robert.admin – Page 104 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

June 16, 2019

OpsLog – WBRR – 6/15/2019

n my real job, nobody listens to any suggestions I have to offer. And it’s a cock up there. But on the Western Bay Railroad, at least some of the things I say get put into practice. Like today – I’m sitting in the small office (more like an outhouse with the hole boarded up) in Placerville Jct. I can see train 315 toiling up the long grade from Ute Jct, a steam engine on the head end, another behind the tail end passenger car*, shoving. The last times we did this we met with various levels of success. Usually […]

June 16, 2019

Fuzzy Nation (Guest Review)

ell, gang, I’m here to encourage you in a light summertime underdog tale that combines a smart-aleck disbarred lawyer-space prospector protagonist with the repartee of John McClane, a pyrotechnic-trained dog, sci-fi aspects in the eponymous fuzzy ewok-like creatures, and court scenes worthy of a meld of “A Few Good Men” and “Matlock”. This goulash of a book works, it’s fun, but it ain’t great literature– get over it. The book in question is Fuzzy Nation, a ‘reboot’ by John Scalzi of H. Beam Piper’s 1962 classic Little Fuzzy. I am unfamiliar with the original work. The story, according to a […]

June 14, 2019

Sulking in his tent (DOG EAR)

nd there will be pasta! From a top-end Italian restaurant!” I’m still stinging from my corporation’s hi-jinks. On top of everything else theyve done wrong or badly over the last few years, they offered a buyout. Of course, it was phrased to sound like it was fair and equitable and dispassionate. But it turned out that they were just golden-parachuting a lot of their overpaid, underperforming execs, tossing handouts to forty-year deadwoods and picking off one or two incompetents. So yes, I didn’t get it. What I was to get was an “appreciation” lunch, a little thing put on by […]

June 9, 2019

Don Quixote (Book 1) (Review)

was actually stunned, a few weeks ago, when I mentioned to someone I was reading Don Quixote and the person had no idea of the reference. Really? Good heavens but I didn’t think a 500 old book, one of the building blocks in what is now the modern novel, would be so forgotten. Well, for those who don’t know, Don Quixote is a tale of an old gentleman, a threadbare noble, living in a small hacienda in the Spanish countryside. To pass his idle time, he reads books of chivalry, of knights, the tales of adventure and nobility (wildly popular […]

June 6, 2019

The Long, Hard Road (DOG EAR)

’m currently working through Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. I’ll probably cover the first book (which I just finished) now, and then approach the second book (which I just started) in a couple of weeks. But even then, outside of splitting this in half and doing my best to get through the second book, I’ll be focused on it for some weeks. And that means I won’t be able to get anything else read. I’ve got some ideas on how to get around this (I’ve faced this same issue before). First, I can always use guest reviewers (hint hint) […]

June 2, 2019

The Stolen Village (Review)

seem to be on a non-fiction kick these days. This one was a loaner from my brother, the story of the village of Baltimore, Ireland, and what happened when two ship-loads of Barbary pirates landed on night and marched most of them off into slavery. I was aware that something like this had taken place – it’s fictionalized in the Sabitini yarn The Sea Hawk. In this historic recount, we have the events of the night when the raid took place, the events of the long cruise home (can you imagine forty days in the hold of a slaver?). And […]

June 2, 2019

ShowLog – Tampa – 6/1/2019

on’t have much to tell you for this one. Wasn’t the best start for me – got up at 4:30, bought donuts at 5am (and got the shit panhandled out of me by a Colonial Drive bum who kept asking for more – what, car keys next?). Then a long drive down to Bill’s where I got lost in Walt Woods. And then another long drive down to Tampa where the show was. But we had the gold team in for setup, the old sweats who know how everything goes together. The layout was running in fifty minutes and we […]

May 30, 2019

Your audience (DOG EAR)

eorge Carlin once said he played Spy at the Airport. “Your job? Find him!” The other day I was left on a seat in the terminal, waiting for an unlikely meetup (long story, but I didn’t know any flight information for the arrival). Since I had to sit for hours and watch for a specific person, I watched people. And I’ll say this – unlike the 70’s when Carlin referred to this, there was nobody I would categorize as being particularly spy-ish. I can’t imagine someone who’s fought their way up the bloody rungs of the KGB dressing in flip […]

May 26, 2019

The Aquariums of Pyongyang (Review)

e tend to see North Korea in terms to its threat to us, such as its steampunk nuclear rockets and its last-generation military. And we see various solutions, from MAGA to Hollywood (i.e. The Interview). But we don’t see it from the point of view of its people. Kang Chol-hwan was a Korean kid living in Japan with a leftist grandmother who bought North Korean propaganda and thought taking her family to North Korea would be the right thing to do. And it was. For about ten minutes. From this personal history of her grandson, we see a family shaken […]

May 23, 2019

Early ReTesterment

bout a year or so ago, I took a week off and hung out at the beach with the wife. Mookie the cat loved it – she’d watch the ocean for hours. And I planned to work on whatever it was I was writing then. Just six days of yawning mornings and productive days. Didn’t happen. No, I played computer games. I read. I walked on the beach. I ate too much. And I took a lot of naps. Hardly wrote a thing. Recently at work we were offered buy outs (actually, I thought they said buy outs, but they […]