There was a separate meeting late yesterday, long after Happy Hour had started over by the Patio, inside mostly. There was interest on the killer of the Health Exec who apparently is still at large and there were two other issues. The Socotra workforce sort of works from home, if that is what this is, and there is word that the new administration is going make those who are working, or in a working status, to go someplace to demonstrate that they are not on a Zoom call from a bubble bath, which was actually a real and signifiant federal work-force issue yesterday.

We think it was true, or at least presented that way. We had frequently found ourselves in similar situations in group government assemblies but it had been more metaphoric, you know?

It wasn’t that wat here, or not exactly, since this isn’t home, per se, but we do sleep here on occasion. The Chairman had been told by Legal that there are some real problems with content generation until some sort of rule-of-law is re-established. That started when the current Press Secretary, a woman representing several important identity groups, issued a statement not ruling out a new concept in American jurisprudence. Which is sort of news. It is a thing called “Pre-Emptive Pardon.”

That apparently is more in the line of a re-run rather than new content. Which led directly to the Sidecar discussion over in the Chairman’s office. There was a time when simple brown beverages marked ceremonial sort of meetings, sometimes offered with coffee or in it. That transformed, subsequent to medical advice to modify recipes to include citrus with a ceremonial aspect. He does it with a flourish, a bottle of Courvoisier brandy, triple sec, lemon juice and a simple syrup for sweet balance in a nice glass dusted with salt or sugar on the rim. Depending on topic.

The Chairman had made a show of brandies but settled on the Courvoisier VSOP that he gets for $45 a bottle and has to stretch a bit. We can only afford Sailor Jerry’s, the one named for the old tattoo artist on Hotel Street in Honolulu, so we can use the label as a more inexpensive sort of show-piece on the table, along with those little edible things he has in a little cut-glass bowl alongside.

It appeals to the brands we would like to maintain even if it is unlikely we will actually be able to purchase them on the bi-weekly trip to the Class SIX or the VABC. Steven Grasse is the distilling mastermind for those brands he issues under the Tamworth Label and is highly recommended if we can figure out how to get compensated by producing a fair but honest restaurant review in The Daily. Then we can get a sidecar and worry about tomorrow.

That approach has worked before, but it seems to have a random factor we don’t completely understand.

Oh, the Pre-Emptive pasron list? Conceptually, it supposedly includes Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, and retired General Mark Milley. They are all working from home at the moment.

The list is actually not that new, and why we have ex-post facto laws, so the King can’t declare things illegal and try you for doing them a while ago. But we have decided to minimize some of the malarky and assure you that everything is proceeding according to process once they figure out what it is.

There were dining and exercise issues that needed to be dealt with. We were hoping for clarification on what that meant and what issues it might affect, but the Chief was in Angola, awarding a billion US dollars to ameliorate the consequences of a horrific crime perpetrated by imperialist and capitalists in league with domestic forces to oppress the great-great-grandparents of people who mostly live in Brazil. That’s if you actually look at the numbers on the great African diaspora, but that isn’t what today’s story is about.

Meanwhile, there are people in North Carolina complaining about the hurricane or whatever it was last week. So, the show is just getting good and all the streams in the story are worth a sidecar by themselves, but you can see that would lead to the sort of thing that. What the Chairman wants from Legal is a reading on how we can talk about what is going on, treat is with a sort of broad-brush comic opera sort of thing, or just pretend it is pure fiction and let it play out on its own.

That naturally is our inclination, since it requires the least activity not already on the schedule, but we can no longer tell what precisely is fictional anymore. This is what came out of the Chairman’s Legal meeting and was delivered to DeMille as a sort of directive for content to be issued in the Production Meeting, now occurring through the opening activities in week 2 in January. That when the plans being made now will start moving in kinetic fashion here in town. It is still too soon to plan on reacting to things still in planning, you know?

Like the nomination that will sort out a lot of local stuff, starting with Defense, sweeping through our Intel Community and eventually landing in Melissa’s portfolio.

So you can see where this is going. We honestly were no longer certain whether what we were watching on the big flatscreen at the end of the Conference Room is parody or reporting. We have seen and done both and can no longer precisely tell the difference. I’s sort of weird, right? We have agreed on another sidecar to test the theory.

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