Author: Vic Socotra

Arrias: A Streetlight in Kota Kinabalu

The road from the port dipped, As it ran beside the long pier, Dark and dirty and quiet, Efficient, unwelcoming, austere. He walked slowly down the road, Far away was a single streetlight, A pale yellow glow in the tropic heat, Just managed to hold back the night. The bougainvillea smelled like honeysuckle, Memories of […]

Splash Deferred

(Belmont Farms Delivery Vehicle. A known Classic. Photo Belmont Farms). Splash was missing at the Morning Production Meeting. The Attorney was smiling. She had taken firm and decisive steps to remedy a growing problem. Thankfully, the problem had been resolved in a manner precluding a call to local law enforcement, which would have created a […]

Letter to the Editor

We have been caught up in a minor struggle here in a lovely place that has experienced greater ones. Much greater. It caused the Chairman to actually draft a note to the local paper, marking his opposition to some of the industrial change being proposed on agricultural land in this part of the Virginia Piedmont. […]

Weather Report: Stalemate and Tipping Points!

They say Mr. Putin, also known by his nick-name “Vlad the Impaler” is headed to Brussels to talk to some people in the European Union and assure them that despite an open, armored force invasion of a country right next door, everything is fine and to just relax a little. We are apparently at a […]

Arrias:  Liberty or Death?

It has been a strange few years: around the world we have seen the reach of governments grow. Whether we agree or disagree with the specific justifications for the expansion of government, we simply cannot deny that virtually every government in the world has tried to expand its reach over the past several years. In […]

General Matters

We had a nice piece to run from our pal Arrias this morning that called out to history and the astonishing confluence of events in our world today. That minimized the urgency to put something into production for street circulation, and likewise lessened our Attorney’s attention, since she thought nothing was liable to escape into […]

Point of Order

Splash was up early. The last thing we caught from the news storm of Sunday was an ultimatum from the Kremlin- we used to say things like that- about what had been a pretty nice town on the Black Sea in Ukraine. It had been surrounded by some invading army, and as night settled in […]

Cheju-do

Editor’s Note: This popped up in a search for something else. It was written onboard USS Midway, then home-ported in Yokosuka, Japan, and an account of an ancient military exercise in the height of the Cold War. Four US Marines were just lost in Norway in something similar in these strange times of a new […]

Waxing Gibbous

“You may as well talk about the cycles of the sky!” That is how our assigned Attorney greeted the weekend. We had been talking about the waxing gibbous Moon that under clearing skies the bathed Refuge Farm in silver-colored light sharp enough to cast shadows. She stood up, almost flounced in emotion and went to […]