The birds are singing this morning and my door is wide open, where the 7th Day Adventists might look in. Like the birds, the religious proselytizers are out.   I saw two earnest young Latter Day Saints bicycling down Pershing Street the other day, headed for an objective on their two-year Mission for the […]

Rebel troops opposed to Premier Fidel Castro landed before dawn on the swampy southern coast of Las Villas Province in Cuba on April 18, 1962.   There was no good reporting of the action. Intelligence was a cruder and more personal business in those days. After daylight was gone, Premier Castro issued a brief statement […]

  It is the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs and I have finally got around to wondering what is up with the Red Wings, my erstwhile hometown team.   I have a vague fondness for the old hockey clubs from the Golden Years in the snowbound northeastern corner of the country. The National Hockey […]

  Paul Wolfowitz was out in Korea last year, taking a look around for his Boos, Don Rumsfled. Paul is the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defense, the number two official, and a very smart guy.   Some think he hs been a little preoccupied with Iraq, and has been since the first Gulf […]

  There is a marvelous confection of fried dough called the Krispy Kreme. Perhaps you have seen the green and white boxes. The yeast-risen sugar-glazed snack comes in dozens, and some places they are ubiquitous as Girl Scout Cookies. They sell them by the dozen in bright green boxes to raise funds for neighborhood organizations. […]

  In order to get a boatload of bucks, I said “yes” to an aggressive technology company that wants my services.   But that means I have to quit my current job. I went to the office yesterday and typed out a contrite resignation and slipped it under the door of my erstwhile boss. He […]

  War Department, Washington, D.C., April 9, 1865- 10 o’clock P.M.   Ordered: that a salute of two hundred guns be fired at the headquarters of every army and department, and at every post and arsenal in the United States, and at the Military Academy at West Point on the day of the receipt of […]

  By the time I finally got to the Hot Box at the end of the day I was not at my best.   It was business and I hate doing business after dinner. Normally my day would be done. I had been up early and writing frantically, traveling to the Arctic in my mind, […]

It is ten years since the genocide began in the heat of Rwanda. The generals are muttering about sending more troops to Iraq, just for a while, just to settle things down in Falluja. I feel sometimes that we are traveling in a pasty gray winter of the soul. The University of Connecticut won the […]

I came home for lunch yesterday, an unusual luxury. My little place was almost equidistant from the Agency where I had an early appointment and the office. It was also almost a direct line past the Department of Motor Vehicles on Four Mile Run, so I took advantage of the middle of the working day […]