Author: Vic Socotra

The Bombe

The Bombe NCR Building 26 Being Encased at Dayton, 1960s The hairs are going up on the back of my neck. I am glad I don’t know anything about what is going on in the world where I used to live. I sense there is something afoot, and I am pleased I have nothing to […]

Cherry Blossoms

Cherry Blossoms I have lost most of my innocence, and I tend to approach life with the surliness born of experience, expecting to find the cut deal and sweet angle. I am working on the charity-to-others thing, though. I hope at the end of days to arrive again at sweet idiocy. That marvelous state of […]

The Tulip Tree

I began to sneeze yesterday, and I carefully checked my vitals, thinking I might have been tagged with the last head cold of winter. It was not until I headed out for a trip across the District that I realized everything was fine and normal. Just pollen and alergies. The early trees are in bloom, […]

Organic Soup

Organic Soup I don’t normally devote much time thinking about Wolfgang Puck, the famous chef and entrepreneur. We operate in different circles, and there is enough flying around in the ether to worry about. I cringed over the British captives in Iran, particularly when I saw the headscarf draped across the head of the lone […]

Pawns

It is Spring now, and time of an exhilarating game of global chess. The Senate sent a message to the President yesterday, setting a deadline for the removal of forces from the Gulf and attaching it to the supplemental funding bill to continue military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is an interesting bit of […]

Trilobites

Trilobites Mount Lemmon is a massive piece of rock that thrusts up out of the Arizona desert toward heaven and almost makes it. It is so tall that the mountain has a different ecosystem at the top than it does at the bottom. Green and cool, while the desert below is blasted and sere. My […]

Overhead Imagery

It was a day of astonishing brilliance, and the small rooms high up in the tower were oppressive after the dazzling freedom of the observation deck of George Washington’s Masonic Temple. The panorama was the best view of the two states and the District, according to the young 32nd Degree Mason who guided the tour. […]

More Soon

More Soon Five years into this war, most of my contemporaries are done with the business of fighting. I hung it up on September 1st, 2003, disturbed by what was happening in the Global War on Terror and following the maxim I had been taught all those years: “When it ceases to be fun, retire. […]

Eternity on Georgia Ave

Eternity is an easy concept if you ignore it. It is harder when you have to come to grips with it. The Post Office apparently noticed that it is inconvenient when they increase the cost of sending a first class letter by a few cents, since we all have to rush out and purchase those […]

The Cubi Special

The Cubi Special ADM Arthur Radford, Chief of Naval Operations had a dream He was going to cut a mountain in half, and create a modern operating base on the island of Luzon, on the Bataan Peninsula. The airfield would serve a deep-water anchorage for deep-draft naval ships. It would be constructed on land permanently […]