Dog Ear

hen my wife tells the purse story, she always does it wrong. She starts with, “I left my purse in a Tokyo bathroom but someone brought it back.” I mean, what can you do with a story after this? All the suspense, the tension, the comedy and the trans-pacific dread, shot. When we meet mutual friends who haven’t heard this tale, I jump in an start with the Kyoto exchange leading into the chaos of the Narita Airport, the police, the sweaty brows, all that. I thought about that a lot, the way my wife tells the tale. I thought […]

’m not dead. Nor is the Blogtorium. But it’s late, I know, but there were reasons. Some time ago I noticed that the Blogatorium (where you are now reading this) was down. Really down. Nothing but the pen, the word “Manuscript”, the tan screen and nothing else. Now I’ve gone down once before – for GoDaddy issues (it came up two days later). But this time they weren’t suffering any national malware attacks. And I’d just agreed to some service plan where they would nightly scan my site for malware and whatever. Yes, my site has been knocked on before. […]

o, last week I mentioned the week I was down for a crash. That was in November. So where was my site since then? Well, I’d mentioned my vow, how I would run official backups through GoDaddy (and not these self-launched efforts I’d been laboring with). I called them and signed up for the program. No problems. The tech checked my site and said it would be fine (refer to the blog before this on how fine “fine” can be). The next day I logged into GoDaddy and checked my backups. They’d crashed. Back on tech support, it turns out […]

s traditionally on this site (well, as of last year), here are my outstanding books from 2018. I am not ranking these in any order. Simply put, they are the best five from the 50 or so reviews I did this year. If you are looking for something to spend your Barnes & Noble gift card on, these are you best choices. Leviathan Wakes – This has become a powerful series on the Sci-Fi network, a great saga of books that follows four characters on a small stolen ship in a universe defined by our solar system (in a hundred […]

ime is always a sour subject with me. I’ve never had enough of it. Even without kids, even with a quiet, low-maintenance wife, there isn’t. I haven’t written seriously (my old Tuesday/Thursday lockdown) for years now. And there are the dusty model  trains, the abandoned telescope, the unwatched movies. But still, in all this, I’m active, frantically so. My recent efforts have been writing StoreyMinus, an interactive game that is nearing something like completion. And then there are two nights each week at the train club. Oh, and my buddy who is in a distant hospital, necessitating a long 2-3 […]

his isn’t writer’s block. At least I don’t think so. There was an old Odds Bodkins comic (a Berkley counter-culture strip from the late 60s) where a character mumbles that it’s Monday and his brains are in the basement. I’ve always remembered that and it comes to mind now while considering a Thursday blog. Sometimes I just don’t feel like writing. Nothing creative comes to mind. It’s like that with game writing. I’m still adding functionality and adventure to StoreyMinus. During the day, I’ll be so excited to add new stuff to my adventures, like old bomb shelters (complete with […]

saw this great Martin Scorsese flick back when it came out in 1985. Funny story – my best friend’s mom and her daughter went to the art-flic house to see it and were totally confused. Why was this male dating-from-hell movie funny? The next night they took us to see it. We laughed uproariously all the way through it. They looked at us like it was some sort of elaborate joke. If you are a man, see it and think of your own dating disasters. If you are a woman, ask your man to explain it. Or stick with Outlander. […]

nteresting thing happened the other night. I’ve invited my fireball niece (who has done everything from traveling across Ireland with us to riding a critical mass on a Blompton) to do a guest review. She’s settling into her world o’ work and has a little more time, now that her school/party days are sadly fading behind her. Since she’s reading more, I hoped to get some of her book reviews up (less work for me, right?). She agreed. So, the night in question, she IMed me to tell me she was going to write a review. I thought about it […]

ack in my younger years, some forty years past, I would attempt to get people to see favorite movies. I’d loan them my VHS tapes. I’d offer to sit with them in the theater. I’d nag and beg and plead. I’d even bribe. I remember coming home to tell my brother all about the Anime Star Blazers we’d been following religiously in college. Or Run Lola Run. Or just about any great flick or series or episode. And you know what – 99% of the time, nobody would spare the time. Apparently the greatest gift, that of time, was not […]

just started a new SciFi series a friend of mine sent me for Christmas. When I pursued the back cover, I noted all the libertarian praise. Guns and dogs and freedom comments. A fatigue fell over me. I’ve read a couple of libertarian books before and, without exception, they are always the same. A buff, handsome entrepreneur, heavy with bitter backstories and loaded for bear, decides to make a stand against a mass of people so liberally unlikable that it brings tears to your eyes. If you’ve ever enjoyed socialist privilege, even to the point of checking out a library […]