Blog – Page 106 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

February 25, 2017

OpsLog – FEC – 2/25/2017

o, the long drive home. Great op session on the Florida East Coast – so good I’m not sure what to comment on. I’d run 920 through Palm Bay to Pinetta, quietly doing my work and advising the dispatcher of what I’d do next so she could set mainline turnouts my way. Even that detector I’d hit was a methodical fix – dropped the car into the closest and most efficient siding and then… That’s when, at Crystal Lake offramp, I almost got creamed. To get off westbound 408 here, you need to merge across two lanes of onramp, with […]

February 26, 2017

Go for Beginners (Review)

ow. 1972, I hadn’t even gotten into D&D yet. But while I was playing Speed Circuit and Jutland, there were people playing Go. And this book was published. If you’ve read any of my other blogs on this, Go is the Oriental game of strategy, simplistic in its rules but mind-breakingly complex in its execution. There are people out there who actually spend their lifetime mastering this game, and making a livelihood at playing professionally. Me? I’m still a beginner. I beat two people in the Go tourney at work and then suffered a set of losses that knocked me out. […]

February 28, 2017

Rigel and the Beehive (2/28/2017)

he real purpose of tonight’s jaunt into the backyard with the scope was to check the alignment of the spotter and laser sights – I’d knocked them off putting the tube into the trunk of the mini and wanted to check them. Tonight was fairly clear, so sure, at the very minimum, a little calibration. Turns out they were pretty close – since now it was well dark and I had an assembled scope, I decided to look around a bit. Had at least one thing on the agenda – I’d heard of people actually seeing binary stars but had […]

March 2, 2017

Lent Rethought (DOG EAR)

couple of weeks back I noted my thought that for Lent I’d give up storytelling. It seemed like a good idea at the time but I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to tell storytelling from simple discussion. For example, if you see a crime, are you storytelling when you talk to the police? Or are you fulfilling a duty as a citizen? It’s a bit… nebulous. And that’s me speaking as both a writer and an amateur astronomer. Now, I’ve long had a hate-affair with smartphones and the zombie-wander aspects of their users. Worse, if I’m killed on […]

March 5, 2017

First Love (Review)

…….nd Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life (full title) Okay, I’ll admit I was behind the eight ball here. Was reading The Wanderer (a Hugo Award winner from the 60s) and got pulled into Go for Beginners. Sometimes you need a fast filler to make a deadline. Hello, Project Gutenberg. Howdy “Short Stories” section. This one is a translation from an old book; the stories take place in the mid-1850s but perhaps it’s been Rafatinied from the mid-1900s – no information. (late breaking news – just searched around and yes, 1927. So it was written roughly the same time Captain […]

March 9, 2017

Faceless 1 (DOG EAR)

hirty-eight messages wait for me on Facebook. This I know from my recent periscope peek. And my daughter Mulan has a repeating message that keeps deviling my email inbox, something requiring a response. Can’t see it. Can’t look. It’s a week into Lent and I’m still observing my no-Facebook pledge (with caveats – I use facey to put up notices regarding my site, such as the one the likely brought you here. I can post, but no reading, no clickthroughs, and certainly no scrolling). So, what’s it like? Refreshing in ways. Empty in others. When President Punchline comes up with […]

March 12, 2017

The Wanderer (Review)

ooks are time machines and we read them in our context at our peril (or rather, our down-our-nose smarminess). The Wanderer copped a Hugo Award back in 1964, which was seven years after On The Beach (a story about a gentle yet depressing apocalypse) came out. Yet gone are the gentle civilians living out their last days in quiet contemplation of the doom that was settling over them. In The Wanderer, we’re back to people meeting their end with violence antagonism. Mobs. Guns. Killing. Drunkenness. All the things we Americans do well*. So the story opens with a half-dozen openers […]

March 16, 2017

Overdrive (DOG EAR)

ell, it happened again last night. I have this… idiosyncrasy. Most nights I have no problem falling asleep. I just open the window behind my head, the night airs breathing around me. A kiss to the wife, the lights out, the hop of the cat coming in the settle across my legs (only after the lights are out, mind). And then, the bliss of unawareness, the detachments from work stresses, the latest Go game, traffic, club issues, writing problems, everything. Gone. But some nights I start to think. When I was a kid I’d lay in bed at night imagining […]

March 19, 2017

The Sirens of Titan (Review)

o let’s not start by talking about this book as a story or a metaphor or anything. Let’s talk about it as a book. Been carrying this little paperback with me for 40 years or so. It was on my shelf in Drapers Meadows West in Blacksburg, it lingered in my huge shelves in my vault I lived in at York. And in the time between all these places, it sat in a book box waiting to be reread. I can’t even say why I’d have bought it. I did read some Vonnegut at University for classes and found him […]

March 22, 2017

OpsLog – LM&O – 3/22/2017

don’t think our op session was that bad. In fact, at the next business meeting I’ll have Sean Spicer come out and explain why it was so good. So, No, it really wasn’t bad. We were running hot, with both Silver Bullets on time. I was having the usual congestion around Harris Glen, nothing extraordinary until a crew made a mistake, compounded the mistake by backing, then suffered derailments all over the place. There were trains waiting for him, and trains waiting for those trains, and next thing I knew 97 was running hours late. It was so bad that […]