robert.admin – Page 142 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

March 22, 2015

What Money Can’t Buy (Review)

o I’m a socialist and my best friend is a libertarian. It makes for interesting weekly phone calls. However, What Money Can’t Buy, the new book by Michael Sandel, expresses everything I find wrong with the world (and can’t often articulate). Centrally – that market culture is replacing civil culture. Sandel tracks this across the last thirty years (and before), how often we allow money to determine what’s right and how goods will be distributed (strike that – right has nothing to do with it). Where theme parks used to have lines so everyone would join up in egalitarian fashion, […]

March 19, 2015

Wednesday Night Lights (DOG EAR)

f you go HERE, you’ll see my new interest in Astronomy. I’m fascinated by the skies – always have been, ever since I looked at the moon through my dad’s clunky Naval binoculars. And now that I’ve got a x35 scope and a big telescope on order, now I’m reading all about this and getting to know how you look for stars, how you find stars, about light pollution, all that. As part of this, my wife and I went to the local observatory (as luck would have it, it’s a mile from the house). There were several members of […]

March 15, 2015

War of the Worlds, plus Blood, Guts and Zombies (Review)

his is a tough one to review. I’m feeling like the food reviewer who is assigned to check out the local greasy spoon, a favorite of the lowly locals. Is it proper to equate what you eat there to the finest of French restaurants? Or if it’s a favorite for its clientele, should you pursue it with that angle? Okay, for those who don’t know about this sort of thing, there is a sub-culture of literature (in this case, “Blood Enriched Classics”), which takes a classic and puts zombies or whatever into their story. I first heard about this with […]

March 13, 2015

Saturn (3/13/2015)

t takes some effort to find these things. Last night, I checked where Saturn would be this morning at 6:30 (preceding the moon). Got up at 6:10. Walked outside – clear with broken clouds and there was the moon. Transported the scope outside, set it up, lined it up, swung it to bear. Over the sight I could see the moon and a bright star off to its right. Lined it up. Lower mag lens (x25 or so) I cast around in that area and suddenly there it was. I could see it, tiny rings and dunish body and all. […]

March 12, 2015

You haven’t read…? (DOG EAR)

kay, not this has happened twice. A person in conversation says, “Oh, you haven’t read…?” and then foists a book on me. And that’s fine. As you can see from my reading list HERE, I’m not focused on one thing. But in both cases, I’m halfway through and hence, of course, the follow-up conversation arises, where “I’m at the point where…” and that’s when I find out that, no, they haven’t read it. What? What??? I recommend books all the time – refer to that list above – but at least I’ve read them. And one of my sins is […]

March 11, 2015

Jupiter and M42 (3/8/2014)

‘posed to go out to Geneva Saturday night to get a clear star view. That didn’t go so well (heavy clouds). Next night, the computer told me that Io would be shadowing across Jupiter. Took the scope out at 10pm or so but couldn’t quite make it out (at 60x). Where is that backordered extender? While JB and I were running our usual drill around Orion, we did look in on M42 and that area, and caught a neat cluster of stars with a visible nebula around that. At first I thought it was some sort of smudge on my […]

March 8, 2015

Lord Foul’s Bane (Review)

wasn’t into Fantasy too much in the 70’s when this originally came out. Oh, I read the Ring stuff and loved Watership Down (a fantasy epic in its own right). But I’d never read Donaldson. Since then, I did read his The Real Story series and loved it. It had a gritty realism and unconventional storytelling that I found appealing. A bookhead friend from work suggested this one day while we were having our Lonely Literary Club chat so I took a look into it. In a nutshell, Lord Foul’s Bane is a stand-alone novel, yet also part of the […]

March 8, 2015

Atlas of the Moon (Review)

he what, you ask? Well, there’s my astronomy interest, bleeding over. Picked this up from the lending library at the Central Florida Astronomical Society (just how many clubs am I a member of?). While mostly the book is made up of plates showing beautifully clear drawings of a section of the Moon (including a side description of all the craters located there), what I really found most interesting were the descriptions of the Moon. Where it might have come from (at least back in 2004 – everything changes so fast). How it orbits. While this section isn’t all that long, […]

March 5, 2015

The Game’s Afoot (DOG EAR)

riting is all about the worlds we create. Even if it’s contemporary, even if it’s fantasy, we need a background for our actions to take place in (or, rather, where our heroes can be heroic at). When writing Fire and Bronze back in the pre-internet days, I spent a lot of time in the public library, looking at old maps, trying to get my head around the layout and atmosphere of what had been the city of Carthage. How high was Brysa hill, the rise on which the city was centered? What was the harbor like? What did the surrounding […]

March 1, 2015

Northwest Passage (Review)

kay, so I picked this one up at the Forbidden Planet shop (right next to the Strand Bookstore) on my New York trip. I’m not a big graphic novel fan – loved the original 300 and was reading The Spirit way back in the day. I’ll admit that there is a certain depth (dimensionally different from superb writing, but still there) that pictures can add to a story. So, here in Northwest Passage, we open with an Indian getting run down by a mob of Europeans on a ridge overlooking an English wilderness fort, where within, the one-time wilderness explorer […]