quicksilver, mercury, which transformed into several astonishing spheres on the counter. It was magical stuff. Pure mercury is a liquid metal, an element all its own, linked to the Messenger God of classical times. Swift as […]

Bones In my dream I was down on the wreck. The current was not so bad, and I could make out the long gray outline of the submarine. The conning tower was broken off and one of the two periscopes was extended. The root of it was somewhere in the inky shadow that covered the […]

Home The notion of Home is something quite dear, and one we all share. I am delighted to be home, for a number of reasons, though I must write it with a small “h.” Perhaps it was the notion of staying in the airport at Traverse City , or huddled on a bench in the […]

The North always holds the winter to it, even at the height of the summer season. The flowers are fragile, and the cinder block buildings from the time before the construction boom still hint of a drift of old snow around the corner. The new buildings are jolly enough, and that lends a frantic life […]

The bombings are still fresh. They say that not all the dead may have been discovered and brought home yet. It is dark down in the transit network, some of it new when Victoria mourned her lost Albert. I ache for London, that grand old city. Some of the bombs went off in the same […]

Bring It On So, I was thrashing around this morning, almost as soon as my eyes opened. The alarm jolted me, and it hurt. I realized I would be getting up even earlier to catch a plane tomorrow. I thought about the Relationship, and I thought about the move, and in the darkness my eyes […]

Liberal Portions The last time I saw Vice Adm. James B. Stockdale was in the Class Six liquor store across the street from our hacienda-style house in Coronado . It must have been nine years ago, in 1996, or maybe early 1997, just before we left the village. The house we lived in was a […]

Best Tan I had a bunch of stuff to do yesterday, and only got to part of it. I pounded on some job applications in the morning, and some stuff for the radio until after lunch. The sun was out, and the humidity was low, and finally I couldn’t take it any more. I was […]