Blog – Page 8 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

March 26, 2011

Unwitting favor

Typical Friday for a commuter cyclist. My Indian coworkers have been screwing around (watching cricket finals on tiny tellies), and now we’ve got broken code and fumbled patches, all after quitting time. By the time I’m rolling off the dock, it’s 7pm. The sunlight is getting long so I’m running lights and I’ve got my yellow bee-jacket on. At least traffic will be light. But then again, it only takes one car. Going through Eatonville on the bike lane, nice tailwind. Observe a car coming in from the right, a sloppy cross-the-line stop. Figuring the flubbery woman driver is going […]

March 30, 2011

Bad work day?

It could have gone better. The day was bad enough. A two-hour corporate Nuremburg Rally with pre-positioned questions and carefully worded answers. Clap clap clap. I have a bunch of things I need to do yet I’m sliding backwards as interruptions hit me like bugs across a windshield. At 2pm, I decided I couldn’t attend the train club – I’d have to work. Then, at 4:30 all hell broke loose. First it was the gust off a squall line that actually shook the building – not something good to experience on the 14th floor. Looked out the window to see […]

April 1, 2011

April Viral

If there is a day for religious observance for me, it’s this one – April the First. It’s a chance to shake people awake, to pull them from their monotonous lives, to puzzle and puzzle them until their puzzlers are sore. Every year, I try to come up with something fun. This time, I concocted an email posted to all the process leads (those who monitor process at our corporation, rather like the political officer on a Russian submarine (and about as liked, I suppose)) and to my team. I related in the most officious terms possible concerning a new […]

April 3, 2011

The Ragged Astronauts (review)

My Florida room looks out across green native foliage. Beneath its wide widows is the grande shelf, three decks straining with books, the “I might want to read this again” books. Many of them I’ve read in college or before. Many of them are yellowing. But they are (or were, to that younger self I was) great books. The Ragged Astronauts comes from a time before many Avatar / Potter fans were born, 1986. Back then, youth still cared about the environment (to the point they didn’t throw their plastic bottles all over it). We were still jazzed about the […]

April 4, 2011

The Most Dangerous Game (review)

Just watched this one tonight, a 1932 movie with Fay Wray, Joel McCrea, and Leslie Banks (as the smarmy, scarred, aristocratic Zaroff). Read the story over and over as a kid from my favorite collection, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. In a nutshell, a Russian big game hunter has grown bored with traditional game, and has set up a Pacific island with false buoys with which to wreck passing ships. Those who make it to his hospitality become “The Most Dangerous Game”, forced into the jungles to be hunted by the count and his dogs. The imagery here […]

April 16, 2011

The Tourist (Review)

Let me put it bluntly – the day before yesterday I was in Venice. It’s a beautiful city. Loved every minute I was there. The Tourist is a vehicle movie for a frumpy Johnny Depp and an impossibly exotic Angelina Jolie. In a nutshell, the British secret service are tailing her to snare her rich, mob-ripoffing banker boyfriend. To throw them off the trail, he orders her to pick a fall guy on the Paris-Venice train to play him (he’s had plastic surgery, don’t you know). She does, pulling an innocent tourist into this murderous game. So the flick’s got […]

April 16, 2011

Italy – Day Zero – Reservations

In the old days (before the internet, when everyone wore funny old clothing and photos were in black and white), people would have gushed about their pending trip abroad, bubbling to friends and family of their destination, itinerary, their hopes and dreams. Of course, now we worry that our wider broadcasts (via facebook and blogs) will result in our doors being pried open and our houses ransacked. So yes, I’ve been quiet online about this. But anyway, about nine months back, my wife and I had been talking to my sister about traveling abroad. First the idea was Morocco but […]

April 17, 2011

Italy – Day One – Arrival

From the Piazza de Popalo, you can see down five streets. If there was a sixth street, a Val del Past, I might have been able to see the day before. I’d see us at the airport with plenty of time, relaxed, through security and detached from all the hassles of preparation. A slow lunch at a nice airport restaurant. I’d see the flight to Phily, where I sat next to an avid reader and chatted about books and life. Even at Philly, where Air Force One’s passage snarled traffic and kept our Rome flight on the ground for 90 […]

April 18, 2011

Italy – Day Two – Ruins

I’m halfway to the sun, high in the seating of the massive Coliseum, watching as a line of armored militia lock shields against four times their number of long-haired, screaming enemies of the empire. Did I mention I’m facing outwards? And that I’m watching a students and riot police play hot-potato with a tear gas canister on the street below? Such is Rome. Still, on our first full day in country, we headed out early for the ruins. My sister was clever enough to suggest the Roma Pass, which grands free transport all over the city and two free entries […]

April 19, 2011

Italy – Day Three – Ostia

Did you ever find something you didn’t know you were missing? Like a dollar bill? That spare key to the boat house? Or your old copy of Fire and Bronze? Well, that’s Ostia. This was one of Rome’s primary ports along the mouth of the Tiber, a sizable city that was doing just great until 500AD or so, when the river suddenly moved away. Commerce dried up, everyone moved on, dirt blew up around that walls and the city was largely forgotten. Now recent excavations of unearthed an entire Roman city, its bath, amphitheater, its market, its apartments and shops. […]