Author: Vic Socotra

Intifada

Morning, Gang! It is a pleasant morning following a brilliant Piedmont dawn. Our version of your wakening ritual featured a reprise of yesterday’s events in the “Downsizing” process, and a quick visit to a souvenir acquired 32 years ago. As you can read, complete with an ancient typo in black china-marker, it was on the […]

Arrias: Nuclear Chicken

Jim Geraghty at National Review framed it correctly: if the US President believes we are on the precipice, that we face nuclear “Armageddon,” then that deserves an address to the American people, from the Oval Office, with all the seriousness that can possibly be mustered. Geraghty also raises the proper follow-on issue: Ukraine is not […]

The Last Cruise

(USS Forrestal (CV-59) greets a happy couple at Mayport, Florida prior to a Med deployment). Well, it wasn’t. The long stream of gray ships steaming across components of the gray ocean continued after the Soviet Union collapsed. It wasn’t even our personal last cruise, since there was another to follow on a ship assigned to […]

Plural Emergencies

So, we have drawn down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to the lowest point in forty years. Now, we are looking for the emergency that we did it for. There seem to be a lot of emergencies these days, a virtual plurality of pesky problems. We posed questions around the Fire Ring. It is a […]

Short and Sour

We were working on the Weather Report for the week, which is a bit dizzying. The remnants of Hurricane Ian are still hanging atop our Farm. The Lady in Red says they will start being swept away this afternoon, and maybe the sun will shine for the first time in a week. DeMille looked at […]

Life & Island Times: Go Fishing

Author’s Note: “What goes down must come up” as they say in American stock markets and exchanges . . . or . . . as the card game unsnarkily says “Go Fish!” Permit your author this brief island return to talk about a shipwreck as a metaphor for what may be on our surface-search radar […]

Tuesday’s Top Ten

The storm that has captivated our attention- and killed around fifty citizens- is stalled overhead. Two high pressure systems, one northeast and one to the west, have captured what is left of the fury that traveled west across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa, arced north across Cuba before slamming Florida, raking the interior and intensifying […]

Expendable Part 2

Editor’s Note: Marlow’s storm memories continue this morning, looking back to an account of a couple 1944 Hurricanes that didn’t cause as much damage as our latest hit from “Ian.” Of course, there were a couple million fewer retirees from Up North living there then, our storm tracking is better now, and fewer people got […]

Life & Island Times: Expendable

Editor’s Note: Marlow’s storm memories continue this morning, looking back to an account of a couple 1944 Hurricanes that didn’t cause as much damage as our latest hit from “Ian.” Of course, there were a couple million fewer retirees from Up North living there then, our storm tracking is better now, and fewer people got […]

Postlude

The word sounds a little like some drug you might take to get over something. “Post” meaning “after,” and “Lude” one of those things coming over the former border in backpacks. The dictionary says it actually refers to a musical interlude, normally on the organ, played at the end of a church service as a […]