Author Archives: floegel

On Wedgies

8/18/2005 – 9:31 am

Summer is in full throat. Cicadas drone through the day, crickets are loud every night. Pairs and threes of teenagers walk through the evening neighborhoods, their voices drifting through the window screens. At summer camp, wedgies must be getting out of hand. Experienced camp administrators know wedgies play a regulatory role in the living organism […]

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The Crossroads Fish

8/11/2005 – 9:29 am

Menhaden are small, bony, oily fish, members of the herring family. Most people would go out of their way to avoid eating them. (Some old Germans, like my dad, eat them pickled on New Year’s Eve. Supposed to bring good luck.) The rest of us don’t eat menhaden, except when we do. Oil from menhaden […]

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The Turning Point

8/4/2005 – 9:08 am

According to his obituary in the New York Times, King Fahd bin Abdel-Aziz of Saudi Arabia urged Saddam Hussein to retreat from Kuwait in the days following Iraq’s 1990 invasion. The Times reports: “Then Dick Cheney, the defense secretary at the time, visited the king to make the case that Saudi Arabia stood a good […]

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“Is Jersey open?”

7/28/2005 – 8:13 am

In 1963, with the collaboration of the Delaware Highway Patrol, producers for the television program “Candid Camera” set up on the Pennsylvania-Delaware border a sawhorse with a sign on it that said, “Delaware is Closed Today.” A man, dressed in what vaguely looked like a uniform, told drivers Delaware was closed for repairs and that […]

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Chronology of a Crime

7/21/2005 – 9:51 am

February 2002 – At the request of the Central Intelligence Agency, retired diplomat Joseph Wilson travels to Niger to investigate reports that the African nation was selling “yellowcake” – lightly processed uranium ore – to Iraq. He concludes the “yellowcake” reports are without merit. 28 Jan. 2003 – Ignoring reports from Mr. Wilson and the […]

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The Plame Game

7/14/2005 – 8:30 am

New York Times reporter Judith Miller is in a federal jail cell in Alexandria, Virginia. She may be there for up to four months for refusing to answer special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s questions about her confidential sources in the Valerie Plame leak case. Good for Judith Miller, sort of. More on that later. Time magazine […]

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A Death Worth Dying

7/7/2005 – 1:09 pm

On the seventh day of the seventh month in the fourth year of the War on Terror, death came to another western capital, in the form of bombs in London’s transportation system. The leaders of the Group of Eight nations, meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland are repeating their boilerplate speeches about resolve, but what can they […]

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