NY times: “Socotra House Launches 548th Million Irrelevant Web Site: Publishing World Sighs in Indifference.”

Editor’s Note:

For those who missed the Daily yesterday, the entire production staff at Socotra House Publishing expresses the deepest regret. It is not our fault. Really, we showed up for work and everything. Here is what hung us up:

Power blinked off in two orderly stages of complete degradation at Big Pink shortly before 0800, the result of an eager-beaver squirrel, if we may be permitted the mixed metaphor, who apparently found the end-of-winter hunger so profound that the little critter gnawed through the lines in the transformer located over by the intersection of Pershing and George Mason Drive.

As you know, the voltage of the electricity produced by the generators at the coal-fired plant in West Virginia, is “stepped up” before being shipped out to customers here in Arlington as alternating current (AC) in 60-cycle phases, then “stepped down” at substations and ultimately the transformer near Big Pink to become 220-volt (washer and dryers, mostly, for household applications) or 110-volt circuits (which powers the bank of servers that hum as the main engine of Socotra House Publishing).

Electrons do not move down the wires in one continuous flow directly from generators to houses. Waves of AC currents shift directions based on the RPM of the spinning of the generators. In Spring, and again in Fall, the imperatives of the little gnawing mammals periodically causes the electricity to pass directly through the squirrel, which causes the transformer to “pop” wetly and drop off-line.

Anyway, I would have invited you yesterday to visit the all-new fancy web site that will serve as the portal between the physical and virtual worlds of SHP, LLC. In our strategy to make the site survivable, a portion of our archives have been placed in a digital repository in the Inter-mountain west; our editorial suite remains located in the immediate vicinity of the National Capital Region, with satellite connectivity and broad-band access in near the vast vaults of the Mt. Pony national bomb-proof media archive.

This is very much a work in progress. Thousands of photo sets are queued up, ready to be added, and we are engaging the services of a battalion of interns to port over the archives of the last decade’s worth of stories. We are also in the process of rolling out a line of physical and e-books, t-shirts and coffee mugs.

There are no depths to which we will not sink.

This plummet into the world of crass commerce makes everyone feel a little queasy, but we will see how it goes.

As an added note, should you visit www.vicsocotra.com and see the old trusty web site, hit the “refresh” button on your browser tool-bar. The miracle of home computing is that previous images are saved on our hard drive to make them load faster from cache memory. Refreshing will access the site server for the most current version of the site.

There will be a cascade of new content and vast new opportunities for frustration and error as we build the site.

Join us on the adventure, won’t you?

Sincerely, The Editorial Staff of the Daily Socotra

Oh, the story, had it ever got written would have been titled “L’Etat C’es Moi,” some ruminations on the rantings of megalomaniacal madmen of the Maghreb, the process of preparing for the most likely contingency, and No-Fly zones you can establish in the privacy and comfort of your own home.

Maybe, squirrels permitting, we can get to that tomorrow. It will take a minute to bring up the ships, cruise missiles and associated support staff anyway.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com