This is a highly personal editorial page — but personal in a rather different way from that of most of the blogging spectrum. You would not, for example, find my views on the relative merits of various condiments with regard to french fries, or the caffeinated beverage hierarchy, unless for some reason it should appear incumbent upon me to make them known and expound upon them in the interest of the common good.* Or chatty remarks directed to people living in my neighborhood, personally known to me, referring to things we have spoken about out loud elsewhere, and thereby necessarily obscure to everyone else as an overheard conversation at a checkout counter. Or updates on my cats. Not because I don't think that anyone should engage in such things, but because I don't have all that much free time, and I don't see that such use of it would be worth anyone else's time, either.

Nor is there any real chronological importance to the articles comprising the Orrery, other than the fact that current events may have suggested the topic, or demanded a response; but I don't write in such a way that without the moment-by-moment context, the observations will be incomprehensible (or at least, so I hope) in the way that trying to read a newspaper editorial from a hundred years ago is a difficult thing, with all the topical significance of the references which were household names when it was written abraded away by the destructive hand of Time. (And this will be equally true of most editorial writing published today, in another century.)

What you will find are occasional comments on subjects of topical interest, some more limited than others in temporal scope, but all of them considered from a background of wide-ranging if eclectic historical interest, and far-reaching traditions of critical thought. 

I call it, perhaps over-ambitiously, "the Orrery," rather than "Observations," because it is an attempt to craft with words a dynamic model of the known world, reflecting as many different sources of data and perspective as my limitations allow, rather than a view from a single fixed point — always bearing in mind that it is but one individual model and subject to both the errors and limits of the clockmaker, as well as to its own innate limitations. 

Wherever possible, references will be provided, and if too long for footnotes, via links to other permanent pages. 

VADEMECUM
Odd Lots