What's in Dave's Head

I remember in elementary school we used to have air-raid drills, like fire drills.  When the siren went off we would put our heads under our desks or be walked down to the school’s basement and wait for it to be over.  Both very effective plans, I’m sure, if the Rooskies came a-knockin’ with their 50-megaton friends.  The Cold War was a pretty tense time in our nation’s history.    The media lately have been recalling a statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin from several years ago: “The breakup of the Soviet Union [in 1991] was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20 th century.”   Putin seems to be trying to put the Soviet Union back together.    In 2008, a couple years after Putin made that statement, Russia invaded Georgia, pushing ethnic Georgians out of about 25% of that country and creating two “independent” states—South Ossetia and Abkazia—recognized by a handful of Russian allies.   Now, with Russia ...

My maternal grandfather, Earl Frank Egleson, was born in 1902 in Middle Fork, West Virginia.  I had a special bond with Grandpa Earl.  As far back as I can remember, he managed to spend a lot of time with me.  One day when I was four or five, he took me for a walk from our house in Kensington, Maryland to Wheaton Plaza, which was probably three blocks away.  It was a great adventure for me.  I remember going through woods, although there are no woods around there anymore. He spent countless hours playing catch with me.  I had a lively arm but struggled with command.  In other words, I would throw as hard as I could and didn’t care too much where it went.  Once I sailed one well past him and into a peach tree we had in our backyard, knocking down a good number of fruit.  I got in big trouble for that one. My mom has given me a number of mementos from him.  He was big into cars, and somehow she had a really cool gearshift knob...

I’m kind of a book junkie.  I’ve read some really good ones over the past year.    Last week I finished one of the best works of non-fiction I’ve ever read, The Guns At Last Light by Rick Atkinson.   It’s the final book in his Liberation Trilogy about the Second World War’s Europe theatre.  (Spoiler alert: we won.)  The book is magnificent in how it brings to life the horror and humanity of war.  The writing is almost poetic, similar to one of my favorite novels, All the King’s Men , by Robert Penn Warren . I haven’t read the first two books in the Liberation Trilogy but my parents-in-law just gave them to me.  I start on them today.  Atkinson really pisses me off.  He’s a great writer.  He has a string of honors and awards, including two Pulitzers, one for investigative journalism and the other for the first book of the Liberation Trilogy, An Army at Dawn .  As a reporter for the Washington Post he’s been on the fro...

There’s an inspiring article in the Jan. 29 Washington Post about Seattle Seahawks outside linebacker Bruce Irvin.  Irvin had little football experience, playing in just three games on his high school team his freshman year.  He was later ruled academically ineligible and dropped out of high school in his junior year.  His mother kicked him out the house and he moved from house to house, “often settling in those shared with friends who sold drugs,” according to the article.  In 2007 Irwin spent three weeks in a juvenile detention center on burglary and weapon charges.    A turning point came one day when he was 19 and living in a house where drugs were sold.  He happened to be out of the house when a police raid resulted in his friends being arrested.  If he had been there, he too would have been arrested. He was taken in by Chad Allen, a mentor who, seeing Irvin’s potential, urged him to straighten out his life and take the GED exam....

This offseason the baseball hills are alive not with the sound of music but with the wailing and gnashing of teeth of other clubs while the New York Yankees seem to climb ev’ry mountain and yodel like the lonely goatherd.   The good news for Yankees ownership, led by Hal Steinbrenner, just keeps coming. In 2002 The Yankees launched the Yankees Entertainment and Sports (YES) Network, a regional TV network that televises Yankees games and other programming.  On Jan. 25 the AP reported that 21st Century Fox will raise its stake in the YES Network to 80 percent.  Sports blog Fangraph indicated that could mean more than $150 million per year in additional money for the Yankees.   That kind of money, combined with national TV revenue, ticket and concession sales and merchandise proceeds, can buy a lot of talent. So far this year the Yankees have complemented their list of favorite things by adding catcher Brian McCann ($85M, five years), outfielders Jacoby Ells...

My paternal grandfather, Granddaddy Paul, worked as a leading-man model maker and machinist at the David Taylor Model Basin, a naval facility on the Maryland side of the Potomac River in Carderock.  You can see the Model Basin from the American Legion Bridge on the Capital Beltway.   The Model Basin is so named because it houses a gigantic, .6-mile-long pool of water with a carriage that runs above it to tow model ships through the water to test their waterborne characteristics.  The carriage can tow models at very precise speeds up to 50 knots.  In addition, the basin can generate waves of exacting height and modulation.  Considering the Model Basin was built in 1938, the technology is amazing, though with today’s computer-aided design systems the idea of testing hull designs by building wooden models and towing them through water seems a bit anachronistic. But the Model Basin is still operating and admirably serving the U.S. Navy.  It is on the Natio...

I have swum for and coached a number of age-group swim teams.  When I was 14 I joined our community pool’s swim team, at the suggestion of a girl I had interest in, and I really enjoyed it.  I later coached that team, and swam for and coached my high school team and swam on an AAU team in high school.  For the last eight or so years I have been on a Master’s club for post-college swimmers.  We have meets and, like the summer community pool leagues of my youth, the results are posted by age bracket. There is an interesting phenomenon in age-group swimming.  When you are young, it’s to your advantage to be at the top of your age group—in the 13-14 age group, the 14-year-olds have the advantage over the 13-year-olds.  As you age, however, at some mysterious tipping point the advantage switches to the younger members of an age group.  The U.S. Masters Association has national competitions and sets qualifying times for the various events by age bra...