Let’s put it this way:  a day always starts off a good one when it takes me this long to get around to the blog. The blog is always what I do last, after I do the work somebody is going to pay me for, and when that work gets difficult and conflicted, I tend…

So here we are again, at my local news, because over the week-end we had something of a story. Around about Sunday, a couple of hikers came across a vehicle obviously abandoned on the side of a popular hiking trail.  What’s more, the vehicle stank to high heaven, and the stink was–well, the hikers thought…

For something like the  last five days, while most of the rest of the world has been worrying about royal babies and George Zimmerman playing Good Samaritan and I don’t know what else, I’ve been following a story about a Norwegian woman who was arrested in Dubai for having “illegal sex” after she called the…

Not all the books I’ve been unearthing in my office have been light and shiny ones like the one on Piero della Francesca I talked about yesterday.  I read a lot of books about policy, and some of those have come to the surface, too. One of those is a thing called The Tower of…

Every once in a while, I have thi s fantasy that I will one day be able to establish a personal schedule that will never have to change.  Part of that schedule would be what I think of as Sacrosanct Sunday Mornings, a time when I would have to do absolutely nothing but listen to…

I thought about starting this blog post by pointing out that what we usual call a True Believer is much more likely to be a Sadist than a Masochist. But I think that, right now, I’m going to take that as read, and go back to Socrates, or at least the Socrates of our imagination.…

So, it’s just past the middle of July, and my left eye has done its usual trick for the summer.  I don’t know what it is, but I get some kind of allergic reaction thing in it.  I would go into the details, but they get fairly disgusting, so just leave it at the fact…

From my sophomore year, I attended a private Catholic girls school some  miles from my home.  It was a place run by nuns still in full habit (the “change” wouldn’t come until graduation week my senior year) and filled with girls who were trying to be good. I can remember how odd I thought that…

Okay, I’m going to try something of a tricky maneuver here.  It’s tricky mostly because I want to start in what is probably going to seem like left field, make an enormous loop around a couple of millennia of history, and end up–well, we’ll end up where we end up. Let’s start with this         …

The title of t his post is also the title of a very good book by Scott Turow, and I personally think you should all go read it if you haven’t yet.  It’s good enough so that I read it, in spite of the fact that it’s a novel about somebody falsely accused, which is…