Author: Vic Socotra

The County Fair

There is not a great deal better than making the Saturday List on a sunny day in August.   The possibilities were endless, or nearly so. There was the mundane, of course, the scut-work of putting together the Quarterly, checking the office stuff that would pile up, but there was no Project hanging out there […]

Time

09 August 2008   Time    I have known, as you have, that there is a new force in the world, but I knew it intellectually, and from statistics. Not from the gut. I do now. It had something to do with the nature of time. Halfway around the world, the games were actually in […]

Cardio

08 August 2008   Cardio   The proposal that was crushing us at the office is done, the pricing complete. It is a nice piece of work, and I am confident it is as good as we can get it.   It was a bitch to move forward, since there were a lot of moving […]

Diminished Capacity

Ah, Thursday. It has an imperative all its own, though this day is ruled by what has been, and concluded, rather than as a launch pad into a desultory Friday and the weekend. What does one do on an August weekend, except pray for the sun, and count the diminishing number of summer days in which […]

Grills

  I was in the dental chair late yesterday. Perfect place to be in the summer swelter, and a late appointment, so all the emergencies of the day were there waiting for some spare time to fill in.   Ann is a plump blonde dental tech- a woman of a certain age, if you will, […]

The Wave

Economist Pa ul Krugman was not down at the pool yesterday, though he should have been. He would have liked it.  The humidity was down, there was a mild breeze and the rays of the sun were warm and inviting, not scorching, and the water was cool and refreshing. I had been downtown, to the […]

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 […]