Blog – Page 147 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

February 9, 2020

On Desperate Ground (Review)

kay, I’m a pretty good historian and know some of the flow of history, but this one I was not really aware of. In late 1950, the North Koreans were pushing south, just kicking the stuffing out of their southern counterparts. Then General MacArthur had a bold plan of landing at Inchon. This broke the North Korean rear and sent them streaming up the continent for safety. Attempting a bold follow-up, MacArthur sent his Army and Marine units pushing for the Yalu River, the border with China. As long as the Chinese kept in their own backyard, he’d have the […]

February 13, 2020

Game (DOG EAR)

ot invited/provoked to do a game on FaceBook recently (you can follow it on my Early Retyrement Book Group. The deal was that every day for ten days, you’d post a cover of a book you loved without comment. Well, I obeyed that – inside the realm of Facebook). But here, I can say what I want about them. So here’s the list in order of appearance, along with my comments. Day 1: War of the Worlds: When I was a kid, this one opened up reading for me. I’d never heard of a story where the hero just tried […]

February 16, 2020

Predator’s Gold (Review)

ook 2 of the Mortal Engines series, a steampunky little tale about Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw beating about the world in their stolen red airship, of the city of Anchorage grinding about on black northern ice, and of dark science reanimating a character lost in the first book. So, yes, lots going on here. The mark of a good sequel is when an author gives us something new and Philip Reeve did just that, putting us out in the far northern climes. It’s been two years since Tom and Hester escaped London and they are actually growing into a […]

February 20, 2020

Toil (DOG EAR)

kay, I just got out my second edition of the Journal Box, the National Model Railroad quarterly newsletter. On the good side, it was not the suddenly can-you-do-it rush it was the first time around. And I wasn’t fighting an unfamiliar tool (MS Publisher). And we had a hard submission deadline – Feb 15th at midnight, and NO EXCEPTIONS (last time they were trickling in two days later, tormenting my formatting with every inclusion). So things were a lot more stable. Still, last Thursday I started cleaning up a copy of the first one I’d done for the second. Looked […]

February 23, 2020

Tiamat’s Wrath (Review)

nd with this, the eight book of the Expanse series (or is that The Expense?), I’m caught up. Now, like everyone else, I’m going to have to wait for the next one. There aren’t unread Expanses on the bookstore shelf anymore. The worlds (all 1300 of them) were pretty screwed. In the last book, the Laconians (a break-away fleet from Mars that discovered alien-tech shipmaking platforms) had sent a battleship through their gate. They trounced Medina Station (which held the hub in a Gibraltarian grip) and then munched the massed fleets of Earth and Mars with their spooky ironclad. And […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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, […]