robert.admin – Page 148 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

May 5, 2016

Understated (DOG EAR)

eople say that when anything happens to me, everyone knows about it. My kidney stone got more word-of-mouth (mostly my mouth) coverage than had it been a meteor burning its way towards a doomed Earth (and knowing my luck, it would be cloudy that last night so my telescope would be useless). But I digress. The point is that I’m a storyteller. Incidents are epics. Events are miniseries. Granted, I’m not like some (using a cartoony voice when straw-manning some person who has annoyed me in a later recount). I keep my stories honest. I just don’t keep them short. […]

May 1, 2016

The Historian (Review)

he Historian is a strange little (actually, quite big) novel, one that wanders through many voices (in the form of a father’s letters, a mother’s postcards, old love letters, even doomed scrawlings secured in a crypt) to eventually get around to telling a story horrifying in nature and long in telling. Look, don’t get me wrong – it’s a good read but it’s long in the effort. If you think you’re going to know what’s happening any time soon, you’ve another thing coming. Without giving too much away, we begin the story with the unnamed daughter of a gun-for-hire (it […]

April 28, 2016

Blogs (DOG EAR)

y buddy Steve is an interesting guy. Retired and funny, he descended like an angel into our train club with his electronics knowledge at exactly the right moment in our sectional layout effort. Instead of some kludgy half-thought-out-effort (since we didn’t have any sort of plan, I think that description qualifies), he came up with a bulletproof system that is one of the selling points of our sectional layout. Every show, one of us ends up sweeping back the skirts to show off what’s below track level (to model railroaders, that’s just as important as what’s on top). As the […]

April 27, 2016

OpsLog – LM&O – 4/27/2016

ell, several crews were out, some getting married, some at prom. The dispatcher was laced on painkillers. Just another night on the LM&O. Good turnout – always happy for that. A couple of guests got paired with crews. Me, I was running the Zanyesville makeup run. Last month this job didn’t get done and now it was twice is big as normal. So out of the yard I rumbled on warrant #1, direct to Zaynesville and the pile of work awaiting me. Wasn’t too bad, really. I just used my old tricks – sorting out cuts at the bottom of […]

April 24, 2016

The Jungle Book (Review)

o this isn’t your Disneyland version of The Jungle Book. It starts a couple of degrees off. In the film, young Mowgli is orphaned in what looks like a high-speed canoe crash. Bagheera the panther takes pity on the young creature and dumps him with a wolf pack. And that’s what makes him a wild boy. In the book, Shere Khan (who doesn’t show up until the final reel in the flick) is a lame tiger who is not urbanely deadly, but rather a limping posturing loser. When he attacks Mowgli’s woodcutter parents, he accidently leaps into the fire. The […]

April 23, 2016

OpsLog – L&N – 4/23/2016

ee, so, sometimes, I’m a sweetheart. I don’t tell about truly embarrassing stories, even when there is a fiery train wreck. I don’t blog out nice people. Regardless of the burning of Ramsey, the smoke of whose burning cast down despair among the people of Tennessee, we had a great ops session. I got to run the L&N DS panel, the hot seat of the whole railroad. My pal Ken Farnham ran the Southern board, sitting across from me. Even though it was his first time under warrants, he kept his end of the railroad moving and we hardly had […]

April 21, 2016

Floatation Devices (DOG EAR)

o I gotta wonder where this phrase came from. “Floatation Device” Think about it. Someone was tasked with writing copy. He might have been a tech writer or just an engineer. Whatever. Planes were probably mandated at some point to carry these things (like anyone could survive a 300mph water landing and then bob in the water and not go hypothermic before help arrived (Ah, the Hudson landing, you might say. From pictures, it looks like everyone just stood on the wings with their shoes filled with water). I don’t know if they ever actually got used. But this guy […]

April 17, 2016

The Big Over Easy (Review)

wasn’t sure what to make of this at first (an omelette?). Loaned to me after a book chat between adjacent modeling projects at the train club, I looked into this English satiricalists with a slight unease. Humor works differently. I can only point back to War of the Worlds: Plus Blood and Guts and Zombies to illustrate where it doesn’t for certain people. The Big Over Easy follows Detective Inspector Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division (see, what are you thinking, right now?). He’s a not-so-successful copper, having just seen his long case against the three pigs for the […]

April 16, 2016

Spring Star Party (4/16/2016)

o tonight was looking bad for the CFAS (Central Florida Astronomical Society) Spring Star Party. At 4pm, clouds were rolling in. I was pretty much not going and then I checked the Orlando Clear Sky Chart, an awesome site that gives you star gazers an idea of what your viewing night is going to be like (taking into account clouds, the moon, the winds, everything). And according to it, at 8pm we’d be clear. So I loaded up the Jetta with wife and scope and off we went. It really didn’t look good. The clouds grew darker and I capped […]

April 14, 2016

Spring Cleaning! (DOG EAR)

n The Name of the Wind, the magical university library sprawls across dusty space and time, it’s indexing part of a constant war between librarian factions. Some systems would be by title, some by subject, some by magical context. Bureaucratic wars are fought – indexes are burned, and the library, it ends up as a massively confusing collection of books. I was facing a similar problem with my own Library of Alexander. When I started doing reviews five or so years back, I was just blogging about things I was reading. I’d let my website sort them out, just popping […]