A detour on my Venus Mons Iliad Among other duties as assigned — of which liquor-board members always found plenty for me — I was sent to represent them on a committee appointed by the director of traffic safety, comprised of alcohol therapists, government lobbyists, highway cops, even a judge…

Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel: We are the sum of all the moments in our lives — all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape it or conceal it…Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every…

The glossy hunting catalogs of this still-new century are full of pages touting the wonder of German optics. Clarity! Precision! Workmanship! I’m sure glossy catalogs for yachtsmen and bird watchers and private eyes contain the same spiel. Binoculars, for instance — you can, with perfect fidelity, observe which Dall sheep…

“For months we have been making triumphant retreats before a demoralized enemy who is advancing in utter disorder.” No, this isn’t a direct quote from Vladimir Putin’s 2022 Victory Day Speech. But it sure captures the gist. Televised images of the ex-KGB megalomaniac — and the dour expressions of massed Russian brass hats around him in Red Square — seem tailor-made to the sardonic quote. Author was Eric…

Fall from grace: to lose favor, be discredited; in theology, relapse into sin. — Dictionary.Com To give in to temptation; to suffer a moral lapse. — The Free Dictionary Chapter 37: Fall from Grace She sat in her large luxurious champagne-colored van in the hotel parking lot, eye-level with me standing outside. An unlikelier ride…

It’s a strange old world I have lived to see. Coming up on my 79th birthday — unless something intervenes, and Fate always is watching — I am largely inactive, mostly housebound, and too-often bedridden. My mental faculties remain more or less intact, so the internet gives me a window…

Given the hideous brutality of the Russian assault on the steel works in this martyred Ukraine city, the end seems near. The world sits back and watches. No Dunkirk evacuation of defenders by small boats defying Nazi airpower. We have relinquished the Black Sea to the Commies. (Putin still is…

My daily news scroll was arrested by the following headline”: Missing Alabama inmate, corrections officer had ‘special relationship’: Sheriff Now I used to write headlines for a living and that would never have made it past the slot man; too damn long and confusing. But social media is sloppier. The…

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been regarded as fact. — Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast Going off the reservation. Present participle.(Literally)to leave a reservation to…