The Knights Templar: Rise and Fall

This is about Jacques deMolay and the Knights Templar, a romantic tale with a certain mystique, but mostly a story of bad luck, of being in the wrong place and wrong time, with the wrong people owing you money. It begins with the First Crusade. The Crusade was a boondoggle, but a successful boondoggle. After killing nearly everyone in the city, Jew, Muslim and Coptic Christian alike, the Crusaders won control of Jerusalem for about 88 years, from 1099 to … Read on…

Getting To The Poetry

Snug in the cockpit, I go by the numbers – Pre-taxi checklist complete, altimeter to three zero point zero five, rpm to seventeen hundred, check carb heat, mags, vacuum and mixture; flaps to fifteen, radio to one-two-one point nine and transmit:. “Ground control, this is niner-eight-three-two Uniform, departure heading two-niner-zero for twelve-thousand five hundred, ready for taxi”.