Blog – Page 224 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

October 13, 2024

Fokker Dr 1 Aces of World War 1 (Review)

‘ve always thought of writing a semi-fictional book about World War One aviation. I realized there is far more to know than just the planes. Did pilots use zippers or buttons on their flies? Did they drink coffee (could the Germans even get coffee by 1918?). What was the slang, the thoughts, even the haircuts. Think about your own life and the number of little items in it – now imagine trying to write a compelling story at some level of detail. In the end, I still love flying so I wrote a book about crows, an excellent book that […]

October 17, 2024

Coward of the County (DOG EAR)

remember it well. Hurricane Charlie was coming right up Interstate 4 towards us. We had the house battened down. Tools and cat cage in the center hall. Windows boarded. Winds picked up and as the sun set, the hurricane rolled over us. Suddenly it was black outside, winds howling. The lights flickered and went out. In the back, I could hear trees going over. Got Prince the cat and stuffed him into his cage. The cat and wife and I hunkered in the center hall, all the doors closed. The house shuddered, wind coming up through the floorboards. At the […]

October 20, 2024

Adjustment Day (Review)

hat makes this a creepy read is that Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club) wrote this in 2018, two years before the real-world insurrection, and it’s yet as chilling and disturbing as our own. The story takes place with a wide collection of characters (hint: write them down so as not to be confused) with most of them involved in the overthrow. Working off an online unpopularity list of political and public figures, Adjustment Day finds the various state houses filled with machine gun toting radicals, who quickly kill off pretty much everyone on that list. To get credit for doing it, […]

October 20, 2024

OpsLog – TBL – 10/19/2024

nice summer day on the Tuscarora – an aspect we’ll mention a bit later. Greg and I were thinking of a two-man run but got enough interest to bump it up to six. Of course, I got there two hours early and set up in thirty minutes (why do I do this (because I’m usually freaking before ops, I’d wager)). But the guys all came out and were ready to run. I spent some of the down time explaining to the new guys how it worked (yes, this isn’t simply a tiny 2×4 foot train layout). But of course, they’d […]

October 24, 2024

OpsLog – LM&O – 10/23/2024

t seems like the trope of railroad fiction; a moment where the high railroad summit is packed with trains and the grizzled dispatcher has to ask a young cub engineer to pull off a move that, if it fails, will lock up the railroad for hours. And that is exactly how it went down. At the 2/3rds point, I had traffic building in Red Rock and Lehigh, the summit approaches. They were pretty plugged. To get trains out, I needed to run a bunch over the hill. To clear Red Rock for westbound moves, I needed to get Jude’s long […]

October 31, 2024

Overestimate (DOG EAR)

here is a thing I see a lot in our modern world, that through that simply buying (or doing any minimum effort) gives you mastery over a skill. Possibly it comes from all the movies we watch where a montage is used to show months/years of work. Even Charles Atlas had it – the “Hero of the Beach” bulked up in a couple of panels. You might have seen young teens (and twenties) drive. They get themselves a spiffy little toy car (either on their own loans or gifted by over-indulgent parents). And now, suddenly, because they have a quick […]

November 3, 2024

How to Rule and Empire and Get Away with It (Review)

companion book to a wild breakout novel, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, this book picks up a couple of months after the completion of the first one. Of course, you might have thought that the siege was broken in the first book, but no, that’s never mentioned and the barbarian leader Ogus, outside the battered walls, still wants everyone in the city dead (gruesomely). So this time, our story comes from an actor of plays and a playwright (he publishes them like he’s grinding sausages) named Notker. His other skills include witty impersonations of political figures. So he’s […]

November 10, 2024

Icerigger (Review)

kay, so back in the seventies, I really loved Alan Dean Foster’s stories. They were funny and exciting and great reads. And now I picked up one that’s a half century old, Icerigger. Of course, the question is, how does it keep up with modern scifi? Not StarWars either, but adult series like The Expanse. So in Icerigger, a passenger liner is making a stop at a colony world, one totally covered in a sea of ice. During ship’s night (as they orbit in) the main character, a merchant named Ethan Fortune, comes across a kidnapping in progress. The inept […]

November 10, 2024

ShowLog – Lake Nona – 11/9/2024

o this is what an easy train show is like. Instead of getting up at 5am and running out to Deland to build our layout in the dark, then walk around it all day, with this show at Lake Nona Middle School we were able to go out on Friday and casually put things together. The next day, it was a leisurely local drive out. The layout was already up and ready – we just put trains on and ran. We had a lot of help this time around, with new members wearing their bright yellow bullseye shirts and really […]

November 11, 2024

OpsLog – WAZU – 11/10/2024

f you are thinking that you already got posted from me this weekend for a Saturday show, you did. But now it’s Sunday and a big bunch of us train-freaks are over at Doc Andy’s, running on the WAZU. For once, I didn’t jump for the DS panel. One, I wanted to run some trains for once and two, some of my friends were going to need my burly brawn assistance to get an old lady up some stairs. Since I was on a short leash that day, I chose to run trains and see how it would play out. […]