Author: Vic Socotra

Arrias and His Muse: The Equinox

Dry leaves tumble in the breeze, Red and yellow and brown, And then slowly come to settle, A crunchy covering o’er the ground. The Equinox is upon us, Winter is just around the bend, Soon the weather guessers will tell Just what all this portends. But their forecasts might as well be dice, Their records […]

Mothers Vegetable Beef Soup

(Vegetable Beef Soup on the Stove)   Well, they took lovely dead summer and put the green shroud on her, lickety-split. She was barely cold when Czar Peter and his pool-surfs showed up late yesterday.   Peter was at his leonine best, rich dark hair flowing like Fabio over his tanned muscular shoulders. He poured […]

The State of Things

The first official day of fall will start with coffee tomorrow on America’s right-hand coast. The last full-moon of summer is waning over the West Wing at our corporate HQ, the one we don’t directly work for, and which is not, therefore, responsible for anything we might be thinking from moment to moment.   We […]

Disavowing Previous Remarks

Above right is the Mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson. He has been in the news about his opposition to an acoustic sensing system known as “ShotSpotter” currently deployed in the Windy City, He recently dismissed the system as “nothing more than walkie-talkies on a stick.” That is a bit simplistic, since the system was designed […]

Distant EchoEs

You can imagine the controversy at the Production Meeting. The collision between the messaging streams is remarkable at all levels of the information campaign. In the war that looks like the old ones with clips on the Flat Screen? There is grinding tension along the brutal line of contact adjoining both sides of the Donets […]

New Ways to Share Stuff

There is glitter all over in the messaging world this morning. We would start with the Supermoon, the much ballyhooed display obscured here by the remains of the tropical storms. They scudded disconsolately northwest across the West Wing of the building. We tried to see it but there was nothing except a gentle mist in […]

Living in the City

The AP tired to pre-empt our local interest story this morning with the more sensational news that “several hundred” Hezbollah members were injured or killed when their hand-held devices spontaneously exploded in Beirut overnight. It is a big deal on the tech issues we have been following, since it represents the product of targeting data […]

Arrias: To Amend #2

Here are two more amendments to chew on (you have only one more week to suffer through this). I repeat my earlier comment, none of this is definitive. Rather, these are the starting points for discussion. We need to fix a few points, and to fix them we first need to discuss them. The words […]

The Caliber of Our Problems

We tried to keep it quick this morning and failed. It wasn’t lack of thought, nor of mild disorientation as you can see. The increased volume about the several issues contributed to the compilation, of course, since they are all sort of related in the stream of intentional messaging of varying volume, calibers and ranges […]

Good Folks

OK- Yesterday we fumbled through a brief account of some of the tension in the long grinding conflict caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine across the majestic Donets River. That is the one that drains the East European Plain, originating in central Russia’s Upland north of Belgorod. There has been vigorous periodic fighting there over […]