Over the last week or so I've been reading more than usual. I'm almost on par with how many pages I turned in my teenage years. Between occasional bouts with the feed reader and making my way slowly through the bookshelf of "must read" books over my desk, my mind's been awash in new information.

I noticed it particularly this evening while reading Diana Block's book Arm the Spirit. On page 40, Block and her compatriots are in Minneapolis and trying to settle into their new lifestyle. There on February 7, 1986 she is following the overthrow of Jean-Claude Duvalier with some enthusiasm.

Duvalier's unique nickname, "Baby Doc," rang a bell and after a few minutes of thought I realized I had read about him only a few days earlier in the story of "Learjet repo man" Nick Popovich. According to Salon, on the day of the coup, Popovich had been sitting in a Haitian prison for seven days for trying to seize a Boeing 707.

Nearly as Duvalier was flying to the U.S. in an Air Force jet, Popovich was flying home in that 707. And on June 9, 2009, more than 23 years later, a book and an online article have connected those three people with me and with each other.

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