robert.admin – Page 169 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

April 2, 2015

Eureka! (DOG EAR)

he incandescent moment that hits without warning. Just had one. Was at work the first Monday of March. The work day was through. Was outside my pod, loading my bike for the ride home. Weather was pleasant. Hanging the saddlebags over the bike’s haunch, my fanny pack around my rump. Tossed on my lobster bib. Gloves. Road ID. Sweatband. Helmet. We’re good to BANG Right there, an idea, another, and another. I literally rocked back on my heels. A concept erupted in my mind, a wondrous vision of a steampunk world in a unique setting (one I’m not ready to […]

April 1, 2015

ClubLog – ONT – 4/1/2015

ome folks in the club wanted this blogged, so here you are. It’s been a weird April 1st today. I played a couple of pranks today, one of them on the club (a freeway was coming through). I was pretty proud of myself – I find myself so very amusing. Worked at the club. Did a little scenery and a lot of club maintenance – trash goes out, filters swapped, vinegar down the drain, doodah, doodah. So now it’s getting late and time, perhaps to leave. First problem – we’ve got a short on the main across Bethlehem. For some […]

March 29, 2015

A People’s History of the United States (Review)

know enough to be outraged by slavery. I don’t agree (i.e. I think it’s horseshit) to the droll explanation of economics and time and place that makes slavery in the U.S. into some understandable economic phase. It’s as if we consider that our country is a human being and the slavery phase was when it was rebelliously and petulantly thirteen. We had steam engines, telegraphs, and iron-working to the point where we could build metal ships. And still we had people in chains? I mean, WTF? So that didn’t surprise me. But everything else in Howard Zinn’s massive A People’s […]

March 29, 2015

The Sweep (3/29/2015)

t’s been a busy period here, one full of frustration. Right now I’m wrapping up an evening sweeping everything I can identify – clear night, finally. The last thing I want to look at is the moon, currently hiding behind grandfather pine. Anyway, my barlow lens arrived a week and some back, which doubles my existing lens (giving me 120X, but I’m begriming to realize that isn’t all that it sounds). Still, the day it came, cloudy. The next day, cloudy. And cloudy cloudy cloudy. Finally, while coming home from the club Wednesday night, I saw that the moon was […]

March 28, 2015

OpsLog – FEC – 3/28/2015

een listening to a lot of old radio serials while drilling though audits at work. Some of them are pretty stupid but there are a couple I really like, amongst them Gunsmoke and Frontier Gentleman. However, I really like this new one, Night Beat, where an intrepid night-shift newsguy digs up stories in 1930’s Chicago. Usually it involves gangsters leaning on him, generally beating the shit out of him while sneering things like, “So, going to write about that, Newsie?” Yeah, well, I know what it’s like. So we ran Ken Farnham’s Florida East Coast, and I was once again […]

March 26, 2015

OpsLog – LM&O – 3/25/2015

‘m late on this piece – yeah, I know. Running home after a great session, I saw the moon through (appropriately) the moonroof, and so regardless of the time, one hobby lent itself to another and I was outside with the scope until 12:30am. But that’s hobbies for you. Even when I came in and was putting the peeper away, I really didn’t know what to write about. We had a good showing, a number of the old timers had much of the layout already cleaned. The clocks booted up in master/slave configuration perfectly. My paperwork was already out and […]

March 26, 2015

Death’s Doorway (DOG EAR)

veryone who’s a geek can remember that dramatic moment in Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan, where Spock dies. I can remember a trekkie next to me quietly sobbing in the dark. Truthfully, it was as good a death scene as could be written, full of sacrifice and victory and sadness. Of course, they ruined it in the third movie – his body wasn’t even cold yet and suddenly he popped back in, none the worse for wear. Character death is a primary tool (like a chainsaw, a valuable yet dangerous tool) of the writer. Killing an important character […]

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 […]