Dog Ear – Page 42 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

August 13, 2020

The Robby Awards (DOG EAR)

he heat was sheeting off the three eastbound lanes running towards Bithlo, Florida. I was in the right lane behind a massive pickup truck with all its proudly stickered vulgarities. Suddenly the trunk swerved its massive tires left, cutting into the center lane. In horror, I saw a guy on a hog (with no helmet) making an equally uncleared and unsignaled shift from the far left lane. Both spotted each other and locked up (I had to stop because the wide back end of the pickup was still in my lane). Then, like pitbulls, they screamed at each other, unmasked […]

August 20, 2020

Start the Presses! (DOG EAR)

t was the weekend of my quarterly chore, putting together the fall issue of the Journal Box, a newsletter I do for our National Model Railroad Association region. This is just an example of what happens when you are a known writer – everyone has resumes, cover letters, and assembly-and-print nightmares for you to do. Because, you know, you write and all. But seriously, if I’d been there and they’d asked someone else, I’d have been writing a “why didn’t they pick me?” blog. So, yes, better to complain from the battlements than from the base of the wall, I […]

August 27, 2020

Business Communication (DOG EAR)

uch of my last twenty years in business involved learning to write. Oh, not the whole thing about wine-dark seas and such; I already know how to wax descriptively. No, in this case, it was to write informatively. I was having to manage compliance issues across an organization situated across the globe. In this, email was the tool of choice; my requests and corrections involved too many people to one-on-one with a phone. However, to keep from having my email turn into a long thread of postings and counter-postings, I had to learn to make sure that information was conveyed […]

September 3, 2020

Summer Reading List (DOG EAR)

dear friend of mine wrote me Monday – she’s got two girls and for next year, they have to list forty books they might consider reading. Since she’s inert as a reader, but I devour books like a wood chipper, she asked if I could come up with some sort of list. Okay, I couldn’t come up with forty (challenge; can you?). But since they consider a book 150 pages and longer ones count as two books, I might have made the cut. Anyway, below is the response I sent her. See how many of these you’ve read and maybe, […]

September 10, 2020

Juniors Diner (DOG EAR)

e used to love going to Juniors Diner, a little hole-in-the-wall place just around the corner from us. When I was working, we’d go in on Sunday and try to time it between the church rushes. Still, once it got discovered by the swells of Baldwin Park it really crowded up – there could be a forty-five minute wait for a table. Still worth it. We loved eating omelets slowly, drinking coffee and reading our books. Once I retired, we shifted to Thursday mornings. That made it a walk in for us, right over to our favorite booth. With lighter […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

October 8, 2020

Pud (DOG EAR)

ack when I worked as a summer hire for the Navy in Cubi Point, Philippines, Chief Mullens would always yell “Don’t just stand there with your pud in your hands!” The things you carry forward in life. So now, fifty years later, I’m in a world we could have scarcely imagined. We have/had space shuttles (I even worked on them), computers beyond imagination, an ability to travel the globe and a pandemic that came, in part, because of that. And now I’m an old guy, retired, and I’m out riding my thirty-mile ride. Everyone I pass on the trail, baby-pushers, […]

October 15, 2020

Fake News (DOG EAR)

ossibly I missed the critical news of the year – Covid-19 has an effective vaccine now? No? Nothing changed? Then why are we opening bars, tossing off our masks and acting like it’s VC day? Today I went into an Ace Hardware and there in the paint aisle was a guy standing there, deciding if he wanted Cherry Red of Valentines Pink, breathing unfiltered, unmasked air, too proud to respect a store full of others, assuming that his risks should be run by all of us. Needless to say, I loitered outside the aisle until he’d fumed his way up […]