Author: Vic Socotra

Back to the Front

It was refreshing to rise at home rather than the slightly softened authoritarian confines of the hospital! The image above contains the view from the bed in vertical wing of Virginia Hospital’s new SIX BEE where the future meets the past in the complexity and of our current adventures. The imposing towers mark the general […]

Tumble Inn

It is one of those days. Better said, yesterday was one, and today another one. They are predicting one tomorrow as well! The Doctor’s appointment did not go according to the routine. We normally arrive at his office over on South Carlin Springs about a half hour before the scheduled time and have the office […]

Arrias and his Muse: In the Fog

Author’s Note: He was just sitting up there in the tree this morning – 2nd morning appearance this week. But before I went out he was hooting quite a bit – I looked it up – definitely a Great Horned Owl’s call…ArriasInline image Early morning, a dense, warm fog, The sky still black as pitch, […]

Arrias and His Muse: Bulldogs, Soccer, and Foreign Policy

Author’s Note: It just seems to me we could get so much more done if we had folks who paid attention… – Arrias One of the marvelous scenes in the movie Man For All Seasons has Thomas More talking to his friend the Duke of Norfolk, about More’s refusal to endorse the King’s divorce of […]

Tower of Babel

What with the budget cuts and all, it is not easy to deal with the State government, and a weekday seemed like the best bet, still with three weeks to Christmas. I found the DMV on a service drive in back of some auto-body places in an industrial park. I parked the car that is […]

On the QT: PRIZE CREW Takes Back the Night

The restoration of order was what was at stake in the Mekong Delta long ago, and the answer was a major change in the naval strategy supporting the land war in Indochina. A new and aggressive posture was adopted which called for naval personnel and operational units to be placed in critical lines of interior […]

Section 702: What Do We Do?

A key provision of the law governing foreign-intelligence collection is up for reauthorization, and the stakes are high. In fact, there are people serving in our Government today for whom there could be real legal consequences for the next General Election. Here is the gist: “Section 702 extensively protects the privacy of Americans who are […]

Detroit’s Electric Road

OK- we saw the Toronado shown above the other day and it has drifted through our imagination ever since.That is what two-door automobiles used to look like. That blue beast demonstrated a front wheel drive and an aggressive smile on the chrome grill. That was how some of us got around in 1967. this is […]

Weather Report: Declassified Obituaries

We are going to run the weekly meteorologic update a little out of the normal sequence this morning. You may have felt the same way when you saw the headlines this morning. We had not quite got over the news of the passing of former First Lady Rosalynn Carter. The announcement about her husband Jimmy […]

And Meanwhile In Persia…

(We thought we would start with the Footnotes section of the Socotra Daily and get that out of the way. You are aware of how complicated this gets and how quickly when we deal with other people’s religious faiths and try to stay away from the details we do not understand. When world history came […]