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Vic Socotra

Year: 2017

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April 6, 2017 Vic Socotra

Life & Island Times: Hollywood Famous

Editor’s Note: Standard disclaimer: Marlow is a real person, and veers into poetry on occasion as he does this rainy morning. Me? I slogged through the taxes this morning and stabbed the button and sent them in. What an obtuse and frustrating system we have created. When I printed out a paper copy for the […]

April 5, 2017 Vic Socotra

Life & Island Times: Net People

Editor’s Note: Marlow, and his wonderful Coastal Empire series, comes from a real human being and is not a figment of my fevered imagination. This one struck a particularly resonant chord. I work from home- or better said, with the net, I live at the office. I find if I turn around from the AOL […]

April 3, 2017 Vic Socotra

Culpeper Spring

Scientists now have arrived at the 97% consensus: temperatures in Culpeper, VA, were once warm enough to support the growing of grapes for wine. To demonstrate, our team of expert scientists sampled an experimental personal analysis of the local product at lunch today, courtesy of Quentin, our server at the Copper Fish on historic East […]

April 2, 2017 Vic Socotra

The Mac Book

See? Isn’t that one of the problems? I have been a useful idiot for Apple products for several years- I think since I was working for IBM and discovered that Big Bluw was going to sell the ThinkPad lap-top line to the Chinese. I always hated Microsoft products because the Government made us use them, […]

April 2, 2017 Vic Socotra

Arrias on Politics: West Texas Foreign Policy

Editor’s Note: Remember, Arrias is a real human being and he writes powerfully. Under the hard country of West Texas and eastern New Mexico, Comanche country, lies a 70,000 square mile geological formation called the Permian Basin. Since the first commercial oil well in the Basin in 1921, approximately 30 billion barrels have been pumped, […]

April 1, 2017 Vic Socotra

April Fool’s Day 2010

(ADM Thomas Moorer in 1964. Photo USN). It was April Fool’s Day, 2010. The town of Topeka, Kansas had decided to re-name itself “Google” for some reason best known to the Mayor and the city council. Mac Showers was feeling a little housebound and was available to chat, and on a splendid day in the […]

March 29, 2017 Vic Socotra

Life & Island Times: It Is All on Us

Editor’s Note: This is, in the form of the mandatory disclosure, the fruit of the intellect of Marlow, a colleague of distant year’s past. It is his story, but we all have them, don’t we? Life & Island Times: It Is All on Us Last week’s imperial city healthcare follies stoked citizens’ fears over the […]

March 28, 2017 Vic Socotra

Vigilantes

(An RVAH-12 RA-5C beginning its reconnaissance run over Vietnam, 1967. Photo USN). Mac was waiting patiently at Willow, half way down the bar that Old Jim anchored at the Amen Corner. I was a little flustered. A subcontractor to us on a counterintelligence contract down at the Russel Knox Building at Quantico had some people […]

March 27, 2017 Vic Socotra

Space Age

Editor’s Note: We are still marching through the remarkable career of RADM Donald “Mac” Showers, which spanned the rise to zenith of The American Century. I will get us to Vietnam one of these days. But trust me, we are going to wrap this up in a month or two. – Vic (GRAB reconnaissance satellite, […]