"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
In the news
Polly’s home with her boyfriend in Ajo and Angie’s back in Tampa. I should be rushing to catch up with bloggage and book reviews, but my thoughts are random and disorganized. I’m leaving on a five-day motorcycle trip Thursday; maybe I’ll get back in the groove once I get some miles under my belt. Anent the motorcycle trip, […]
Do even white people trust the police any more? What should I do if a cop wants me to pull over? Try to keep rolling until I can stop in an area where there are witnesses, hoping someone will take a cell phone video in case things go sideways? Is the cop going to tase me if I don’t bow and scrape? Do I have […]
I started learning and collecting bawdy songs when I was in the Air Force; every fighter squadron I flew with had an unofficial songbook (that’s one of my old squadron songbooks on the left). Midway through my USAF career I started running with the Hash House Harriers, who, like rugby players and fighter pilots, share a love […]
I don’t have any brilliant thoughts or insights about Germanwings Flight 9525, where the co-pilot is suspected of committing mass murder by flying a plane full of passengers into a mountain in the Swiss Alps. I’m sad and shocked, of course, that any pilot would do such a thing. I’ve always considered military and commercial flying a profession; […]
The Nut Tree was a landmark of my younger days in California. In my last year of high school and first year of college, my friends and I expressed our newly-found independence and adulthood by driving from Sacramento to San Francisco on weekends. The Nut Tree, just off the freeway south of Sacramento, was a mandatory coffee stop. That […]
Donna and I leave tomorrow on a road trip to a for-now classified destination. If we don’t have internet access where we’re going, you’ll hear from us later next week, when we get back. Meanwhile, those of you who suffer my rants on Facebook will enjoy a few days of peace. I try not to […]
Institutionally, the military services have never forgotten the crippling constraints imposed upon the conduct of the air war in Vietnam: Target lists were reviewed at the White House in the informal atmosphere of the Tuesday lunch, attended principally by President Johnson, his press secretary, the Secretaries of State and Defense, and the President’s special assistant for national […]
I am the Nancy Grace of celebrity plane wrecks. When I saw the first photos of actor Harrison Ford’s crashed airplane on the golf course in Santa Monica, I immediately zeroed in on the propeller. Probably only someone trained as an aircraft accident investigator would do that. I am such a someone, and that is what […]