(r)evolution

Kiss Her Goodbye

Dropped Cici off at Johns Hopkins this week; another milestone. Lacrosse players and international students were able to move in a couple of days early. A caravan of SUVs pulled up outside Wollman hall. If it was a girl, the vehicle would be packed to the gills with boxes full of patterned things. If it was a guy, there would be an iPod speaker system, a Wii, a fan and one suitcase.

Best of both worlds for Cici in her suite overlooking "The Beach" -- her roomate is another freshman lax player, and her suitemates are from Asia, including a girl who went to Hong Kong International School with several of Cici's primary school classmates.

Turkey Bowl Homecoming

What makes a great Thanksgiving? Start with two Turkey Bowls to add friends, neighbors and sports to food and family. The first was soccer, in the neighborhood where I grew up. A childhood friend mentioned that the game -- started by all of our families in the early '70s -- was still going on. I showed up at the old field and sure enough, there were all the kids from the old gang -- the Mahaffies, the Byersdorfers, the Wilsons -- except all grown up with their own kids. Soccer in the rain and mud was plenty fun, even though fearless 10-year-old girls with ponytails kept stiripping away the ball and scoring on us parents.

That wrapped up just in time to head to Turtle Park, in what's my neighborhood now, for our bi-annual (Thanksgiving and Superbowl Sunday) father-son football game. I have daughters, but the fathers recruit all the help they can get with their sons now in 10th grade and some of them playing varsity ball. Lots more muddy fun.

Final Thanksgiving tip: Try organic, free-range turkey. For the first time in history even the leftovers tasted good.

How does that sound?

Podcasting has become a mass medium since I first floated this idea, but there still doesn't seem to be anyone using it to bring poetry to the people, in its original oral form. The Poetry Foundation podcasts feature people talking about poetry as often a reciting it.

If you want to get poetry out of a highbrow ghetto, use this new medium to push poetry as entertainment. Persuade actors and singers to do recordings of cannonical poems (they'll do it for free, to underline their artistic chops). That gets attention. Package them in fun ways -- Sean Penn and Ludacris reading competing versions of Shakespearian sonnets. Now that's a poetry slam.

Move to the more esoteric later -- living poets reading their work; avant-garde work. But start with the world's greatest poems and currently popular names, and you may get kids to listen to something other than Snoop Dogg on their iPods.

Surfing in Maine

Okay, it wasn't exactly a surfing safari. Whole family in the truck, but at least the board was on top. Looked rather amusing when we parked in Tribeca for lunch, cutting through New York on the way from DC to New England. In R.I., pal Alan got up and hooked on the first try, on the gentle waves of Naragansett. Then on to Maine, where buddy Jim Sullivan, author of the excellent book Over the Moat, happens to live 2.5 miles from Higgins Beach, which must be the best surfing break in Maine. Had some amazing early-morning and late-evening sessions, bracketing family day trips filled with beauty and lobster.

In fact, the beauty was almost overwhelming; imagine being at the tip of Georgetown island, ocean on one side, rocky tidal stream on another, and cold-water lagoon on the third. Seagulls floating in the dry, 79-degree breeze, light so clear and crisp that it makes the wildflowers glow. Trip home via NH, VT and cousins in CT; a day is special if it starts with surfing and ends with motocross. But girls will remember the guy standing at the bow of a motorboat thrumbing down the Connecticut river between NH and VT who dropped his trunks and shouted "Live free or die."

Rhode Trip

Started the day in DC; spent the afternoon kayaking in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay; back in DC by bedtime. Cheap flights make it feasible to deposit 10-year-old daughter with distant friend and return home in a day, but it's reassuring that they haven't destroyed the sense of place -- sharp accents and sharp features filled Tigger's diner in East Greenwich, and Del's frozen lemonade is a true delight. Paddled past the town of Quonset that shipped the eponymous huts to US military bases around the world starting in WWII; that reminded me of Marine Corps Platoon Leaders Class, but that's a story for another day. A more managable but nonetheless magical memory from the mid-90s: starting a summer day swimming in the Atlantic at Lewes, DE; driving to BWI, flying to LAX, and swimming in the Pacific that afternoon off Santa Monica. No wonder I'm always stoked.

Fountain of Youth

Cici celebrated her last day of 8th grade today by leaping into the fountain across from her Catholic school. The problem is, some teachers decided in the morning that this tradition should end, so that students wouldn't get flattened crossing the busy traffic circle to get to the fountain. But it takes more than that to stop a tradition, or rather, to stop a torrent of inspired 8th-graders. "We came out of Mass, said a prayer, then ran across the street and jumped in the fountain," Cici recounts. "It was full of algae and really slippery. It was so fun." Clearly, her education so far has been a success.

Landcruisers are forever

Biked past the house today of a guy who collects Toyota Landcruisers -- he had six or seven parked out front, including three old-style models from the 70s. They reminded me of the one I had in Vietnam, when I was based there as a reporter in the early 90s. It had been imported by the French Consulate in Saigon in 1973 and eventually made it to the French Embassy in Hanoi, where I bought it from a departing staffer. Once equiped with some steel mesh to keep the headlights from being stolen, and a couple of fans clipped above the windshield to provide air-conditioning, it was unstoppable. We strapped our two babies into Fisher-Price car seats, bound the seats to the back benches with rope, and were on our way, rattling over the rutted and mostly unpaved roads of northern Vietnam.

What a change that was from our first car in Hanoi -- a Lada I bought from the Tass correspondent. After driving it for two weeks, with the air-conditioner constantly causing it to overheat, handles coming off in your hand when you tried to crank the windows, and rattles everywhere, I understood why the Soviet Union collapsed. Fortunately...

Dogtown + 29

Saw an advance screening of The Lords of Dogtown tonight -- it's going to be the Blue Crush of skateboarding. Saw it with Mitch Temoche, my best buddy from Old School days. We were both 9th graders, recently transplanted from Bethesda, MD to Geneva, Switzerland when we met skateboarding. The sport was just arriving in Europe, we met a promoter, and we did demos all over the country. We soon had a pack of skate buddies, and like landlocked grommets everywhere, we ripped open each issue of Skateboarder magazine when it arrived in the mail, saw the stunts Alva, Peralta and Adams were inventing, and took off to try them. With a European twist, of course -- our favorite route flew through the city, shot under the train station, then down the middle of the main street heading to Pont du Mont Blanc. Once across the lake, we grabbed the backs of trams or buses for the uphill ride to the Parc des Eaux Vives, past the disapproving facades of Swiss banks lining the waterfront.

The Second Coming

Even with all the war and political news this year, the story that produced the biggest headlines in the Washington papers may have been the return of legendary football coach Joe Gibbs to the beleaguered Redskins. “The Return of the King” in giant type was typical; I don’t know how they’ll top that if Jesus Christ comes back tomorrow. Of course, the Redskins keep losing most Sundays, (but as always, we’ll get ‘em next year).   

-- excerpt from a letter to friends and family written around New Year's 2005

Sept. 11, 2001

Everyone remembers exactly where they were that morning; I was on the 22nd floor of the USA TODAY tower overlooking downtown Washington when the plane ploughed into the Pentagon, clearly visible across Arlington National Cemetery. Because a radio report said another plane was heading toward our building, my colleagues evacuated. I suppose I should have done the same -- after all, by then I was just a business guy building the travel website, and I hadn't done any journalism for more than two years -- but my bad habits from years as a foreign correspondent took over. All those obscure stories, filed with such great struggle (in Kompong Thom, Cambodia, in 1993 I had to sweep the crickets out of my suitcase-sized satellite phone dish, then connect my Tandy computer via accoustic couplers). Now here was the biggest story in the world, and I had phones, computers at my fingertips and a perfect view. I stayed, started writing the main story with the help of a late-arriving colleague, and kept updating it all day. I was grateful to have something to do that kept my mind off the overwhelming horror.

Nate Thayer vs. Pol Pot

As much as I loved reporting, the highlight of my years at the Far Eastern Economic Review was editing Nate Thayer, one of the greatest investigative reporters of his generation. Nate broke the story in 1997 that Cambodia's ex-dictator, Pol Pot, was still alive and had been purged from the Khmer Rouge, the movement responsible for the deaths of some 2 million Cambodians when it held power from 1975-1979. He followed up a few months later with the first interview with Pol Pot in 18 years, shedding light on how utopian leftism absorbed in university classrooms and cafes in Paris translated to genocide back in Cambodia. Pol Pot committed suicide after he heard Nate's report, picked up by the Khmer service of VOA, that the Khmer Rouge were about to turn him over to international authorities for trial.

In an era of instant communication, when scoops are matched in hours and sometimes minutes, the Pol Pot stories went unmatched for months. That's because Nate had spent years developing contacts within the Khmer Rouge, Thai intelligence, and elsewhere to gain this access, and seized an opening when the movement turned in upon itself. By no means a Khmer Rouge apologist, he presented a straight, unvarnished picture of the past and present, and confronted Pol Pot with the evidence that he was a mass murderer. With journalism dominated by repackaged content, reporters spoon-feed by anonymous sources with agendas, and few publications besides The New Yorker and The Atlantic willing to back long investigations, these stories stand as journalistic monuments I feel privileged to have helped build.

Words, words, words

That's all Poetry Pod is for the moment, but it was just born. It will become home to free downloads of the world's greatest English-language poetry, formatted for iPods and other MP3 players.