Blog – Page 162 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

March 28, 2021

Steam Bird (Review)

ell, this one jolted me in surprise – written in the mid-eighties by Hilbert Schenck, who worked on feasibility studies for the USAF for a nuclear-powered bomber (impractical, given that conventional bombers could do the job easier, cleaner, and didn’t radiate like the bombs they’d just dropped when they returned home). Anyway, what caught me is that the story opens in a model train operations session (where, before Digital Command Control, they are using “microcomputers” (whatever that means in 1985) to simulate how steam engines work in their session). Overall, I really enjoyed the tension and repartee most sessions have. […]

April 1, 2021

Power (DOG EAR)

here are times when it becomes evident that writing is like magical spell-casting (if that were, indeed, a thing). It takes years to hone one’s writing ability. But once one is a writer, people in general concede that the writer has a power. In the paper the other day, I read of a lawmaker who is enacting legislation to suppress voting (by making it illegal to distribute water to those waiting in hot sun-blasted lines for a chance to vote in ever-restricted poling places. I simply noted (in as few sentences and with as few words as possible) that such […]

April 4, 2021

Dirty John (Review)

irst, I’ll say that I have no idea where this book came from. I was going through my read-stack and there it was, as if some literary hopeful planted it there (I really don’t think the Blogatorum has that sort of pull, but who knows). Maybe I got it out of one of those curb-side libraries. But if you gave it to me, thanks! I really enjoyed it. So let’s get into why I enjoyed it. Dirty John is a collection of short pieces by Journalist Christopher Goffard, interviews involving “true stories of outlaws and outsiders”. And, as he says […]

April 8, 2021

Regressing into Space Opera (DOG EAR)

y dirty little secret is that I run a role-playing game once a week (zoom-style). Haven’t reffed in three decades but some of the players asked and it sounded like fun. Back then, my world was StarWars. Everything was about light sabres and TIE fighters and that endlessly evil Empire. Black and white morality (literally) and (if you think about it) silly technology. The data center that the Rebels raided in that recent movie had the information stored in what looked like giant eight-track tapes. And even though flying space fighters around is really cool, it’s pointlessly stupid when you […]

April 11, 2021

Hey Nostradamus! (Review)

rom the brilliant cultural writer Douglas Coupland comes this (as always) social commentary of the cheap-landscapes and aimless-times we live in (you might remember him from his breakout work, Generation X, the book which defined that term decades ago). As always, he’s a good writer to produce a book you can curl around when you feel the world is tragic, stupid and pointless. So Hey Nostradamus! is told from the points of view of four primary characters. And they are: Cheryl, in 1988, a young high school girl who is comfortably religious, a member of a group of high school […]

April 22, 2021

Rock and a Hard Place (DOG EAR)

doubt it caused concern in the New York Publishing Houses (is that even a thing anymore?). And I don’t think the literary blogs were abuzz over it. But last week, I skipped any entries – Dog Ear and the following Book Review. The thing is, I wasn’t up to it. Before posting up my blog (I’d written it the day before) I’d gone over to the dentist first thing in the morning to get my new tooth implant inserted. Big day, been waiting a year for it. But when I got out of the car, that gentle muscle spasm (sic) […]

April 25, 2021

Hurricane Claude (Review)

ack before writers wrote to fulfill publishing needs, when they just wrote stories and submitted them to publishers and magazines in manila envelopes, writers ended up with all sorts of story-chunks, from a million words to a couple of hundred. And publishers, trying to fill a potential book, had to dip into a writer’s backups to get enough to flush out a paperback. That seems to be the case with the short story Hurricane Claude, which showed up as a 45 rpm flip side in Steam Bird (which I reviewed HERE). This story was actually quite good. Oh, there were […]

April 29, 2021

OpsLog – LM&O – 4/28/2021

always thought that when you accomplished some amazing feat, you’d feel this near-holy glow radiating from you. However, right now it feels like I levered myself into a dryer, sat a bowling ball on my lap and hit spin. I’m in a daze. When I left the property tonight, I got out to lock the gate and then discovered my car’s push-button start wouldn’t work. I pushed it and pushed it in the dark, only to realize that when I’d got out with the gate lock, I put my keys in my back pocket. So the ops session – from […]

April 29, 2021

Railroad Paperwork (DOG EAR)

ne of the side uses of my site is recording model railroad ops session. To explain, I’m a member of a huge model railroad club. Once a month we run trains like a real railroad. Dispatchers. Orders. Paperwork. Switching. All that fun railroad stuff. And early on in the Blogatorium I started writing my accounts of each session, everything from my small 2×4 foot microlayout to the sprawling La Mesa club in San Diego’s Balboa Park. It’s fun to “yarn” about things that happen, all the goofs, fubars and accidents. What is funny is how much this has become a […]

May 2, 2021

Becoming Alien (Review)

omeone once told me that Star Trek: Voyagers was essentially “Star Trek for Women”. I suppose I’d have to agree. Not weighing in on that series (I’ve heard a lot of gripes about it), I’m actually focusing on the novel Becoming Alien, by Rebecca Ore. This is another one of my Used Bookstore finds, another one that came from 1988. So, Tom lives in poverty in a backwoods farm with his brother Warren. Parents dead, the chickens just not making the revenue, the brothers turn to drug manufacturing. And during this time a strange alien vessel crashes in the woods […]