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June 28, 2015

White Wing (Review)

ere’s another entry for my review mid-eighties, mid-level scifi, this time a novel by Gordon Kendall, White Wing. Endless Galactic warfare is pretty much the law of the ‘verse here, namely by the League against the evil Sejiedi. No crazy creatures here, no. It’s humans on all sorts of different planets, each with tiny differences. For the League, these planets (or confederations) fly space fighters in wings denoted by color (i.e. blue, red, etc). And the late-coming Earthers? We’re White Wing. And we’re hated. I guess it goes back to the fact that our planet was destroyed two hundred years […]
June 27, 2015

OpsLog – FEC – 6/27/2015

he FEC. Great railroad. The only thing the host, Ken Farnham, could do to make it better is to change the benchwork height. See, Cocoa yard is at a great height to switch, but when it comes to using it for banging your head, it’s just a little too low. I have to lean in to crack myself in the skull, over and over, when I goof up. See, I was running 915, the train that leaves Cocoa and runs down to Buenaventura to do a lot of switching. It’s tricky, the usual balance of pulling stuff out and putting […]
June 25, 2015

Echo (DOG EAR)

was feeling pretty down. I’d read The People’s History of the United States – not the apple-pie Sousa march towards patriotism you’d expect. Then, watching a clip of Good Will Hunting (the friend who’d recommended the book had pointed it out), Robin Williams mentions Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomski as another good book. Curious, I ordered it from the library. It’s just as depressing as People’s History, a discussion of how propaganda in media occurs, how it always benefits the rich and entrenched, all that. As a liberal, sometimes the world can be a bleak and depressing place, and I […]
June 24, 2015

OpsLog – LM&O – 6/24/2015

t was quite the night at club ops. We had a lot of people, always thankful of that. For once I wasn’t the dispatcher, just a local running to Zanesville and beyond to Carbon Hill. A good run – engines worked well and I knocked off the switchlist quite orderly. Stuff went where it was supposed to go and I made clean moves for it all. Only surprise – coming back to Zanesville from Carbon Hill – had clearance to work all tracks (since I needed to work Bolton Box, pull a bunch of outbounds off the head-in track for […]
June 21, 2015

War World (Review)

illiam Dietz is an established scifi author with something like forty books to his credit, but everyone starts someplace. His origin was War World, an interesting first effort that launched his career. It’s been sitting one of my book boxes for ages, since the mid-eighties. Anyway, out it came for another read. It’s a fun book, I’ll give it that. In the eighties, we were still gaga over dashing Han Solo (back in the days when he shot first). Now, after thirty years of grim realism (usually with sprawling worlds of mile-high slums and spaceships that take decades to get […]
June 18, 2015

Grinding (DOG EAR)

kay, so I started playing this game, see? A little sea adventure called Windward. Clever thing, rather like Pirates. You get a ship, you sail around a random board, you trade between towns and sink pirates. I started playing about a week ago. I sunk a literal boatload of pirates – I’d see those black sails and I’d volley instinctively – must have sent an armada of pirate ships to the bottom. And trading. Pick something up here, take it over there. Repeat. I played and played and played. Then I started reading the bases for the game and its […]
June 13, 2015

Stardust (Review)

’ve been reading a lot of angry books recently – all fulla leftists and carpet bombing B-52s and Nazis and neo-punks racing across deserts. Thus, it was nice to sit back and crack the cover of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. He co-wrote a novel with another author I loved, Terry Pratchett (Good Omens), which I most thoroughly enjoyed. I’ve read a couple of his other books, Anansi Boys and American Gods, so I figured I’d be getting a good read after such grim tomes. He didn’t disappoint. With a dose of whimsy, we are introduced to the town of Wall which […]
June 11, 2015

Way behind (DOG EAR)

don’t know how this works. I was comfortably ahead with my Dog Ear pieces and now they are all but gone. Yet suddenly, where I had no idea of what I wanted to write, three new ideas popped into my head (this is one of them). So now, on the Saturday evening of a lazy memorial day, I find myself with the following things to knock out. 1) This piece, describing the situation of everything suddenly looming. 2) A Dog Ear piece on Grinding (on what?) 3) A Dog Ear piece I found concerning a checkout list discovered in a […]
June 7, 2015

Manufacturing Consent (Review)

he guy who got me to read The People’s History of the United States also sent me a YouTube video of Good Will Hunting, a scene where that book is referenced. Matt Damon is saying how amazing it was, an eye-opener (agreed) where upon Robin Williams counters with Manufacturing Consent. Okay, so since I read one, this lead me to read the other. If you are on any medications for depression, I can’t recommend this effort. That’s not to say it isn’t good. Actually, it’s great – in the way it made me look at the world (and the United […]
June 4, 2015

Disingenuous (DOG EAR)

love English. I am thankful that it is my primary language (like I know any others!). But English is a beautiful language to write in. The rules are loose. You can make up words and sling them around. You can change tempo and pacing and meanings, pick words for foreshadowing and flavor. I don’t know if any other language has quite the versatility of ours. It always comes to me, when I’m reading a superb book, what a great language this is. A page from China Mielville or HG Wells or George McDonald Fraser drip with flavor. I can watch […]