Author: Vic Socotra

Life & Island Times: Men Wanted

Author’s note: After spending an entire summer season, here are an initial impression of sultry Sundays in the Hostess City. sun-dressed women without men in a Savannah church Sunday morning; their men are gone or in jail or insane or dead; one floats by in a chic and attractive frock, waiting . . . hoping […]

Life & Island Times: American Borderlands

Editor’s Note: This is a very personal introspection from shipmate Marlow on his new ‘hood in South Carolina. Regardless of the specific GPS coordinates, we are truly in terra incognita now, aren’t we? – Vic Almost every day I travel here in Savannah through local borderlands. What I see and hear in these places reminds […]

Life & ISland Times: Crossing That Bridge

Months passed before I began to figure out what lay beneath and beyond my sight as I drove north over Savannah’s US Route 17 bridge. Do you know which bridge I mean? The memorial one named after Eugene, the former three term Georgia governor and bitter angel of the Jim Crow era, Talmadge. There is […]

Swamp Post Card #11

How the heck did it get to be Wednesday again? Dog Days of August and the uneasy realization that the pool is going to close in less than two weeks. At least one problem is deferred: Congress is back home raising money, and not much is happening here in the muddy flats by the Potomac. […]

Life & Island Times: Bats Over Barstow

Editor’s Note: God help me, Doctor Hunter S. Thompson, whose earthly remains were recently shot from a cannon at his beloved Owl Creek Farm near Aspen, CO, was one of the formative influences on my professional and artistic life. This is Marlow’s take this morning. God help us all. Bats Over Barstow America is speeding […]

Arrias on Politics: Equal Justice

If there’s one idea that encapsulates the Founding Fathers goals, it’s this: Equal Justice. A responsive government that worked – literally and figuratively – for the citizens, was a means to that real end: a political system wherein everyone – everyone – was treated the same. Last week a Congresswoman opined that Vice President Pence […]

Totality

Everyone was kind of nuts yesterday about the heavens, and the accidental passage of the moon between us here in North Americ and the solar orb. We were not quite in the sweet spot, and I was not going to join the other lemmings seeking darkness at noon, though naturally I am not opposed to […]

Dewey’s War Orders

There is a lot of talk about monuments these days. The direction it is going- more demonstrations in Boston this morning, results unknown at press time- amounts to an assault on the country where I thought I grew up. I am OK with the debate, though not the direct action taken against monuments to causes […]

Cruise books

(You could look these guys up in the Cruisebook, if you had the right one. Here is a chance!) Shipmates and fellow travelers, I could rail on about what is going on this week- and which has been going on for some years in the context of the Conference theme of “Cognitive 5th Generation Warfare” […]

Durham Bull

This is going to have to be short- I am in between panel discussions at the big Defense IT conference and have many networking obligations this morning. Still, I have to say that the news from Durham got me going this morning. The bullshit confrontation between Nazis and Commies in wonderful little Charlottesville- both groups […]