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“As little as possible,” Jake Gittes responds when asked what he did as a cop in Chinatown. This quote from our favorite movie came to mind last weekend. We were in our front yard when we heard a cat meowing. We looked down and saw a small, cute, black and brown feline rubbing against our […]
In today’s world, the peacock is more admired than the chacalaca. The bold maneuver more than the quiet effort, the hare more than the tortoise, the eloquent loud speaker above the quiet toiler. We often celebrate what people have done but rarely what they did not do, which in some cases is more valuable. Our […]
ESPN is dead. Maybe not Dickens doorknob dead but at least JK Rowling’s Professor Binns the ghost at Hogwarts dead. We are an NBA fan and as we were about to leave our office earlier this week we glanced at Twitter (the world’s fourth worst invention) and saw the news of the trade of Kyrie Irving […]
International Need to Know, as the name indicates, is focused on the rest of the world. We leave the United States, including its politics, to other analysts and commentators of which there is no shortage. But when in the course of human events we elect a president doing and saying things that our current one […]
Last weekend we attended a gathering of Washington, D.C. refugees. That is, a group of us who once worked in Washington, D.C. but now live in the more beautiful, successful Washington in the Pacific Northwest. Just as back when we worked in D.C., the gathering included people from both Republican and Democrat congressional offices. When […]
Seattle is hot this week. Not Seattle-hot where Seattleites complain it’s 80 degrees and the rest of the country snickers. No, it’s in the mid to high 90s and may reach triple digits. A legitimate heatwave. Making it more difficult, most people do not have air conditioning. Making it personally difficult, the International Need to […]
The most independent we ever felt was in our early, early twenties walking home from our job in Washington, D.C. to our new apartment, picking up a beer, crackers and cheese log. We sat on the floor of our apartment (we hadn’t yet purchased furniture), drank the beer and dipped the crackers into the cheese […]
Our cat’s allergies remind us this week what a strange and unfair universe we live in. Putter would very much like to go outside on a frequent basis. But it turns out he has allergies to innumerable plants and grass. When he goes out he becomes very sick and unhappy. But to remain inside makes […]
Perhaps you’ve noticed the news is often dispiriting these days. We are hammered by the bad, the corrupt, the idiotic and the just malevolently silly on a daily basis. This makes it easy to forget the good, courageous people all around us and we had the joy of hanging with a few of them this […]
On the second afternoon of the Directed Energy Conference we attended last week in Washington, DC, we kept an eye on an old man wearing a seersucker jacket. The day before he had been dressed equally nattily and somewhat extravagantly. But it wasn’t his sartorial style that caught our attention, it was his nametag informing […]