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 white board covered with some colorful partial phrases. The lead one started with the observation that the United States has 4% of the global population but consumes between a quarter and a half of the Globes Gross Domestic Product. An analysis of the average weight level of a population that once modeled itself on Marylin and John Wayne is now looking more like John Candy.

We were going to run that picture of actor John in his Space Ball make-up but Legal warned us Director Mel Brooks was still alive and might object. Rocket said he had met Mel and his wife Ann Bancroft at a film opening a while back when everyone was mobile and he was sure they wouldn’t mind. But Legal is lazy and they insisted we lay off.

Meanwhile, the clouds had parted outside the big windows on the east side of the building and a faint half-circular object of exactly the same color as the clouds was posed at around the four o’clock position on the window to the right, almost edging the big screen on the South Wall of the Conference Room.

Vic clicked his screen, a change from the days when the big Nikon was slung around his neck on the colorful cord identifying him as an objective journalist. This scene identified him as someone looking out the window. With a flick of his index finger the image of a moving half-moon was transferred from the window over to the screen. With only a single click and the prompt “sharpen and dramatize” entered below the image the reality of the faint image turned into the drama of a gigantic satellite circling the home planet.

The image of the Persian carpets seemed to fit in between the screen grabs, since Melissa had collected exquisite samples of the carpets when she was married and raising children. That had dissolved in some news she wished to keep private, but came up this morning since there may be some unexpected Persian bargains coming up in the coming months.

That is where the Weird News at home turned into the Weirder News from Overseas, or WNO. Iran had announced that it was at war with the United States, Israel, Europe and presumably the five unincorporated overseas territories belonging to an assortment of former colonial powers.

Denmark is reportedly looking nervous over the expanse of Greenland.

Which was weird when taken with America’s strikes on Venezuela, The Prime Minister of Israel on full screen fir about five minutes while the American President talked non-stop. One of the things the President talked about while the Prime Minister stood motion and speechless was another strike on Iran, possibly like the one that concluded the 12-day war last summer.

Vic insisted on a quick update on Regime Change in the Americas and the one that is happening now in Tehran. The Boomers have been in an uneasy relationship with Tehran since 1979 or so, but in an effort to keep things manageable, had averted their eyes from the events that have shown the unraveling of the radical Shia Clerics who have ruled Iran since the Shah was shown the door.

But what is happening now is worth a quick chat. Miles in his sickbed sent a note on the office network asking us to explore the third day of the Bazaar Shop Keeper’s strike in which shop-keepers shuttered their doors while continuing an unregulated trade in new tunnels dug under the public square to keep their public trade private.

There is much more, and attempting to keep it to a single paragraph doesn’t make it make sense. There is a cafe society revolt in progress in Tehran, as younger Iranians boldly enter coffee houses and talk to one another, some with their Hijabs loosened in a way that threatens the regime.

The Iranian currency- the Rial- once was worth about 4 pennies and conversion was pretty easy. Today? It is something like a million and a half Rials to make the bucks we complain about here. There is much more, of course, while Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, says things are fine even if Persian carpet sales are down and his oil-producing nation is now forced to import gasoline.

There is more, or course, and maybe there will be a response to Iran’s weird declaration of war. That means we do not have time to get to the sinking of a Russian merchant ship in the western Mediterranean last week. That isn’t that unusual, except apparently two unfueled nuclear reactors were cargo on deck and the ship had been headed to North Korea to enable them to complete a nuclear submarine capable of carrying ballistic missiles.

We took a poll for those who showed up for the morning meeting. We do not think the Norks have anything nuclear they can put atop those ballistic missiles, but it is entirely possible that is another chapter in that weird news that is almost as old as the five Boomers at the end of the table.

The actual start to this morning’s meeting was a discussion about what was weirder. The news we haven’t talked about and the entertainment value of saturation binge watching for parody shows about the 1970s. We were going to turn outr attention to the idea of Clerics and their religious police squaring off against bare-headed women and the young men who find them attractive.

That is when Splash clicked the big screen display over to Netflix and pecked in the letters GLOW. We started watching the comedy-drama about the characters and gimmicks of the 1980s syndicated women’s professional wrestling circuit: “Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.

It started in 2017 with season one and lurched across the years in three seasons, the last airing in 2019. We don’t mind, and it still seems new in the thicket of weird news. if the Ladies of GLOW share some of the excitement, we intend to watch all three seasons before it turns into a brand new year.

Moonrise is around lunchtime, phase is waxing gibbous. We accept that as being weird enough for this afternoon as we turn our attention to the activities of tomorrow, which are even weirder than usual as we have to start remembering to put a “6” at the end of the year!

Copyright 2025 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com