Author: Vic Socotra

Orientating the 4th

Morning, Gentle Readers! This short blurb is inserted in the morning traffic to explain some of the discontinuity in our normally well-disciplined production cycle. We had opened an account of meeting the Deep State a couple years ago which will continue in due course. It launched at an unusual time- early in the evening of […]

Arrias: Independence

As Damon Runyon liked to say (quoting Hugh Keough): “The race isn’t always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.” Looking back 247 years, how would odds-makers have called it, what kind of odds would they have given the gang in Philadelphia? Before answering that, consider the […]

Arrias: July 4th

Author’s Note: I have been pestered by my Muse … it won’t win any prizes but there it is! – Arrias To Our Founding Fathers What were they thinking, Why would they even dare, Fight the British empire? They didn’t have a prayer. The British had thousands of troops, The Colonies really had none, Just […]

Joys of Travel

This is the eve of a great holiday celebrating a special moment in human- not just American- history. 247 years ago some relatively young men argued vigorously in Philadelphia about a new system of government to replace the dictates of a King across the water. They were property owners, but more importantly, they represented the […]

GNOME Celebrates the 4th

Sorry to intrude on this lengthening but lovely Sunday approaching the holiday week commemorating our independence from the King of England, as he was deemed in those days. This is note is to commemorate the restoration not of the Monarch but the Gnome. We have mentioned him in passing, citing the old black-and-white image from […]

Arrias and His Muse: Green is the Grass

So green is the grass, in a hundred shades, Green too are the trees, The morning sun plays gently on the leaves, And some turn golden by degrees. A woodpecker begins his daily labors, Hammering rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, And the squirrels descend warily from nests, As if poised for combat. The songbirds begin their daily choral, […]

The Nature of Conflict

You may have noticed there is some odd stuff going on in our spinning world. There is a major land war in progress on the edge of Europe. That used to be a big deal, since it is being conducted by a nation heavily armed with nuclear weapons among other things, with resistance funded by […]

The Scientific Method

We are finally done with June, and can move on from being proud about some things and start muttering French phrases to celebrate our Franco-American heritage and the other four things we are supposed to recall until the school-bells start to ring. One of the Salts is just back from a trip to Paris and […]

Stars and Stripes

Morning, Gentle Readers! We did some of the controversy about our holiday proliferation yesterday. There could be more excitement caused by the growing conflict over the Supreme Court. It includes legitimacy, which was one of the topics covered in the more than 100 days our Constitution was under discussion by the members of the Convention […]

Firing Up the Grills

We are now ending a month-long national holiday devoted to the celebration of things we did not talk about in polite company in the first half of our Boomer Generation. It is sort of weird, since we don’t mind what other people do in the privacy of their homes whether we approve or not. It […]