Pleasingly reminiscent of the Notebooks of Lazarus Long....   (read more)

Just because I can, here are the girls of the Israel Defense Forces. Aren't they just heartbreakingly beautiful?...   (read more)

So those of you who have already seen Iron Man 2 will not need me to explain which sequence of Scarlett Johansson's I'm talking about here....   (read more)

Morning, breakfast in an amazing upstairs room with, reassuringly (to, you know, me) several guns on the wall. Rather less reassuringly, there was this countour map of the West Highlands, which our hosts thought they were being helpful in pointing out to us....   (read more)

Well, it's that time of year. I'd say the gardeners of Hyde Park must have planted the bulbs, the special bulbs, around March. You know the ones I mean. The ones that sprout blooming flowers on these warm days. Young, shapely, beautiful, nearly completely naked women - wearing only the equivalent of string underpants - lying on their stomachs, all over the grass fields of the park....   (read more)

An amateur novelist doesn't think he's done until his book is under a cover and piled on display tables across the land. Why do these people think this is likely to happen? Moreover, why do they imagine that it will be a rapturous, fulfilling, life-changing event if it does?...   (read more)

Q: Just how much Graham Greene do you intend to read, anyway? A: Every word he wrote....   (read more)

It had stormed overnight. I got up, crawled out of the tent, and moved the now-even-more-soaked travel towel from the fence (where it had been "drying") to an actual clothes dryer in the main building. I then broke camp, stowed my pack, and hoofed it into town...   (read more)

Upon checkout, the nice innkeeper man, Terry (*) , gave me a replacement pen, gratis. Hard to argue with that. The least I can offer in return is some free, and much-deserved, publicity: http://porthcurnohotel.co.uk/....   (read more)

Awoke at, yes, half-seven again - what is it with this St. Ives campsite reveille? - to, yes, another glorious morning. I packed up much of my stuff, tried to shake some of the overnight dew off the tent (in anticipation of packing and carrying it later)...   (read more)

Why is it, actually, that May always seems to find me broken up and depressed and alone and melancholy? It's a striking pattern....   (read more)

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." - George Orwell ...   (read more)

"But who is it that lingers there on the strand in the half-light, by the darkening sea that seems to arch its back like a beast as the night fast advances from the fogged horizon?"...   (read more)

And but so walking home through central London last night, I had figured I would be looking at at a total 28 Days Later scenario - walking through the eerily deserted streets of the city, my footsteps echoing off of the centuries-old stone....   (read more)

So, I've had a heck of a 12 hours. First I fell out of bed - it was inevitable, my bed is 8 feet off the ground, in a little loft....   (read more)

Heart is so full, and evening is mostly clear, and so I head out toward Chelsea, laptop on back - preparing to "kick it old school". That is to say, I'm going to find a congenial pub, treat myself to a pint (and possibly a half), and dispatch with great abandon....   (read more)

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The hop from Amboseli to Nairobi was painless, and our quick drive-by of downtown Nairobi tended to underscore why we weren't being dropped off in the city proper. Lamentably, these days, Nairobi is literally one of the most dangerous and crime-ridden cities on the planet. ...   (read more)

So I actually spent a lot of time worrying about, and trying to figure out how to avoid, dying in that Land Cruiser we took to Serengeti....   (read more)