Author: Vic Socotra

Arrian: Who Really Won

I came out ahead on a gentlemen’s wager this week. I made it more than a year ago, right after the first Republican debate. Mr. Trump won and so did I. I was nervous near the end, but… Not that I take a great deal of credit for the insight; rather, my insight came from […]

The Clip-on Bow Tie

19 November 2016 Editor’s Note: I am sick as a dog this morning, and have had to cancel traveel plans. I am shaking under the covers in bed, an with a severe case of mal de mere. i am very disappointed nd hope this passes swiftly so we can get back to bashing one another […]

Life & Island Times: AfterMath(ew)

Note: I wrote today’s piece several days after Hurricane Matthew raked the Georgia coast. It was one of the pieces of recovered data from my failed laptop. Marlow’s Coastal Empire Matthew was the kind of storm whose Savannah area rainfall total suggested his moisture laden sky had binged on diuretics before his arrival. Ten inches […]

Two Out of Three

Editor’s Note: The cabinet nominations are starting to drop. This morning it is Mike Flynn, America’s angriest General (press) for national Security Advisor. Sen. Jeff Sessions for Attorney General and a congressman I have never heard of to be Director of the CIA. I wish Mac were around to talk about all this. He might […]

Regime Change

(Demonstration in Tehran, 1953, opposing Operation AJAX. Photo Public Radio International). “I told you the other day that I was sent to London in May of 1950 from DC.” I nodded in agreement, and got out my pen and prepared to take notes. “I rented the flat, picked up our 1949 Mercury four-door sedan at […]

Binding Commitment

Editor’s Note: I stayed up late watching Monday Night Football, something fewer and fewer of us do these days for a variety of perfectly good reason, some of them akin to the reason we have a President-elect with orange hair. I talked at length about that with Liz-with-an-S at the bar last night. She was […]

Life and Island Times: Saturday Night on the Front Porch

Note: I wrote today’s piece way back in the early fall just before my “new” laptop developed a fatal hard drive fault. It took a long time to fix the computer and then chase down the old drive all over the country before recovering the data thereon. It was the opening day of the 2016 […]

Going Ashore

14 November 2016 Editor’s Note: It was a quiet enough weekend, though there did not appear to be enough of it. I did not take to the streets in protest, but just enjoyed the marvelous crisp air of autumn. If there were disturbances downtown over the results of the election, they did not spill over […]

Mid-way

Editor’s note: Mac would have been happy this morning, and I am trusting that somewhere he is. The Iowa Hawkeyes knocked off my Michigan Wolverines in a tiresome reprise of some games back in the 1980s. People are still rioting in the Pacific Northwest, though I honestly can’t imagine why. Maybe it is something else […]

Life and Island Times: Age of Style

Marlow’s Coastal Empire Election 2016 seems to have boiled down to who could encapsulate his/her message to the general public in vignettes as entertaining, as compelling with clearly dramatic highs and lows, and as briefly as possible. Once again, effective self-storytelling and self-selling were about the characters and not the story, policy substance, truth or […]