(USS Forrestal (CV-59) greets a happy couple at Mayport, Florida prior to a Med deployment). Well, it wasn’t. The long stream of gray ships steaming across components of the gray ocean continued after the Soviet Union collapsed. It wasn’t even our personal last cruise, since there was another to follow on a ship assigned to […]

So, we have drawn down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to the lowest point in forty years. Now, we are looking for the emergency that we did it for. There seem to be a lot of emergencies these days, a virtual plurality of pesky problems. We posed questions around the Fire Ring. It is a […]

We were working on the Weather Report for the week, which is a bit dizzying. The remnants of Hurricane Ian are still hanging atop our Farm. The Lady in Red says they will start being swept away this afternoon, and maybe the sun will shine for the first time in a week. DeMille looked at […]

The storm that has captivated our attention- and killed around fifty citizens- is stalled overhead. Two high pressure systems, one northeast and one to the west, have captured what is left of the fury that traveled west across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa, arced north across Cuba before slamming Florida, raking the interior and intensifying […]

The word sounds a little like some drug you might take to get over something. “Post” meaning “after,” and “Lude” one of those things coming over the former border in backpacks. The dictionary says it actually refers to a musical interlude, normally on the organ, played at the end of a church service as a […]

There was some relief from the regular readers that wrote to say “thanks!” for no Weather Report this week. We have all been watching (or feeling) enough weather already. They hoped they wouldn’t have to review the litany of social circus acts in progress. We would have deferred, but an older person whose pronouns agree […]

There was resignation but no panic here at Refuge Farm. The news of Hurricane-Tropical Storm-Hurricane Ian’s advance had been pervasive over the last week as The Big Story. Images of shattered homes and expensive boats stacked willy-nilly on the Florida shores was a sobering indication of what had swept across the Sunshine State and was […]

(Typhoon Kip, the most powerful storm ever to come ashore in 1979. It has been part of the Bragging Rights argument for years, since some of us were there, a fact of which they remind us any time anything else comes by. Like this morning). You know the feeling. “Something wicked this way comes.” This […]

(Vic Socotra conducts field research at the Hotel Roma, Taipei, Tawian, in the delirious year of 1980. God only knows who the photographer was, 42 years ago that alcohol-soaked afternoon. We were worried about a PRC invasion.) Editor’s Note: We get Letters to the Editor at Socotra House, and we publish them as they come […]

We could talk about the Big Storm down in Florida. Or maybe who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines up in the Baltic. Instead, we have often become a little hysterical over the arbitrary changes to our language. External Imposition! It is irritating since it comes and goes based on political need. You may have […]