robert.admin – Page 205 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

October 4, 2012

Are writers better drivers (DOG EAR)

I was driving home after dropping Ark off at the library. Two lane road, and over on the opposite side, riding against the flow, a cyclist on a yellow bike. No gearing, upright stance, big retro fenders. No real branding or effort to conform to “road” or “mountain”. A K-mart bike. And the rider, a guy with flip flops, a ball cap, no gloves, in street shorts and a shirt. And, as mentioned, he’s on the wrong side of the road. A casual cyclist. To the right side, the Hideaway bar. I’m looking at him, placing him as just the […]

October 2, 2012

Dumped

Came home from the club last night to find a new guest in the house. While driving to the gym, my wife had found a stray kitten on the side of a busy highway. Thunderstorms were coming in. Night was falling. She did the right thing – stopped, fetched it, brought it home. It was a yellow kitten, its eyes barely open, with flees and hardly any meat on its bones – you could hold it in your palm. JB did what she could – fed it milk from an eyedropper. We kept it in the bedroom in a box all […]

September 30, 2012

Ark (Review)

Flood was a book I’d read a couple of years back, before I was blogging (flogging?) books. It was an interesting idea, that underground oceans were down emptying upwards, that the world was slowly flooding, deeper and deeper until savage fights were breaking out around the last few mountain tops, and that as those went under the final survivors (floating on their garbage-roped rafts of trash) watched a bright flash as an off-stage space ark fired off its warp drives near Jupiter, throwing a set of human candidates towards a distant star system. Ark is the companion book to Flood, […]

September 27, 2012

It don’t come easy (DOG EAR)

(This was orignally supposed to run on Sept 20th but I wanted to touch on the movie The Words. Wonder if my life is better in the future…) There is the common thought that a writer is only a writer if he is a suffering writer. If you have a big house and kids and everything paid for, you aren’t wired to angst and can’t capture human existence. And that might be true – certainly people who know the crush of personal loss or the humiliations of modern society can ‘write what they know’. But sometimes it comes in so […]

September 26, 2012

OpsLog – LM&O – 10/26/2012

Well, the last couple of weeks have been club-tuf. We got our mower stolen. I got pulled off the sectional layout to work on the permanent, but neither is where I wanted them to be. A show is coming up. Got two out-of-state ops-trips to arrange. Work work work. I was pretty ground out from all this. Just tired. Came out for ops not knowing what to expect but, frankly, expecting the worse. Then again, I always anticipate the worst. That way, you’re never disappointed. But tonight, I was pleasantly surprised. I had fun at the club. Fun. Imagine that. […]

September 23, 2012

Opslog – UP Nebraska Division – 9/23/2012

Sometimes ops are very detailed, by the clock, by the book, era- and road-specific affairs. And sometimes its just pretty much running trains. Doc has been getting his old UP Nebraska Division (Omaha to Denver) back in service after a very long hiatus. He’d cleaned and staged, but I know the waybills were all over the place so we’d pretty much be just running through, no real switching. And that was fine. With the hassles of getting the modules ready for the upcoming show, the stolen lawnmower issue and club elections, it was nice just to run trains with friends […]

September 23, 2012

THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA (all reviews)

What follows is my full list of reviews, with links. You might not find every book published by man here, but damn, there’s a lot of them. A Accelerando (Review) A Clash of Kings (Review) Across the River and into the Trees (Review) Adjustment Day (Review) Affair in Araby (Review) After London; or, Wild England (Review) The Aftermath (Review) After the Golden Age (Review) Airborn (Review) Aircraft of World War 1 (Review) The Alchemist (Review) Alexander and the End of the World (Review) Algorithms to Live By (Review) Alien Chronicles: The Golden One (Review) Alien Chronicles: The Crimson Claw (Review) […]

September 23, 2012

The Wreck of the Titan (Review)

The Wreck of the Titan (or Futility, alternatively) was published in 1898 by Morgan Robertson. It came to my notice in another book (Flying to Valhalla) where its eerie prediction of the Titanic disaster was noted. Once again, a too-huge-for-its-own-good steamship. Once again, trying to set a speed record in foggy conditions. Once again, an unsinkable ship. And once again, that big lethal chunk of ice. Even given the weird gramophone, black-and-white writing of way-back-then, it’s an interesting read. Our main man (once Naval Lieutenant Rowland but now Common Seaman Drunkard Rowland) is a deck-swapping, hair-of-the-dog failure ever since he […]

September 20, 2012

The Words (Dog Ear)

I haven’t done a movie review for nearly a year (when I revamped the site, I dropped the movie section). But when I saw the movie The Words, I knew I had to touch on it. See, it’s a writer’s movie (don’t think that Finding Forrester was – that was a piece of shit). The Words is about a young writer (don’t we all know him) who is accepting an award for his critical success, living the life we all dream (don’t we look so clever? Isn’t our limo sooooo long?). As he and his gorgeous wife come out of […]

September 16, 2012

One step backwards

It’s very hard to keep a train club going through a hard economic downturn. Our older members get, well, older, and younger members just aren’t that common anymore. Its really not the high-speed, instant-gratification hobby they want. So there you are. But as money gets tighter, as we’ve got to pay for everything from paper towels to trailers, it doesn’t help that we are in a white-slum, corn pone neighborhood. It’s just white-trash, trailers, pickups, tattoos, and about six teeth total. And they’ve been ripping us off. First it was the AC copper. Then came the five rapid break ins […]