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Our Creative Section leader, Miles, is back this morning for a somewhat bass-ackward Production Meeting. He has been gone nearly two weeks, so it feels a little like the mayoral primary out in California, where the rug merchants apparently found enough extra ballots to get rid of that entertaining Pratt fellow. It is still too soon to tell whether that is true or merely a Babylon Bee headline that escaped into the wild.<\/p>\n
In any event, Miles is not a happy camper.<\/p>\n
He has been working some of the blockade issues in the Gulf, drawing on his experience as a Navy patrol aviator tracking all sorts of things far from land. He feels the situation is pretty well in hand and was worried that Deirdre and Holly were turning The Daily into more of a self-help recipe club.<\/p>\n
He looked down at the veggie and full-beef variations of the mushroom casserole recipe Dee hoped to publish this morning and smiled\u2014except the war started up again.<\/p>\n
Well, you know. The Iranians cooked off another missile barrage, and that has things moving again, with effects that are limited but certainly noticeable. Gas prices were down thirty cents a gallon over the weekend, though they remain higher than they were at the beginning of this curious but momentous conflict.<\/p>\n
It brought back memories of serious discussions held years ago when the Boomers were still young enough to be shedding military careers and all the baggage that comes with packing up a household and moving every couple of years. Sometimes it was across a continent. Sometimes across an ocean. Sometimes it was merely another year in a six-man hooch at Yongsan Garrison in Seoul.<\/p>\n
Whoops. Sorry.<\/p>\n
Just wanted to put something out there about life in a profession that involves constant movement. Many of us collected things that were easy to pack and carried the same familiar comfort as the small paintings that somehow survived the packers, the U-Hauls, the children, the spouses, and all the other joys associated with relocating across the globe.<\/p>\n
Most of the Boomers had similar experiences and similar conversations about current events, often viewed through the lens of the men who sold the carpets and furrowed their brows over a few dollars while discussing something colorful from Isfahan.<\/p>\n
Vic almost fell out of his chair.<\/p>\n
He and Splash had played the tanker-escort game a couple of times over the last forty-seven years, and each had accumulated a small inventory of fine carpets from places like Tabriz in Iran. They had not negotiated for them there, of course, but there were always merchants in the port cities. Each had stories involving intense bargaining\u2014not over weapons, but over colors, knot counts, soft textures, and the eternal question of whether the seller’s “final price” was actually final.<\/p>\n
So this morning feels a little like yesterday’s shaky cease-fire with 11 Iranian rockets counted ovvernight.<\/p>\n
That arrangement wobbled when the Israelis responded with strikes against Hezbollah targets and the Houthis in Yemen. Those groups had been comparatively quiet since the Epic Fury adventure commenced, but they now say they intend to cause trouble in the Bab el-Mandeb, the waterway we have not discussed much in the last couple of weeks.<\/p>\n
This latest round of unpleasantness was triggered by Iran’s missile barrages launched toward northern Israel on Sunday. Explosions were reported in Tehran and Tabriz, the historic mercantile city in northwestern Iran. The chain of escalation hung in the air this morning, but the feeling around our Conference Room table was that we have negotiated with people from Tabriz before\u2014on matters involving actual cash money and textiles.<\/p>\n
Personal cash.<\/p>\n
Pretty textiles.<\/p>\n
This escalation threatens to unravel the U.S.-brokered cease-fire, which Hezbollah rejected last week. It is a delicate dance. They do not want to provoke the United States into resuming major air strikes that could further weaken their position before the midterm elections.<\/p>\n
We think this may be another attempt by the Iranians to buy time. Again.<\/p>\n
We are not certain that strategy is going to work.<\/p>\n
Our sense is that any remaining military targets missed in the first round are likely to be addressed, perhaps accompanied by some demonstration of what remains at stake for the zealots of the IRGC.<\/p>\n
We shall see.<\/p>\n
You can probably tell from the expression on Vic’s face in the Persian rug graphic that opened this issue of The Daily.<\/p>\n
We suspect things may look a lot like that again tomorrow.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 Vic Socotra
\nwww.vicsocotra.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our Creative Section leader, Miles, is back this morning for a somewhat bass-ackward Production Meeting. He has been gone nearly two weeks, so it feels a little like the mayoral primary out in California, where the rug merchants apparently found enough extra ballots to get rid of that entertaining Pratt fellow. It is still too […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-socotra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33296"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33299,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33296\/revisions\/33299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}