robert.admin – Page 129 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

June 21, 2017

Footnotes (DOG EAR)

’m reading The Man in the Iron Mask right now (kinda spooky in that I’m also watching Versailles at the same time). But Mask is a melancholy story – like our real lives, we have such passionate loves and friendships in our early years yet in the end, everyone is allied with their duties and occupations, with friendship a distant consideration. I even realized that with my best buddy on the phone last night – good friends for thirty years but a thousand miles, five kids and two spouses apart. All those long games and movie marathons – negated. And […]

June 17, 2017

OpsLog – L&N – 6/17/2017

t’s been a while since I operated on John Wilkes’ L&N layout. It’s a double dispatcher delight – two DSers sitting shoulder to shoulder, one for the L&N, one for the Southern, working together to get trains over shared trackage across the dual division. Of course, as the Prince of Dispatching (let’s not think about that unfortunate event with two dozen dead passengers in a tunnel a few weeks back) I was expecting to be invited to dispatch. Walked into my usual place in the dining room – there was the magnetic board, the warrant pad, the train sheets. And… […]

June 17, 2017

Interpreter of Maladies (Review)

his isn’t my usual type of book. There are no trains, no musketeers and no spaceships. This is about ordinary people, Indian people, going through gradual encounters of change. My wife read it and I had a look – after all, it couldn’t suck too badly. Ms. Lahiri won a Pulitzer for this effort. You also might remember that I reviewed the first story I read a few weeks ago, A Temporary Matter. I really enjoyed it, and looked forward to more of the same. And in that, my hopes were realized. Again, not dramatic action here, no 24 pace. […]

June 14, 2017

The Good, the Bad, and the Late-Night (DOG EAR)

es, stories. It’s what connects us to entertainment, to meaning and memories. Father’s Day is rolling around, made less-so by the fact my dad has passed away a few years back, but more-so for the same reason. Now it’s no longer just a card. Now it’s about a personal storytelling observance. See, when I was a kid living on a base in the Philippines during the wind-down of the War in Vietnam, one night my dad invited me to stay up and watch a movie with him. I’d watched late-nighters with him in the past, generally being introduced to some […]

June 10, 2017

A Borrowed Man (Review)

like noir. I like detective stories set in gritty cities where a shoe-leather, trenchcoat guy who knows people and knows the city plays against power (mob or city hall) and figures out the guilty party (even if that party is his client). Yeah, it’s a great genre. A Borrowed Man, by Gene Wolfe, attempts to use a scifi setting to update this mythical misty figure. This time it’s in the far future in a depopulated, exhausted (but seemingly verdant) Earth. The Borrowed Man in question is author E.A. Smithe, who seemingly penned many scifi classics including Mission to Mars. Now […]

June 8, 2017

Little help (DOG EAR)

ou might remember that I’d written about doing a podcast with Ben Lockett. He’d agreed to host me on a podcast about Bikes And… In this case, it would be about commuting, something I’m a strong advocate for. Well, the first attempt did not go well at all. Not only could my brother not get his Skype to work, the combination of his phone and his echoey den proved too much for audio purposes. The connection was the shits and Ben contacted me a couple of days later asking if we could redo it (assuming I could find something better […]

June 1, 2017

Mr Blue Sky (DOG EAR)

kay, I’ll admit it – I’m a Guardians of the Galaxy fanboy. Me and wifey own the first move and just went out to see the second. A quick synopsis – a kid is abducted off Earth in the 80s, and all he’s got is a Walkman with taped music from that time. Now mercing around the Galaxy, he’s a goodnatured goofball who takes on dangerous missions and assembles a team of powerful misfits to assist him. And one of these characters is Groot, a huge treeman who is obliterated in an act of selfless sacrifice at the end of […]

May 31, 2017

OpsLog – LM&O – 5/31/2017

poiler alert! I occasionally screw up while dispatching. If you weren’t there or don’t like bloodshed, you might not want to read further. I burned twenty-five people alive in a fiery tangled holocaust inside a tunnel. If you don’t like unhappy endings, you might not want to continue. I’m very sad. Yeah, so it was a busy night on the LM&O. We’ve redone large sections of our layouts, some turnouts aren’t powered, others aren’t hooked up. Lots of work over the last month so everything was filthy (even with John L. paradropping in to soften the beach and pre-clean). It […]

May 28, 2017

A Temporary Matter (Review)

hoba and Shukumar are a young Indian couple living somewhere in the west on their quiet street with their quiet lives, she an editor, he still a student. And in the mail comes an announcement that following the last snowstorm the power company wants to firm up their repairs so for the next five nights service will be cut from eight to nine PM. Sounds innocent enough. The couple continues on their lives, with reflections provided by Shukumar as he considers, without enthusiasm, the state of their marriage. It turns out that some time before Shoba had been pregnant with […]

May 27, 2017

Jupiter as never before (5/27/2017)

ate spring and summer skies are sucky night skies for astronomer. No Orion. None of the favorites. It’s pretty much open space with few things to bullseye. But tonight was clear and Jupiter was on a close approach so I set up the tripod at dusk and waited for the gas giant to come into view. Okay, first lesson learned – if you are aiming for something rising, don’t set up in the middle of the yard. Set up to the west so you can catch things coming up from the east sooner. I could see Jupiter inside an oak […]