Back in New Mexico!  Hurrah! The last leg was the shortest but difficult, because of the difficulty of driving an overloaded, underpowered vehicle uphill, into the face of a headwind gusting to maybe 40 knots, on a weekend interstate highway choked with 18-wheelers.  When the wind died down I finally made good time, and the […]

We are in Springfield, Mo., having previously passed through, or been within hailing distance of, Springfield, Penn., Springfield, Ohio, Springfield, Ind., and Springfield, Ill.  It’s like we’re on the Simpsons tour of the U.S.! I noted that there were a lot of big gun stores in Indiana, just over the Illinois line, from which I […]

So over the weekend we had our twice-yearly black belt weekend, which was mostly devoted to graduating 33 new Kenpo black belts.  I also re-certified for my own black belt, in which I re-tested for, well, just about everything I’ve learned over the last thirty-odd years.  I was a sweat-soaked bag of silly putty at […]

So the U.S. Senate report on torture shows that it was far worse than I imagined, or I imagine anybody imagined.  We’ve known about the torture for years, of course, but now we know just how depraved and disgusting and totally without merit it was. Consider this: numbers are a little vague, but it appears […]