Author: Vic Socotra

Eggs, Milk and Toilet Paper

Legendary local weather guesser Bob Ryan is now retired, but he would be in his element today. From 1980–2010, Bob was the chief meteorologist at Washington NBC affiliate WRC-TV. Before serving as the station’s chief meteorologist for 30 years, he was the first on-air meteorologist for the Today Show. He actually swapped jobs with the […]

Arrias on Politics: North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and the Nuclear Threat

While the nightly news and the major newspapers stir themselves into a frenzy over mostly trivia, real problems continue to fester: North Korea has nuclear weapons. Three administrations (Clinton, Bush, Obama) believed that negotiations and agreements would change the minds of the government in Pyongyang. They were wrong. The leader of North Korea, Kim Jung […]

Life and Island Times: Time Travel

I had thought about entitling today’s piece with some combination of the words spring, forward and suck but decided against it. As expected, we woke up later than normal to discover a dreary and surprisingly cold and windy morning too late to dress for services, so instead went to the local coffee shop on Forsyth […]

The Medium is the Message (Part 4)

I topped up the tulip glass- close to the last glass- of the remaining bottle of Willow Happy Hour White and walked back to the scene of the séance. I was dialed in, and a pleasant soprano voice came on the line: Karen Anderson, Evidentiary Medium. In my mind I had an image of how […]

The Medium is the Message (Part 3)

(Former Deputy Sheriff, award-winning author and evidential medium Karen Anderson). After yesterday’s outing- the independent account of strange happenings in the Ford Island Dispensary- I am going to reiterate the obvious: There is stuff out here in the world that I do not either understand, or for which I have no plausible explanation. The Macaroon […]

The Bunk Room

(Crater left by the detonation of a Japanese aerial bomb in the Ford Island Dispensary in December, 1941. You are looking out the front door to the company street that leads to the hangars and the headquarters to the left, and the barracks to the right. The Bunk Room is above and to the left […]

Arrias on Politics: A 350-Ship Navy

The President wants to add $54 billion to the DOD budget next year, and expand the Navy to 350 ships; and expand the Army, Air Force and Marines. Several retired admirals and generals opined that it won’t really work, and that once Washington DC reality sets in, there’ll be universal recognition of that “fact” and […]

The Medium is the Message (Part Deux)

OK- you are just going to have to bear with me on this one. It requires a bit of a deft touch, since there are two clear paths by which I might spin this memory. I could be my usual snarky self and play it for laughs, mocking a profession of seers and mystics that […]

The Medium is the Message

Remember those words? The phrase was introduced in Marshall McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in the dim and distant days of 1964. I was a young teen at the time, basking in the bourgeoisie pleasures of suburban Detroit. We had some problems at the time- perhaps you have heard of them? […]

Life and Island Times: Sandy Shoes

the big cities we have left behind fatten, grow old, increasingly coarsen, they become poisoned, and parts of them and their people wither survivors often think of the old days when the nights and days jumped like they never had before that even when they slept they gave off light, electricity and soothing rollicking sounds […]