robert.admin – Page 115 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

February 7, 2019

Libertarian Grind (DOG EAR)

just started a new SciFi series a friend of mine sent me for Christmas. When I pursued the back cover, I noted all the libertarian praise. Guns and dogs and freedom comments. A fatigue fell over me. I’ve read a couple of libertarian books before and, without exception, they are always the same. A buff, handsome entrepreneur, heavy with bitter backstories and loaded for bear, decides to make a stand against a mass of people so liberally unlikable that it brings tears to your eyes. If you’ve ever enjoyed socialist privilege, even to the point of checking out a library […]

February 3, 2019

Powers of the Earth (Review)

ith apologies to my best friend (a Liberaltarian) who gave me this book, I simply couldn’t finish it. I finish almost every book I start. I make a specific effort to do so. But this one, I could not. Let me go over the idea of the novel first, and then I close with my personal pain point about it. So, Powers of the Earth is a tale of a lunar colony founded by those fleeing the slow system’s failure of Earth. Everything is quite touchy-feelie back at home, with the military forced to accept handicap soldiers, with CEOs put […]

January 30, 2019

Must see (DOG EAR)

ack in my younger years, some forty years past, I would attempt to get people to see favorite movies. I’d loan them my VHS tapes. I’d offer to sit with them in the theater. I’d nag and beg and plead. I’d even bribe. I remember coming home to tell my brother all about the Anime Star Blazers we’d been following religiously in college. Or Run Lola Run. Or just about any great flick or series or episode. And you know what – 99% of the time, nobody would spare the time. Apparently the greatest gift, that of time, was not […]

January 26, 2019

Gyo (Review)

oo boy. Okay, so Gyo means “fish” in Japanese, and not “a dreamlike nightmare that gets worse and worse until you are screaming to awake”. Which was my first guess. Gyo is a manga (a Japanese graphic novel) produced by a macabre-spewing author/artist named Junji Ito. My wife gave it to me for Christmas, a little thing she thought I’d like. So let me put it this way – I found it disturbing. Sickening. Crazy. Bleak. Strange. And just goddamn weird. It was also pretty good (from a horror viewpoint). I’m not going to spoil too much. At the start, […]

January 26, 2019

OpsLog – WBRR – 1/26/2016

t’s been a half year (I figure) since my last run down to Al’s (last time I’d suffered a hernia and didn’t want to sit in a car for four hours). This time, my physicians cleared me for light Station Operator Duties, so I reported to the Delores office (as well as Placerville Jct and Dulcie), grabbed a stool and a radio and managed the railroad from the cinder-roadbed level. I suppose that’s why I like this job – it can make a difference. Sure, a dispatcher and a yardmaster can make a railroad run smoothly (and everyone wants those […]

January 24, 2019

Cold Feet (DOG EAR)

nteresting thing happened the other night. I’ve invited my fireball niece (who has done everything from traveling across Ireland with us to riding a critical mass on a Blompton) to do a guest review. She’s settling into her world o’ work and has a little more time, now that her school/party days are sadly fading behind her. Since she’s reading more, I hoped to get some of her book reviews up (less work for me, right?). She agreed. So, the night in question, she IMed me to tell me she was going to write a review. I thought about it […]

January 24, 2019

OpsLog – LM&O – 01/23/2019

o one can blame me – after Bruce had a critical medical attack in my car on the way to a train session, well, I really wasn’t in the mood for operations at the club. But I thought about it and knew that he’d kick my ass if I cancelled a session because of him. So I sent out a reminder and showed up. I can’t say why but as I walked in I suddenly knew what I wanted to run – the helper set he always worked up the Harris Glen westbound ascent. The engines were right where he […]

January 20, 2019

Dead Man’s Chest (Review)

reasure Island, one of my favorites. Anyone who reads that is in the little club that knows that Long John Silver is not a fearsome blood-soaked pirate, no. He’s a manipulator and odds-player, changing sides as needed and playing his cards clever. And at the end of that story, he’s sprung by Ben Gunn, the cheese-drooling castaway, and apparently sails off to freedom, wealth and anonymity. And good for him. Dead Man’s Chest is a sequel to this tale of pirates and buried treasure. We meet Captain John Paul Jones (of later naval valor, so we think), on the run […]

January 17, 2019

After Hours (DOG EAR)

saw this great Martin Scorsese flick back when it came out in 1985. Funny story – my best friend’s mom and her daughter went to the art-flic house to see it and were totally confused. Why was this male dating-from-hell movie funny? The next night they took us to see it. We laughed uproariously all the way through it. They looked at us like it was some sort of elaborate joke. If you are a man, see it and think of your own dating disasters. If you are a woman, ask your man to explain it. Or stick with Outlander. […]

January 13, 2019

Caliban’s War (Review)

nother installment of my up-in-the-favorites scifi series, the crazy-interesting books by a writer team carrying the pseudo name of James S. A. Corey, and what you can view as Season 2 of the Expanse on some of your streaming services. You’ll remember that in our last review, James, Naomi, Amos and Alex had discovered that there was an alien molecule that was being dicked with by a soulless corporation – their thought: hey, we can really save on space suits if we could alter humans by changing their bodies, down to their DNA, to make them into whatever we want […]