SOUTHERN SOJOURN: NORTH CAROLINA, JULY 11
Intermittent deluges blinded on the endless two-lane blacktops of northern North Carolina.
SOUTHERN SOJOURN: HAMPTON VA, JULY 11
Went for a pleasant three hour cruise around Hampton Roads. The tour info was a little lighter than I had hoped, but on the bright side, it was nice to spend a cool and breezy three hours on the water (when it was hot and stiflingly humid on lsnd.) We saw many US warships tied …
SOUTHERN SOJOURN: NEWPORT NEWS, JULY 10
The Maritime Museum at Newport News is just splendid. The museum has a lot of terrific artifacts, including the pricelss eafle figurehead from the USS Lancaster, and a whole exhibit on Nelson and his battles at Copenhagen, the Nile and Trafalgar. The highlight is the the terrific exhibit on the Monitor and the Virginia, including …
SOUTHERN SOJOURN: ANNAPOLIS, JULY 9
Spent the day at the Naval Academy, viewing the library’s special collection of material relating to the Civil War hero William B. Cushing. I visited Cushing’s grave, above, and the Academy museum at Preble Hall. Highlights included the original `Don’t Give Up the Ship’ flag flown by Oliver Hazard Perry aboard the USS Niagara in …
A NEARLY PERFECT DAY
Molly took me to the ballgame yesterday. It was a very hot Sunday afternoon, and we had excellent seats, in the shade the whole game. The Yanks played well, with Hiroki Kuroda pitching seven scoreless innings. We did not hit much, but we did manage to nudge across one little run. As the game went …
WEINER CHANNELS KOCH
(This article originally appeared on washingtonmonthly.com on July 6th.) The New York political campaign season is designed so that the optimistic hothouses of polling firms and campaign consultancies can cultivate exotic candidacies in March and April, and the unremitting glares of voters can cause them to wilt them on the hot, unforgiving sands of Orchard …
HOW GOOD DO WE WANT OUR POLICEMEN TO BE?
(This piece originally appeared on washingtonmonthly.com on July 7th.) It seems to me that the two potentially big outrage stories of the spring—the politicized IRS story and the data-mad NSA story—now have two things in common. First, they have both petered out as little or no evidence of nefarious activity has been discovered. Second, both …
SIGN THE PETITION! RETIRE GENERAL HOOD!
(This first appeared on washingtonmonthly.com on July 7th.) When I last took weekend blog duty here, I coincidentally had an article in The New York Times in which I noted that the US Army had ten bases named after Confederate generals, and argued that we should rename them as soon as possible. My point, in …
EDWARD SNOWDEN, MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY
(This first appeared on washingtonmonthly.com on July 6th.) We woke this morning to find that Edward Snowden (Mr. Around the World in Rrrrrrrrrrr! [sound of a screeching stop]) has been offered asylum first in Venezuela, and then in Nicaragua. Perhaps the only person entirely happy about this result may be John Logan, author of the …
HEAR, HEAR, WIESELTIER!
At some point in high school, in one of those endless bifurcations people come up with to make sense of society, I realized that all the smart guys at my school could be divided up into two categories–word guys and numbers guys. Both word guys and numbers guys could get good grades in both the …