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March 22, 2020

The Lives of Tao (Review)

kay, so the idea here is that an alien ship crashed here millions of years ago. The aliens are gaseous creatures who cannot live long in our air but can enter into living things (but once they do, they are stuck until death). They cannot really directly control those creatures but can speak to them using the magic of italic fonts. And with the rise of humans, now they have a chance to shape our race to their liking, to influence us to greater heights (and along the way, to build them a starship to return home). Kinda odd, right? […]
March 19, 2020

Days of plague and the new media (DOG EAR)

o for last week’s column, I wrote something about people forcing their phone media on you. That afternoon, I met three crazy ex-work ladies at Applebees and hung out with them for about four hours. As we bid each other goodnight, little did I imagine how different everything would be a week later. Now we’ve been staying homeside for about five days. Very quiet. Been working on my games and my writing. Still doing bike rides. Even took the wife out on the tandem to a small park where we ate dinner on a bench, just to get out of […]
March 15, 2020

The Little Paris Bookshop (Review)

ot this one for the wife a Christmas or so ago, a little romance chick-licky story about a fifty-year old somewhat sexy but inwardly dead guy who sells books from a boat on the Seine River in Paris, who lives a zombie life, who has an empty room in his apartment he hasn’t gone into, and who gave a table from said room to his sexy but equally extinguished female neighbor which came from that reluctantly breached room, and who forgot about the letter in the table from the woman who broke his heart and left twenty years past. Yes, […]
March 11, 2020

Pushy Media (DOG EAR)

o I’m an old guy. I only started carrying a phone because I’m cycling in this crazy city (Orlando). And it’s an old flip phone I’ve had for a decade. People walking on the nature trails around here piss me off when they have their heads in their phones. And drivers with phones (which is illegal), don’t get me started. Not a fan. But something that’s really become an issue – with all the content and bandwidth available, people are watching more stuff, and they are watching it louder and louder. On the train I ride, it’s become an epidemic […]
March 8, 2020

New York 2140 (Review)

picked this one up at that Madeira Beech bookstore I mentioned in another review. The cover shows New York, but if you think about the name of the book and look closely, you’ll see that a lot of the forefront buildings are actually standing in water (with boats moving about them). So yes, this is a tale of what it’s like to live in the Big Apple when it becomes the Big Sea Grape in a century and a half. Global warming a reality. The result of our sins. And actually, New York has largely recovered. Where streets were once, […]
March 5, 2020

Podcast (DOG EAR)

aw an interesting thing today (a Sunday) – the wife and I decided to walk over to a local eatery to have breakfast. We’ve done dinner there a couple of times – it’s a little pricy but very eclectic and trendy and rather fun. And it’s the only place I can get what is becoming my favorite drink, Arrogant Bastard Beer. Only not for breakfast. This breakfast, we ordered our food and sat down, only to see two young guys sitting in the back corner with a bight light shining on them, bantering furiously away about StarWars, Jurassic Park, remakes, […]
March 1, 2020

God’s Not Dead (Review)

kay, so I know how angry one can get when marginalized. I ride bikes. Rode them as a commuter for twenty years and now to keep in shape. And I’m well aware of the boundless animosity drivers show towards us. Back by the old trope of “seeing a cyclist go through a stop sign”, they overlook that cars do it on a regular bases (as well as speeding, reckless driving, tearing through school zones, all that). So, see? It pisses me off. So I get where the author is coming from in God’s Not Dead. As the subtitle notes, the […]
March 1, 2020

OpsLog – FEC – 02/29/2020

don’t think I’ve ever had a more pleasant ops session. Was back on the FEC panel. It was a crisp late-winter day so the shed doors were wide open, the breezes cool and the skies cobalt. The crew was old pros so no dicking around and very sharp skills. I got the panel humming and the trains followed their timetables, meeting and working and generally not delaying each other. In the yard, the ladies (and our new engine hostler) worked as a team, getting trains in and out. All that mattered to me was that they prepped the departure track […]
February 27, 2020

OpsLog – LM&O – 2/26/2020

mage you were trying to conduct a symphony and two oboes, a french horn, two violins and a tuba show up. That was ops with a limited number of people. People were sick. People forgot. People were out of town. People were sulking. I dunno what all the excuses were. However, when we don’t have turnout, our efforts suffer. There isn’t as much traffic across the summit. The freight forwarding system slows down and backs up. We didn’t organize our resources (everyone wants to run a specific train). So that’s why we got all the coals and passenger trains, four […]
February 27, 2020

Best of 2019

t hit me a few weeks back that I had completely forgotten to do my best books of 2019 (something I’ve been doing for a few years now). Well, better late than never, I suppose. I will add this generic comment that, looking back, outside of enjoying The Expanse and suffering through (in, in retrospect, appreciating Infinite Jest), there wasn’t anything that really blew me away (or made me tear up or fob onto friends) last year. So, without any particular order, here’s my faves from 2019. Don Quixote – this includes both books. I really did enjoy the adventures […]