Blog – Page 136 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

May 12, 2019

Pines (Guest Review)

ecret Service agent Ethan Burke is on a mission. No, not, protecting the president – Secret Service agents do more than that. He’s looking for agents who went missing in a small town called Wayward Pines. The story begins shortly after Ethan arrived in Wayward Pines. He wakes up with a splitting headache after a car crash. He’s missing his wallet, keys, badge, gun and even much of his memory. As he limps into town, he meets the locals who seem friendly, but strangely not very helpful. While investigating the missing agents, he also wonders what is going on in […]

May 15, 2019

Inventory (DOG EAR)

’m reading Don Quixote right now (which is long, slow novel, which means any guest reviews in the interim are welcome). It’s a great book, and for those who don’t know it, it’s about a threadbare Spanish nobleman (more of a country nobleman) who, having read far too many books on knights and chivalry, saddles up his bony horse, slaps on his corroding, mismatched armor, and with the help of Sancho, his squire, rides about looking for adventure and excitement. Of course, he gets the crap beat out of him by everything from indignant peasants to ignorant windmills. It’s quite […]

May 19, 2019

Hello Universe (Review)

kay, I’m going to sound like a hipster, but since this is a kids’ read I’ll tell you the magical way I came upon this book. My wife and I were having a leisurely ride on our tandem in a tree-covered neighborhood and found a little book box curbside. You know, where are the places where you can add or take books, just a place to swap. Most of them were kid books and this was no exception. Sight unseen, I pulled it. The universe must have been directing my hand. So this story runs between three main characters (and […]

May 23, 2019

OpsLog – LM&O – 5/22/2019

ooooooooom! Crash! “Oh no, we’re burning!” “We have injured here!” “Oh, the humanity!” Okay, so that’s done. Yes, while dispatching the LM&O tonight I did manage to run two first class passenger trains (crack sister express trains, Silver Bullet 1 and 2) into each other. Forgot to give SB2 a checkbox 8, “hold until arrival of Silver Bullet 1”. So off he went and they crashed at Red Rock. To make matters worse, there was a loaded coal train sitting on the siding there so we can only expect that in the fiery wreck, the open-top hoppers caught fire and […]

May 23, 2019

Early ReTesterment

bout a year or so ago, I took a week off and hung out at the beach with the wife. Mookie the cat loved it – she’d watch the ocean for hours. And I planned to work on whatever it was I was writing then. Just six days of yawning mornings and productive days. Didn’t happen. No, I played computer games. I read. I walked on the beach. I ate too much. And I took a lot of naps. Hardly wrote a thing. Recently at work we were offered buy outs (actually, I thought they said buy outs, but they […]

May 26, 2019

The Aquariums of Pyongyang (Review)

e tend to see North Korea in terms to its threat to us, such as its steampunk nuclear rockets and its last-generation military. And we see various solutions, from MAGA to Hollywood (i.e. The Interview). But we don’t see it from the point of view of its people. Kang Chol-hwan was a Korean kid living in Japan with a leftist grandmother who bought North Korean propaganda and thought taking her family to North Korea would be the right thing to do. And it was. For about ten minutes. From this personal history of her grandson, we see a family shaken […]

May 30, 2019

Your audience (DOG EAR)

eorge Carlin once said he played Spy at the Airport. “Your job? Find him!” The other day I was left on a seat in the terminal, waiting for an unlikely meetup (long story, but I didn’t know any flight information for the arrival). Since I had to sit for hours and watch for a specific person, I watched people. And I’ll say this – unlike the 70’s when Carlin referred to this, there was nobody I would categorize as being particularly spy-ish. I can’t imagine someone who’s fought their way up the bloody rungs of the KGB dressing in flip […]

June 2, 2019

ShowLog – Tampa – 6/1/2019

on’t have much to tell you for this one. Wasn’t the best start for me – got up at 4:30, bought donuts at 5am (and got the shit panhandled out of me by a Colonial Drive bum who kept asking for more – what, car keys next?). Then a long drive down to Bill’s where I got lost in Walt Woods. And then another long drive down to Tampa where the show was. But we had the gold team in for setup, the old sweats who know how everything goes together. The layout was running in fifty minutes and we […]

June 2, 2019

The Stolen Village (Review)

seem to be on a non-fiction kick these days. This one was a loaner from my brother, the story of the village of Baltimore, Ireland, and what happened when two ship-loads of Barbary pirates landed on night and marched most of them off into slavery. I was aware that something like this had taken place – it’s fictionalized in the Sabitini yarn The Sea Hawk. In this historic recount, we have the events of the night when the raid took place, the events of the long cruise home (can you imagine forty days in the hold of a slaver?). And […]

June 6, 2019

The Long, Hard Road (DOG EAR)

’m currently working through Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. I’ll probably cover the first book (which I just finished) now, and then approach the second book (which I just started) in a couple of weeks. But even then, outside of splitting this in half and doing my best to get through the second book, I’ll be focused on it for some weeks. And that means I won’t be able to get anything else read. I’ve got some ideas on how to get around this (I’ve faced this same issue before). First, I can always use guest reviewers (hint hint) […]