robert.admin – Page 208 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

December 22, 2012

Make way

Was riding home, this Friday before Christmas. Good time to be on a bike – the freeway was packed, the main roads were jammed, and many drivers were desperately trying their secret back ways to get through the press and meeting little luck. But on a bike, with plenty of bike lanes, it’s the usual commute home. South on 1792, down an endless lane of traffic. Up in the seat, watching over the roofs to make sure nobody is getting waved through (love that trick). And up ahead, I see a big FUV who’d played the timid game (or set […]

December 20, 2012

Killing them softly (DOG EAR)

Flutter, flutter, went the flag, first to the right, then to the left. This was a childhood awakening moment for me, the point in true literature (not kiddy literature, aka whatever passed for Harry Potter back then) when I leaned that people could die in books. Quick. Fast. Unexpectedly. The line comes from HG Wells’ War of the Worlds. The flag is a white flag of truce. The people holding it aloft are scientists and peace-seekers. And the beings on the other end of the leveled heat ray? Martians, with intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic. A moment later, they […]

December 16, 2012

Night on the Town

Interesting Saturday night. A work-friend, Diana, invited me to purchase tickets for an event her choir group was singing at. Keith and Kristyn Getty were hosting a performance of Joy – an Irish Christmas. Sure, why not. Got tickets for ourselves and the folks, too. Little bit of a hiccup day-of-show – Dad didn’t feel up to long walking and decided to just stay at our house while Mom, JB and I went to the Bob Carr (the Orlando Performing Arts Center (you really can’t use “Orlando” and “Performing Arts” in the same sentence, most times). Anyway, Diana snagged us […]

December 16, 2012

Game of Thrones (Review)

A good thing in George RR Martin’s thick Game of Thrones (the first of a series) is the character list in the back. So many characters! It’s like Bleak House. It would have been improved if it had a checkbox behind each one, so you could check them off as they died. Characters die a lot on the various struggles for power. Bravo. A friend loaned me the first book (“Yeah, thanks,” I murmured as I hefted it). It was pretty standard stuff, guys on horses, guys with swords, a threat from the north, the uneasy lord, every bit of […]

December 13, 2012

One year later (DOG EAR)

Hard to imagine, but its been a year. I was sorting through the knotted Christmas lights, wondering when they’d last been untangled. What, a year? No, wait. Last Christmas, we took a break from all that, spending the Christmas week in London. It was the year before. But as I teetered on the edge of the ladder, stringing the now-untangled lights, my thoughts went back to that last year. No, Christmas wasn’t a worry, nor the trip (we’ve done bunches of those). No, it was getting Early Retyrement between covers, as they say. If you’d have told be way back […]

December 9, 2012

The Fantastic World War II (Review)

The cover of this old paperback is a true eye-catcher: A Nazi officer and a Japanese solder whirl as a Corsair fighter flashes over them, guns blazing, against a backdrop of the crumpled Statue of Liberty. This collection was released by Baen back in 1990, and quite the collection it was. Like all collections, it had its not-so-goods, and its goods. Some of my favorites: Vengeance in her bones: An old tramp freighter hates U-boats so bad, it repeatedly wrenches the wheel out of the captain’s grasp to ram subs, or sit over them until the destroyers get to the […]

December 8, 2012

Getting old

Got home from the commute last night and noticed a thak-thak-thak noise from the back hub. Checked for broken spokes, nails through the sidewall (last week, got one of those), all that stuff. Nope. Sounds like the hub. Been dealing with birthday fallout, all that getting-older stuff now that I’ve rolled by bio-odometer to 54. So it was like an echo of last week when I pushed my bike into the shop and had the guy there say, “An old T-700. Haven’t seen one of those in ages. Used to have one years back”. I hadn’t noticed the years roll […]

December 6, 2012

Three Cups (DOG EAR)

I remember reading Three Cups of Tea and enjoying it – good book, and nice to know that good things occasionally happen. Except to people involved in this story. There came the allegations of fiction, that Mortenson, the adventurer whom the story centers on, had a “fluid sense of time” that “made pinning down the exact sequence of many events in this book almost impossible”. And class-action suits against him and his Central Asia Institute, with claims that he perhaps profited from his charity and that investors were swindled. And now the co-author (who parted with the hero in a […]

December 2, 2012

The Ten Thousand (Review)

I caught the reference to this novel right off the bat – the Ten Thousand is a reference to the like number of Greek mercenaries who signed up under Cyrus the Younger (a Persian linage queue-jumper)around 400BC. They began their trek in Ionia (western Turkey) and marched and fought all the way to Central Babylonia where their employer (and all their generals) were killed. Left without supplies in the middle of a hostile empire, totally cut off, they hoisted their thirty pound hoplon shields and turned due north, driving towards the distant Black Sea. Which is why, when I saw […]

November 29, 2012

Dung sellers (DOG EAR)

This always happens. It’s my birthday and I’m driving to Home Depot to pick up some caulk and tar to patch our roof (what a birthday!). NPR’s media show is talking about publishing and I’m getting more and more depressed. It’s all about how writers really need to market themselves, to find a niche and strategy, to come up with clever ways to gain notice, fans, and bandwidth. Shit, that’s marketing. It’s not writing. So trust me, I’m not going to make a comment that publishing should go back to the way it was, that as a writer, I should […]