Author: Vic Socotra

Seasonal Transition

So, here we are in the season of transition. It is still hotter than hell in afternoon when the sun cuts the arc over the parking lot at Big Pink. It bathes the western-facing units on the north-south wings by the Big Road with warmth and light. It also brings up the prognosis for what […]

H-Day

We both got it right this morning! We guessed and got lucky after the confusion of the recent Short Week caused by Labor Day in which we didn’t. Labor, that is. This morning we are awake at the same time and relatively certain as to what day it is! That is a challenge sometimes, since […]

The Gee Twenty

We could feel the heat rising in the eternal campaign this morning. There was the fall-out from one of the efforts to secure the most powerful office in the land. There is talk of impeachment abroad and ashore and more entertaining antics as our current President spent some time at the G20 conference. There is […]

Arrias:  Indiana Jones, ATACMS, and the National Debt

There is a great scene in “the Raiders of the Lost Ark” in which Indiana Jones jumps on a horse to chase the Nazis in their big Mercedes Benz touring car, and he is asked: “What are you going to do?” Jones answers, in his insouciant, devil-may-care style: “I don’t know, I’m making this up […]

Sunday, Sunday…

(1966 Album by the Mamas and the Pappas. We have to change the lyrics a bit to adjust to the individual year. AOL, our internet provider, does not want us to be able to insert the image for reasons best known to themselves). So here we are. Sunday! Damn, that was startling. We were humming […]

Emergency Rule

(New Mexico’s Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham). You probably know the theme for this morning just from the title. There had been some indications the Central Government was going to take us back to emergency rule for the next iteration of the COVID pandemic. We got tired of it last time in fairly short order. We […]

Slow News Day

We are doing some controversy out on The Patio this morning. We do not claim to have any particular insight into what is happening at your place, but one of the major legacy media markets had one of those bottom-screen creeping headlines crawling across the screen announcing it was a slow news day. Placing the […]

Generational Change

Some of us had careers that started out with avoidance. There were a variety of strategies involved with the strategy of not winding up as an eighteen year old with a rifle. Most of our excuses involved the college deferment, so entry into uniform was only deferred, not eliminated. Graduating meant a four-year deferential between […]

Beginnings

Author’s Note: We are trying to wrap up the travel book. Work on that thing has spanned nearly a half century, and several of the participants have assumed room temperature. The news this week was capped with the sad news of the passing of famed calypso crooner Jimmy Buffett. We all shared him in unequal […]

Weather Report: Ann Arbor the Riskiest Campus?

We railed against the internet provider yesterday and the frustration of being unable to display the theme image for this week’s Weather Report right at the top of the story. That makes it a little easier to slide into the the top of the story heap on the day after a national holiday. You will […]