Thanks once again to my friend Lewis Burke Frumkes for inviting me to appear at the Marymount Manhattan Writers Conference. This was my third and unfortunately final year at the event, because the school has decided after sixteen years to close the program because it needed the space. Too bad; the conferences were very stimulating, …
I had the good fortune to spend three days last week with friends Jim and Lisa at the oceanfront condo at Cocoa Beach in Florida, talking politics and watching playoff basketball (tough, exciting wins by eventual losers Magic and Suns) and contemplating the vista presented here. Hot and humid all day; ocean breezes, such as …
We have been quite worried about our old dog Vicki. For the last couple of weeks, she has been limping, a hobble that just showed up after a long and pleasant walk in the woods. No big deal, we’ve been thinking, and it would show signs of lessening, and then she would bound off the …
I had a delightful time yesterday meeting with McCracken Poston, a lawyer and former state legislator from Georgia who told me a warm and delightful story about, of all things, a murder case he tried a decade ago. He and I are going to work to try to turn it into a book. McCracken and …
Squired by London’s Mayor Boris Johnson, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg made a ballyhooed visit to the main control room of the London Underground last week, and came away favorably impressed with the ability of the Tube’s management to use its CCTV system to monitor events on any and every station and platform in the system. …
A belated thanks to my friend Michael Gross, who came up to Briarcliff a couple of Sundays ago. The Garden Club was having its annual Arts Abloom Festival for the benefit of the library, and Michael was the special celebrity guest, reading from his book Rogues Gallery and signing copies. Michael enjoyed his sojourn into …
When I was an editor at Spy a couple of decades ago, we used to run an item called The Spy List, which was almost invariably a simple set of names that were connected by–well, that was for the reader to figure out, or to speculate upon. Basically it was a way we could print …
Ginny and I spent a pleasant hour Monday night watching the HBO documentary about the Philadelphia Flyers of the mid-seventies, the famous Broad Street Bullies, whose adventures Ginny and I much enjoyed. Indeed, some of the footage was a little like seeing home movies. The famous fog game in the Cup Finals in 1975? That …
Peter O’Donnell, who created the comic strip Modesty Blaise for the London Evening Standard in 1963 and who chronicled her adventures for the next 38 years, died over the weekend at age 90. O’Donnell began writing comic strips when he was 17, a nascent career that was interrupted by a stint in the army during …
Does anyone else see the irony in the head of the world’s largest surveillance state meeting his destruction in front of an open mic? Let’s face it, for all the commentary about how Gordon Brown’s harsh comments about a 65 year-old housewife revealed the inner man, what he was mostly guilty of was venting. Struggling …