Category: DailySocotra

Weird News

We were going to run a story analyzing the changes in America across the Gens crowding the Conference Table. The kids in GenZ are acting up a bit. The two Gen Alpha gals are crying at the moment and their view seems to have spread to the Boomers when they are awake. Splash had the […]

3 Days Before Christmas

This happened at Tracy O’Grady’s fabulous Willow Restaurant in Arlington’s Balston neighborhood a dozen years ago. Vic had it as first person, so that is why it reads a little funny: Old Jim called me as I was trying to get topics outlined for some uplifting pre-holiday thoughts. The phone was buried in my back-back, […]

Minx, Season One & Two

If Section Leader Miles hadn’t been down with that accursed Long Covid thing, none of this would have happened. The Big Screen at the end of the Conference Room had apparently been left on an entertainment channel from 10:47 yesterday morning until something approaching 8:00 p.m. No news. No crawl. No emergencies. Just raw, unapologetic […]

Counting Billions

Miles is down hard this morning. He made it to the last weekend of the year, but whatever that contagious thing is going around has hit him hard, sapping his energy and leaving him hacking fluid out of what is left of his lungs. He did not roll out of his rack with the gray […]

Barefoot in the Snow

There was some unease this morning at the Conference Table. Miles was late, thinking the talk about the coming snow north of the Maryland line would be covered by the graphic Splash did yesterday about being a soldier without boots when your commanding General decides to cross the Delaware River. Turns out he was wrong […]

Before the Court

“Intifada. This piece of old Jerusalem Wall thrown through my cab window, 13 March 1990.” Section Leader Miles was not particularly energized this Friday. There was the usual post-holiday requirement to drag at least some of the alleged Creative Group back into the conference room to generate something timely to set up the last weekend […]

Vic & Santa Rehearse for Manana

That slide was what Vic claimed was going to be his Christmas Eve, Eve contribution. He ran into Santa down at the Sled Shop where he was doing some last minute adjustments to the clean fusion power cell that will propel him across the globe, bringing treats to those on the Nice List and dropping […]

The West Bank of the Jordan River

(On the Way to Manger Square, Bethlehem, 1990) It was 2008 at Big Pink, on the West bank of the Potomac River. I reached over and turned the station. I was starting to analyze the Somali threat, and what we got wrong in our adventure in Mogadishu a decade ago, and the sponsored Ethiopian invasion […]

4th Week of Advent, 2025

To mark the Solstice and the week, we turned off the news in the conference room. No panels, no crawls, no updates from the wider human derailment. Instead, we wandered into the seasonal video entertainment we’d been ignoring while waiting for Santa—this one with the stout beared fellow improbably trapped in an AI-generated psychic globe […]

Traffic Accidents, Resignations, & Mood of the Year

(A distant view of the world famous Shopping Bag high-rise, the “Good Luck Bear” taped to the overhead of the group mobility van, the wreck, the Fire Fighters and the Fairfax Police responded and alert drivers found a cut through off the big road and we got around it. Without use of horn. Things in […]