robert.admin – Page 152 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

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 […]

April 10, 2016

Beachhead (Review)

t’s unfair to contrast Jack Williamson’s Beachhead against the phenomenal The Martian. Yes, they both involve the abandonment of one or more people against a two-year mission window, a desperate effort of survival. And Mark Watney is more of a likable wisecracker than the driven Texan billionaires’ son, Sam Houston Kellingan (who spends much of the book feeling bad about not getting one of the women sharing his mission, abandoning another woman in Texas (with child, it would seem) and ignoring another mission chum, a sweet puppydog. And then there are father issues, mother issues, brother issues. No wonder he […]

April 9, 2016

ShowLog – Deland – 4/9/2016

ell, it might be the end of our Deland Shows – we’re not sure at this point. We’ve been told that the fairgrounds is boosting their building rentals by 1003% and the train show is passing their butt-kicking on to us. So we’re not sure if we’ll be out there in July. Hard to say when we started doing Deland – back then we were hoisting our splintery N-trak modules in on our backs and taking ten hours (or more) to get the chaotically-wired monster running (honestly, it looked like the North Korea Model Railroad club at times). Here is […]

April 7, 2016

A verbal plea (DOG EAR)

kay, so not so much writing as communicating and identifying a new (or somewhat old) trend. I recently watched an impassioned message by comedian Sarah Silverman on Facebook. She’s making the pitch for Bernie Sanders. Yeah, I like her and I like Bernie – I voted for one of them recently, not sure which. This issue here is not political, though. It’s toastmastersical. I noticed, as I watched the video through, that the stream breaks and breaks and breaks, as if they shot it a number of times and pieced something together. To me (with my boomer viewpoint) this appears […]

April 4, 2016

M3 and the Queen of the Skies (4/3/2016)

t was pretty clear tonight. Looked at the star charts and decided to shoot for M3, a star cluster I’d never seen. It would be rising above Arcturus tonight, above the line formed between this and the dipper handle. Like, how hard could it be? Messier found it – his first one. My view east sucks (remember how we learned that watching OA-6? The oaks get in the way). Anyway, squidged over to the corner of the garden on the path and got as much east as I could. Saw Jupiter shimming in ascent and took an early shot – […]

April 3, 2016

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Review)

e’d watched the first few episodes of the miniseries lifted from this book and petered out – just didn’t hold us. And then a person I know at work borrowed a copy of this book and tried to get through it, only to die on the white burning pages about halfway through. And when I’d agreed to read it, and when it was handed to me (with both hands, all 782 pages of it (why do people loan me such massive books?)), I knew I had my work cut out for me. But, actually, not bad. Jonathan Strange & Mr. […]

March 31, 2016

The Adventure Begins (DOG EAR)

otta make this vague – too much real-world tie in here. But there is a point to be made. Sometimes things happen, especially between the individual and the group. Wars begin over a slight between princes. Men are called into the dusty street to slap leather over a quip. The course of lives change over the smallest of things. Without being specific, such a thing recently happened between myself and a group and I didn’t see it coming, I hated it when it happened, burned in shame the entire evening, and lay in bed the entire night thinking of what […]

March 27, 2016

Tanks (Review)

o, what do you do when you have an hour for lunch, no computer and no book? Well, there is always a work laptop and Project Gutenberg. This time I found a nifty short story, Tanks, written in first issue of Astounding Tales (Vol 1, Number 1, January 1930, a new decade, new magazine, a new future – so optimistic). Anyway, I always enjoy stories like this, ones where author attempts future combat based on what they know (from World War One) and what they can guess (from the current day). And while Tanks was a bit off, it was […]