PNM popping up all over the dial

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 28 December 2004

Blur of a day: started by getting up at 4am and jumping into limo that I find waiting for me out in the dark on my snow-drifty driveway. Then a 90-minute drive to Boston while I peruse two books I'm wanted to read in anticipation of starting work on the sequel to PNM.

Arrive at local video remote facility in Watertown around 6am and surf the web for about 30 minutes, until the tech says Fox wants me in the seat NLT 0640. I'm wearing what one usually puts on in the dark at 4am: black slacks, navy blue mock-turtle and tan shoes. So I slip on blue dress shirt, jacket from navy blue suit and nice dark blue tie and voila! I'm just fine for a chest-and-up remote shot.

The interview goes well enough. Two hosts of "Fox & Friends" are energetic (Brian Kilmeade and E.D. Hill), which is good because I'm not even after two large mugs of coffee. I make the mistake of taking the tech up on his offer to watch the show in my camera lens, which is helpful because I can then check my position and I know when I'm on-screen. But even just the distance between Boston and NY creates a weird time lag, meaning if I move my head a bit I see it on camera a second or two later, and once you start noticing that, it's a short distance to slurring your words in order to re-synch that which can never be "sunch."

Still, despite one word drop, it looks fine at home later at 8am, after the driver drops me off at home (I give him a signed copy cause he says he loves to read books of people he's driven) and I can check out the tape that Video Link is always so kind to provide instantly after each performance.

After I drop Jerry off at pre-school I'm into my office for a day of organizing stuff and catching up on sundry details (planning to move, you know!), but I find time to appear with Brian Kilmeade at 1140 am EST as he subs on Tony Snow's radio show (that goes better, I feel, because we have more time), plus I do a quick interview with a newsletter editor from the Center for Defense Information regarding China (that article should be out in day or two) and I quick Q&A with a Pittsburgh-based journalist for a Saturday edition feature he does for the local paper. That's four interviews in roughly ten hours, which feels kind of weird for the 28th of December, but I think I'm enjoying the bumps from Ignatius and the C-SPAN broadcasts, so I answer the mail as it comes in.

And yes, I still call myself a Naval War College professor for now, because it takes too long to explain my upcoming departure.

Spent the night reading May through October blogs. Cataloguing before the grand reset of table of contents on Thursday. My brain is cooking right now, so much so that I often feel like I'm coming down with something. I can tell I am really close to the big creative tear that will be about 40 days of writing.

In addition to all those interviews, let me cite a trio of recent articles that highlight PNM and/or quote me with regard to it:

■ First up is Jonathan Gurwitz with his op-ed entitled, "Internet, knowledge light the path to victory for open societies." That story ran on 26 December in the San Antonio Express-News and on 28 December in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (as "Internet a Beacon for Open Societies").

■ Second piece is a Foreign Broadcast Information Service (or FBIS) translation of an August article written in Slovene for the Slovakia daily paper Delo, which in Russian means "stuff" or "business" or "affairs" (and I assume the root is same in Slovene). The title is "The Pentagon's New Map," a commentary by Barbara Kremzar. The FBIS notation was "Slovene Commentary Says Success of US Troop Redeployment 'Difficult To Assess.'" The pub date is 17 August 2004.

Was going to give you third piece from Nihon Keizai Shimbun in which I was quoted by journalist Hiroyuki Akita in an 18 December story on intelligence reform, but he sent it to me only in Japanese and I can't make the font work here, so I'll post a PDF of his full interview article with me from 15 December (tomorrow, I promise) and provide the transcript of our phone interview for reference. I speak so slowly in Japanese anyway . . .

First off, a quick spin of the news dial (a slimmer version that I will favor between now and end of book writing).