Author: Vic Socotra

The Rose

  I’m getting a late start this morning. Not my fault, of course. I blame it on the New York Times. First, there was the news about the commercial rocket failure that destroyed three light-weight satellites. Growing pains in the launch program, I assume, and a predictable risk. Still, there was more. =0 A Along […]

Porcelain Smile

  It is “seasonally appropriate” here in DC, which is to say it is tolerable, transitioning to miserable in the long afternoon of a long working week. We should all be at the shore, or someplace other than in the moist heat. The gas prices are keeping us pinned down, hopeful that the air conditioning […]

The Phone Company

The scariest company you have never heard of just leapt past Nortel Networks and Motorola to become Number 4 in the global telecom hardware market.   I don’t mean to imply that the Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. i s a direct and imminent threat to the national security of the United States of America. That […]

The Golden Fish

Golden Fish in black, March 1987, briefly underway   I feel bad for Senator Stevens this morning. The former Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee is under indictment on seven counts of hanky-panky. The longest-serving Republican Senator was someone we had to deal with in the Navy back in the days of the C old […]

Before Breakfast

I am with Lewis Carroll this morning, and have had to believe two impossible things before breakfast. Well, I mean, I didn’t have to.   That is like the global warming thing, which would be three, and the outsized carbon footprint that the common wisdom has attached to us. That would be four, and altogether too many. […]

Windy City

Windy City Ugh. New week dawning and I am not quite back in the ballgame, so to speak. Baseball overdose, possibly. It was fun, though. Wrigley Field is the last of a whole generation of ballparks, a stadium that is not a gigantic concrete island surrounded by acres of black asphalt parking lots at a junction […]

The Arena

The Arena The Arena lives, and the one next door here in Wrigleyville is one that resonates in me. It is of an era- Fenway and Briggs were the two that I knew, Briggs Stadium in Detroit the best. There is a last-ditch attempt to save a section of stands at Briggs, and the dugouts […]

Big Pink Plywood

We were at the Unitarian-Universalist church across the big ditch of Route 50. When I walked in the average age of the crowd dropped at least a year, and I am no spring chicken. I knew they were gong to be spring-loaded with concern, and was prepared to listen to a certain amount of the […]

Slow Food

The Author’s 10-inch Swiss Diamond Fry Pan It is moving too fast, way too fast. Hardly time to think about the consequences of anything. The rains are coming hard today, presaging a big change.   I have a pal who is going to testify before the Congress of These United States, one courageous woman who […]

Big Crumbling Things

I did not get to the pool until late.   The Czech lifeguard was asleep in his chair by the gate, and I was all alone to do my exercise. I was not late because of sloth, mind you, though not because I worked late. I had a chance to cook for my older boy, […]