I am up, it is just after six. Someone has fired three rockets at the al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, no reported casualties, and the crazy Burmese have returned Nobel laureate Aun San Suu Chi to her home from the hospital where she had been confined for three months following a gynecologic procedure. I have […]

The world continues its fine muddle this morning. Diplomats are talking, bureaucrats are leaking, the ship of state plows on. California is continuing the freak show of a recall election, I read an article with Arnold, the Tyrolean tyro, trying to buff his credentials as a warm human being, presumably to prop up his poll […]

“Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest, Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight, Walk round about an oak, with great ragg’d horns; And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle, And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain In a most hideous and dreadful manner. You have heard of such a […]

Big Pink surrendered to the storm before it even got here, literally without firing a shot in self-defense. I don�t know if it was a tree somewhere else or what. But right around four in the afternoon the lights flickered and then came back, flickered once more and then died for the rest of the […]

Forecasters with the National Hurricane Center say that Isabel’s speed has increased as she comes to us, now moving at 12 knots, and will continue at this pace as she comes ashore. She will arrive in North Carolina with sustained maximum winds of 105 miles an hour. Because of Isabel’s motion, the worst of the […]

There was a story, it flickered in my mind in the darkness. I must have hit the alram and turned on the radio because there were British voices in the background passing an hour of half-consciousness. There is a new candidate in the Democratic Presidential race and Seattle voters have rejected a ten cent tax […]

I got up this morning to see what is up with Isabel, the giant storm that is bearing down on Cape Hatteras. I was gratified that it has weakened to Force Three, but it is nearing. They say she is more disorganized and top winds are down to 115 miles an hour. But that is […]

It is the Ides of September, by Roman tradition the marker from which the month is measured, forward and back. It is the 258th day of 2003 an there are 107 days left to go. For me, it is the day after the Big Pink’s pool closed. For the second consecutive year I claim the […]

OK, it’s the thirteenth and it is time to get over it for this year, let the memories recede and bury them till it is time to rip the scab off again next year. But I found myself in a funk last night, frozen in a capsule of travel time and the fumes of recall […]

The retired admiral from Naperville asked us to wear whites for the dedication of the monument to the dead. I’m fully and finally retired, I said, and Mark is just about offical, too. He said it was appropriate and fitting and it was completely appropriate. He had been retired for eighteen years and he was […]