Author: Vic Socotra

A Trip to Someplace Warm

(Cyprus, officially the Republic of Cyprus, is an island country located south of the Anatolian Peninsula in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. It is geographically in Western Asia, but its cultural ties and geopolitics are overwhelmingly Southeastern European- Wiki. Addendum: this is a trip a couple decades old, when we could still rise and walk without […]

Weather Report From Gobbler’s Knob

Can You Spell “Punxsutawney?” We had a vigorous discussion about movie rentals this morning. You know the one we are talking about. The crowd at Gobbler’s Knob up in Pennsylvania has already dispersed. The land-beaver named Phil has spoken, although his remarks were unintelligible. “Six more weeks of Winter,” is what they say he said. […]

Life & Island Times: Detour Version 1.0 Part 3

Day 3 Trailers for sale or rent. Rooms to let fifty cents. No phone. No pool. No pets. Ain’t got no cigarettes. Two hours of pushing broom Buys an eight by ten four-bit room. I’m a man of means, by no means, King of the Road. King of the Road by Roger Miller The initial […]

Back to the Bombe

(Arlington Hall Station, where some of the tools of victory in 1945 were forged). This used to be part of a story we couldn’t talk about. That changed just before the careers (and lives) of some of those folks who worked at Arlington Hall left us. Keeping secrets was a component of the Spook trade […]

Arrias and His Muse: Ice Dragons

Editor’s Note: Arrias maintains the front on the Chesapeake. We were brushed by the same swath of cold wet air last night. It brought the first barely-measurable snow of the season to the Commonwealth. We had other communications from a square state out west with wind blowing a dozen degrees below zero (F) behind a […]

Life & Island Times: Day Two

May 2001 Detour Version 1.0 Day 2 “Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.” business oral greetings upon a customer entering “Hallelujah, all y’all, Hallelujah.” my response upon entry Ah, the melodious voices which welcome patrons as they open the front door to a 24/7 Waffle House restaurant — home of the Pecan Waffle, juke boxes with some […]

The War Next Door

We are engaged in direct support to a proxy conflict in Eastern Europe that could lead to an atomic exchange. That is still a bit of a surprise. The Writer’s Section at Socotra House apologizes for a slight lapse of attention to the matter. Some of us had been distracted by what happened in New […]

New Math

(General Curtis LeMay, former Chief of the Strategic Air Command. Photo USAF). We talked yesterday about the Cracker Caper and the occupation of Japan after a savage war. That conflict was the one that established the bipolar system we have known most of our Boomer lives. The landscape of that new world pitted two nuclear […]

The Day the Music Died

We let Tom “Big Smoke” Duvall tell his story about how the Occupation of Japan unfolded at the beginning. That is part of the tale unfolding about the emergence of a new branch of government here in the United States. That would be the Deep State we hear about frequently these days. There is some […]