A DAY WITH THE DEAD
My friend Paul Buckhout invited me to tour Brooklyn’s venerable Green-Wood Cemetery with him. How could I say no?
SEPTEMBER BASEBALL!
Thanks to my pal David Jensen, I got to attend the Yanks-Mets game at Citi Field last Sunday night. What a lot of fun we had! The night was perfect, the seats were great, and the crowd was congenial. What we ended up seeing was in game in two parts: sic innings of a tight …
HAMPSHIRE HOLIDAY
Thanks to the religious devotion of our Jewish brethren, Ginny had off four days in a row, so we headed off to New Hampshire for a scenic-historical holiday. On Day One, we saw some aging, full-of-character industrial cities: funky Nashua, where we ate at a very nice Irish pub and saw their august Civil War …
THE BUCKET LIST
By the way, I have the cover story in Smithsonian this month, “The 21st Century Life List.” It was great fun to write and a pleasure to learn about these amazing places. “It crackles with energy,” the Los Angeles Times kindly says. The photographs are breathtaking.
MAKING NEWS IN NEWPORT
I had a great time yesterday speaking to about 25 or 30 very knowledgable and attentive people about Commander Will Cushing at the Naval War College in beautiful, humid Newport RI. John Kennedy of the museum was a terrific host, and he and his colleagues brought out this wonderful folk art painting of Cushing for …
LOOKOUT
Last Thursday Ginny and I visited Kykuit, the spectacular, art-stuffed Rockefeller residence in Pocantico Hills. High on a hill above the Hudson–Kykuit is a Dutch name for lookout–the 1913 house is an amazing combination of Gilded Age splendor muted by the Baptist reticence of its first builder and resident John D. Rockefeller, then adorned first …
CIMSEC-REENING
Last Wednesday (August 12, in fact) I was invited by the Washington Chapter of the Center for Maritime Security to speak at a screening of the 1998 HBO movie Pentagon Wars, which was held at the Heritage Foundation. I was thrilled to be invited, and I was happy to see the film, which I co-wrote, …
TALK TALK
Twice last week I ventured into the wilds of Orange County to speak about the marvelous Commander Will Cushing. On a sweltering Thursday evening I visited the quaint and scenic Museum Village in Monroe, where about a dozen hearty souls sat at picnic benches in an un-air conditioned structure to hear me go on. On …
CRY UNCLE!
Ouch! Even though I was instantly thrilled when I saw that Guy Ritchie had made a movie based on the old Man from UNCLE television series, I was also suspicious that the release date had been scheduled in mid-August, which is usually a dumping ground for dead dogs and moldy cheese. My enthusiasm was further …
THREE DAYS AWAY
Ginny and I took a short vacation this year, a brief jaunt to the near upstate that we have never visited. First stop was at Saratoga, the Revolutionary War battlefield where the British didn’t know they lost the war, but they did. A splendid victory by Horatio Gates, Daniel Morgan, Isaac Poor, the not-as-yet disgraced …