Author: Vic Socotra

Weakly Reader

They are doing something very peculiar at the Metro Stations these days. They have people in safety vests handing out a broadsheet of some thirty-odd pages of newsprint. It is stapled together at the spine, and I thought it was advertising or a polemic the first time someone handed it to me. I glanced at […]

Getting Out of Dodge

It was silent in Boston, where a million blue television screens reflected the eleventh inning Yankee home run that put them out of their misery. Twenty-nine times the Yankees have done that, sending the Red Socks packing, slinking back to the visitor’s locker room to change in silence, eager to get out of Dodge and […]

The Northeast Stones

It is a historic baseball week. Yesterday, the Yankees took a second game from the Red Socks at fabled Fenway Park, and will likely eject the Sox from their chance at the World Series. The Cubs were stunned by the Marlins. It was one of the appalling moments in sports. A fan reached out to […]

Fire Drill

The new Governor of California is a muscular Austrian with a playful sense of humor. He once said he admired Hitler. What a kidder! He has been elected for a three year term, if the electorate doesn’t decide to recall him. There is no getting around America’s love affair with show-biz, and here we go […]

Annual Membership Meeting

The radio says that the Roy half of Siegfried and Roy is showing some signs of improvement after being mauled and dragged by his neck offstage. A dramatic exit, to be sure, and a first in his career as a showman. I feel a little like life has me the same way. It is just […]

Baseball in Arlington

It is Monday, and if that wasn’t enough, there is more bad news from the Middle East. But that is an oxymoron. I got up to sleepwalk through the latest accusations against Gropemeister Arnold, riding on his Terminator bus toward the California election tomorrow. Then the tit-for-tat exchange, the suicide bombing in Haifa and the […]

No Preference

No Preference   The North Koreans, bless their little pointy heads, have announced that they have re-processed 8,000 spent fuel rods from their little prototype reactor at Yongbyon. It is all the embattled theocracy can do to protect itself from the United States. Poor dears. Last I heard, the spent rods were glowing under water […]

Storm of Protest

The BBC World Service got me going early this morning. Some Baroness who is serving in the EU Parliament sniffed about the rights of the detainees at Gauntanamo Naval Base. I don’t know the nature of her title. It is possible that it is hereditary, though there is little entitlement left in the old blood. […]

Secretary Forrestal Acted Alone

I am up, it is just after six. Someone has fired three rockets at the al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, no reported casualties, and the crazy Burmese have returned Nobel laureate Aun San Suu Chi to her home from the hospital where she had been confined for three months following a gynecologic procedure. I have […]

Veterans Affairs

The world continues its fine muddle this morning. Diplomats are talking, bureaucrats are leaking, the ship of state plows on. California is continuing the freak show of a recall election, I read an article with Arnold, the Tyrolean tyro, trying to buff his credentials as a warm human being, presumably to prop up his poll […]