robert.admin – Page 61 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

October 4, 2020

Night Flights (Review)

he fifth of the Mortal Engines series, a YA franchise where, following the 60-second war, towns rebuilt on tracked platforms and chase each other, practicing “Urban Darwinism” by eating each other. And there’s airships and strange tech and interesting people, the usual. It’s a breezy-easy read, perfect for YAs and for reviewers who need to come up with a review a week to keep the blog fires burning. About the book – this time its about Anna Fang, anti-tractionist terrorist, kick-ass air captain, and later a nasty cyborg that launches an all-out global war. But this is about young Anna, […]

October 4, 2020

OpsLog – WVN – 10/3/2020

n these days of Covid, one has to weigh the risk of getting a disease with the fun you’ll have. Granted, I’m not about to jam into a bar just so I can get a watered-down drink and a reminder of how bad the current generation of music is. And my hair really, really needs a cut. But a chance to run on the Komars’ West Virginia Northern (in full masks and even cute blue booties (well, that’s for static but maybe it will help)) is a chance not to be missed. I was so excited driving over. I can’t […]

October 1, 2020

False Narratives (DOG EAR)

here’s this Texan thing – a guy living in the middle of the Dallas/Ft. Worth metropolitan area, surrounded by concrete all the way to the horizon and not within a hundred miles of a single cow, wears a cowboy hat. That’s the Texan narrative, the proud cowboy (even though, historically, their economy was more based on rice and cotton than livestock) and the cowboys that were wore everything from straw hats to bowlers. But they wear their funny headgear, 150 years out of date. But that’s how modern (and, largely, American) society works. Surrounded by more facts and truth than […]

September 27, 2020

The Three-Body Problem (Review)

p front: Fantastic book! I’m not sure how this one showed up on my shelf. I was looking for something to read and found this at the bottom of a pile (actually, I do think I know where it came from). But this is a review, not a confession. The Three-Body Problem is a story from China by Cixin Liu, one of the greats of Chinese literature. It starts off in our real world, during the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. And all that seems normal enough (it its humanically horrible sort of way). Then we get a strange […]

September 27, 2020

OpsLog – TBL – 9/26/2020

understand that Covid-19 has crippled ops. My monthly sessions at three different layouts (and the thrice-a-year specials) have been annulled. For the first time in seven years, I won’t be going to La Mesa (which I had to fight my way to originally get accepted). Yes, Covid sucks. Today Greg Wells and I held our third session of the Tuscarora Branch Line. I invited everyone at the club to attend – we had room for another position to fill. But as with the last two sessions, I ran both dispatch and the coal movements since we were short-handed. Really, I’m […]

September 24, 2020

A nice review-review (DOG EAR)

while ago I read a delightful short story from a collection from a going-out-of-business and lamented-over publisher. The story was Gelato Parlour, and was a very quirky story about a gentleman of adventure. You can read the review HERE. So that was a while ago. But the other day I received a very nice email from the author, Rose Biggin, telling me how much she appreciated my review (the one thing about reading quirky short stories from other people – you might be their only review and she implies I was). But I had been enthusiastically supportive of her story […]

September 21, 2020

Candide (Review)

he driving idea of Candide comes from the titled character, a young man of some privilege who lives in a nice castle and has food, entertainment, a girl he’s sweet on, everything he could hope for. More in amusement than anything else, he chats with the court’s learned philosopher. Doctor Pangloss, with smug certainty, denotes that everything is here for a reason, and hence (by the chain of logic) this reality must represent The Best of All Possible Worlds. Hence the alternate title to the book, Optimism. And hence the coming irony. Of course, almost immediately, Pangloss has his way […]

September 20, 2020

OpsLog – TBL – 9/19/2020

he latest session of the TBL was held at the club today. Again, Greg Wells and I gave it a shot. This was the sixth session and the second live session. So this time we ran the full effort with coal extras pulling through Greg’s choreographed local moves. The interesting thing here is to realize that a 2×4 foot layout is so small, you need to be keenly aware what the other train is doing. Here, the dispatcher (me, in this case) needs to look at his lineup sheet and make sure that when a coal extra comes into Tuscarora, […]

September 17, 2020

Reckless (DOG EAR)

ast night, a car came around a sharp corner behind our house, travelled 200 feet with perfect visibility, street lights, no rain, and managed to plow right into the back of a parked car. The debris field was scattered another 200 feet down the road and both cars needed to be towed. I’m willing to suspect, since external factors were nil, that the driver was either drunk, distracted, driving-too-fast, or drifting. You shouldn’t operate a motor vehicle in any of these states. Nor should you read a book in this condition. There are all sorts of books, brilliant books, world-changing […]

September 13, 2020

A Man Without A Country (Review)

s with Kurt Vonnegut and his style, we hop all over the place, looking at the world through this lens and that, reflecting as randomly as a pond on a sunny day. And I rather like it. A Man Without a Country was written at the end of the author’s life, a look at his own history, his experiences in World War Two (and the bombing of Dresden), as well as the current political climate (which was during the Bush/Cheney years). And a note on that – everything he said about the corruption, the abuse of power, the criminality of […]