The Persian I don’t know where your Realtor is from, but mine is a Persian woman of subtlety and dark beauty. I have had good luck with people from Persia, going back a way. My rugs are beautiful, and many of then are because my friend Farzhan got them to my attention at a good […]

End of Days As you know, I am not a believer, or not a true one, anyway. I do have fierce convictions, or did. I had to check lately, examining my political philosophy over the role of the State in the preservation of life, and of the Constitution, which I view as secular, but holy, […]

Closure I had at least one thing in common with Saddam this morning. We both got up in our underwear. But we changed the calculus in our relations. He once owned a hundred palaces and now he has only one concrete box. As of this morning, I am ahead. I have two. It had rained […]

Call for the Czar It took me a minute to recognize the dark, intense man with the deep voice in the middle of the table at the front of the room. I peered into the gloom. It was Frank Sesno, CNN Correspondent and Professor of Communications at George Mason University , and he moderated the […]

Applique I walked over to the Caucus Club from the Bus Station, headed for a Homeland Security luncheon with the outgoing Administrator of an Agency that had been extremely important until it was determined to be useless. It was the comfortable mid-Spring sort of day, cool, high clouds, and I had comfortable shoes on. It […]

Fine I am wrestling with what I might write this morning. There is material enough for several tales, tall and otherwise. Another enlisted woman was convicted  in the awful abuse scandal from the prison in Iraq , and it is a sign of the times that the most junior and the most senior of those punished […]

Eggs With That? I am not going to say anything about the date and the day. I do not believe in numerology, per se, although the hotels in which I stayed on the Western Coast last week failed to have a thirteenth floor. Someone out there takes this seriously, or at least enough to delete an […]

Gold Cup  I have my first discretionary day in a couple weeks this morning, which is to say that it is full but subject to change. It is Mother’s Day, after all. I got in Friday, late, having arisen that morning in Oakland , looking across the Bay at the fabulous towers of Baghdad-by-the-Golden Gate. […]

Bad Gas I was driving back from the National Lab tucked into the hills above the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. The rain had passed and the clouds had raised and the light was soft. Berzerkeley, we used to call it, because of the daily rioting over People’s Park, and the alliance of […]

Bay Bridge I’m looking out the window of the 21st floor of the Oakland Marriott. It is Cinco de Mayo, and election day in Britain, and they have rounded up another top al Qaida operative. I am far behind the world that lives in Greenwich Mean Time, or Eastern Standard, for that matter. All things […]