<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?><rss version="2.0"><channel><title>washingtonpost.com - Joel Achenbach</title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/style/columns/achenbach?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</link><description>Joel Achenbach</description><language>en-us</language><ttl>15</ttl><image><title>washingtonpost.com</title><width>140</width><height>20</height><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com</link><url>http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/hp/image/wp_web.gif</url></image><item><title><![CDATA[When Mom's Away, Dad Will Pay]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6159-2005Apr20.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6159-2005Apr20.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</guid><pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 7:50:38 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA["Go have fun, don't worry about us, the kids will be fine. You deserve a break," I told my wife, and she flew off to Jamaica, cruelly abandoning the family and ensuring that for eight days our children would essentially have no parent.]]></description><author> Joel Achenbach</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[Surviving the Mailstrom]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48230-2005Apr12.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48230-2005Apr12.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</guid><pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 7:50:38 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[Every few weeks I go to the Post mailroom to open a bunch of stupid stuff and throw it away. Some days all I do is toss mail, purge spam and edge away from people trying to talk to me. In the 21st century, communication is a hostile act. People want your attention and have invented various wires and tubes and vectors to invade your brain. In the midst of it all is the U.S. Postal Service, with its increasingly eccentric communication debris. The office mail in particular is slightly crazy, as though it's been smoking something.]]></description><author> Joel Achenbach</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[Taxation Without Consternation]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28672-2005Apr6.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28672-2005Apr6.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</guid><pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 7:50:38 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[You don't have to file your taxes by April 15. That's a vicious myth.]]></description><author> Joel Achenbach</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[No Day at the Beach]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11193-2005Mar29.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11193-2005Mar29.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</guid><pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 7:50:38 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[Recently I had a little reporting junket to Florida and wound up on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. Spring Break had just started, meaning that the mix of tourists skewed collegiate. Because I'm so much older and so very married, I tried to keep a respectable distance. But mostly, I just wore sunglasses. That way they can't tell where you're looking and what you're thinking. Shades are nearly as good as actual invisibility. Of course, being old is its own form of invisibility: College students see only other college students, in the same way that kids see only other kids. I was barely there.]]></description><author> Joel Achenbach</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[For Crying Out Loud]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58658-2005Mar22.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58658-2005Mar22.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</guid><pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 7:50:38 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[My teenage daughter and I are having lunch in a coffee shop, doing what parents and their children seldom do: talking. We are practically conversing. I want to shush her and call my friends on my cell phone and say, "You'll never believe what I'm doing!"]]></description><author> Joel Achenbach</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[David Duchovny Is Da Bomb]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38199-2005Mar15.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38199-2005Mar15.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</guid><pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 7:50:38 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[As a college freshman I suffered from insecurity, in part because I was, in fact, a ridiculous person, bizarrely small, with braces on my teeth. People assumed I was a child prodigy until I began to speak. Girls were nice to me in the same way that they would be nice to a hamster. I fantasized about wild encounters with females but knew they'd never happen unless my own involvement could somehow go undetected.]]></description><author> Joel Achenbach</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[Garden of Weeden]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17912-2005Mar8.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17912-2005Mar8.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</guid><pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 7:50:38 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[A warm spell in February, prefiguring spring, propelled me to the garden center, where I raced to my favorite section -- the chemicals. In my yard, gardening is all about killing. Every year the ratio of killing to growing rises.]]></description><author> Joel Achenbach</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Baseball Wonk]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63997-2005Mar1.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63997-2005Mar1.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</guid><pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 7:50:38 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[Baseball is back in Washington, and we're all excited about Opening Day, when the president tosses out the first pitch, Cheney manages the team from an undisclosed dugout, and Rumsfeld serves as the batboy ("Here's your weapon of mass destruction, slugger").]]></description><author> Joel Achenbach</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[Dancing Machine]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45887-2005Feb23.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45887-2005Feb23.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</guid><pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 7:50:38 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[When i was a teenager it was extremely uncool to dance. It was almost unthinkable, like having short hair or being Republican or not liking Led Zeppelin. Dance music meant disco, and disco sucked, notoriously, being an art form epitomized by the Bee Gees, aka the Singing Mice. What was cool was to play air guitar and argue about who was the greatest guitar god, Duane Allman, Jimmy Page or Jimi Hendrix. (C'mon, dude, it's Duane.)]]></description><author> Joel Achenbach</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[From Here to Eternity]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27099-2005Feb15.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27099-2005Feb15.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</guid><pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 7:50:38 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[I found a new thing to worry about: immortality. The danger that everyone will live forever, and that I will be forced to write newspaper stories and columns not only for another 30 or 40 years but literally until the end of time, that I'll be on deadline forever, always harried, always irritating some editor, always scrambling for a topic, without having the reassurance of knowing that eventually my work will be done and they will pry my keyboard from my cold, dead fingers.]]></description><author> Joel Achenbach</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[Crazy Love]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8962-2005Feb8.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8962-2005Feb8.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</guid><pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 7:50:38 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[Drive south from Miami on the Turnpike for half an hour, past the palm tree nurseries and the fields of vegetables, and exit at SW 288th Street. Follow the signs to Coral Castle. There you'll learn about love.]]></description><author> Joel Achenbach</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[Company Secrets]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55081-2005Feb1.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55081-2005Feb1.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</guid><pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 7:50:38 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[Every day, I show up at Globules Inc. and go through an elaborate ritual. First I check to see if I have any phone messages, and, if so, delete them without listening to them. My policy is, Best Not to Know.]]></description><author> Joel Achenbach</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[An Earth-Shaking Experience]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36331-2005Jan25.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36331-2005Jan25.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</guid><pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 7:50:38 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[Last month's annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco drew an estimated 11,000 scientists, teachers, journalists and geophysics groupies. The schedule of talks could be found in a bound volume as thick as a phone book. You never see a geophysicist in ordinary life, but apparently the world is crawling with them.]]></description><author> Joel Achenbach</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[A Student of the Blues]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27066-2005Jan21.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27066-2005Jan21.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</guid><pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 7:50:38 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[The inauguration of a red president took place in the bluest of cities, blowtorch-blue, with only a few reddish or purple-ish patches on the fringes (McLean, some cul-de-sacs in Alexandria, Karl Rove's house near Arizona Avenue in Upper Northwest). The president knows he's in hostile territory, which is why he rarely ventures into the surrounding city, choosing to remain in a narrow corridor from the White House to the Capitol -- what the administration calls "the Green Zone."]]></description><author> Joel Achenbach</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[All Downhill]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1880-2005Jan11.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1880-2005Jan11.html?nav=rss_style/columns/achenbach</guid><pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 7:50:38 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[THIS IS THE PRIME SKI SEASON in the East, unless the prime season ended sometime yesterday afternoon. "Eastern skiing" is notoriously iffy, and the very phrase, like "British cuisine," makes purists wince. The material that coats the mountain is sometimes not technically snow, but rather some intermediate physical state of H2O -- a frozen plasma, hard and granular and as enticing as a big hill of road salt.]]></description><author> Joel Achenbach</author></item></channel></rss>