Blog

April 24, 2016

The Jungle Book (Review)

o this isn’t your Disneyland version of The Jungle Book. It starts a couple of degrees off. In the film, young Mowgli is orphaned in what looks like a high-speed canoe crash. Bagheera the panther takes pity on the young creature and dumps him with a wolf pack. And that’s what makes him a wild boy. In the book, Shere Khan (who doesn’t show up until the final reel in the flick) is a lame tiger who is not urbanely deadly, but rather a limping posturing loser. When he attacks Mowgli’s woodcutter parents, he accidently leaps into the fire. The […]
April 27, 2016

OpsLog – LM&O – 4/27/2016

ell, several crews were out, some getting married, some at prom. The dispatcher was laced on painkillers. Just another night on the LM&O. Good turnout – always happy for that. A couple of guests got paired with crews. Me, I was running the Zanyesville makeup run. Last month this job didn’t get done and now it was twice is big as normal. So out of the yard I rumbled on warrant #1, direct to Zaynesville and the pile of work awaiting me. Wasn’t too bad, really. I just used my old tricks – sorting out cuts at the bottom of […]
April 28, 2016

Blogs (DOG EAR)

y buddy Steve is an interesting guy. Retired and funny, he descended like an angel into our train club with his electronics knowledge at exactly the right moment in our sectional layout effort. Instead of some kludgy half-thought-out-effort (since we didn’t have any sort of plan, I think that description qualifies), he came up with a bulletproof system that is one of the selling points of our sectional layout. Every show, one of us ends up sweeping back the skirts to show off what’s below track level (to model railroaders, that’s just as important as what’s on top). As the […]
May 1, 2016

The Historian (Review)

he Historian is a strange little (actually, quite big) novel, one that wanders through many voices (in the form of a father’s letters, a mother’s postcards, old love letters, even doomed scrawlings secured in a crypt) to eventually get around to telling a story horrifying in nature and long in telling. Look, don’t get me wrong – it’s a good read but it’s long in the effort. If you think you’re going to know what’s happening any time soon, you’ve another thing coming. Without giving too much away, we begin the story with the unnamed daughter of a gun-for-hire (it […]
May 5, 2016

Understated (DOG EAR)

eople say that when anything happens to me, everyone knows about it. My kidney stone got more word-of-mouth (mostly my mouth) coverage than had it been a meteor burning its way towards a doomed Earth (and knowing my luck, it would be cloudy that last night so my telescope would be useless). But I digress. The point is that I’m a storyteller. Incidents are epics. Events are miniseries. Granted, I’m not like some (using a cartoony voice when straw-manning some person who has annoyed me in a later recount). I keep my stories honest. I just don’t keep them short. […]
May 8, 2016

Rikki-tikki-tavi (Review)

veryone has a dream pet. And regardless of if it’s got fur, fins, scales or lots of creepy legs, it’s gotta have one thing: loyalty. Teddy finds a half-drowned mongoose out near a stream and proposes a funeral for it, but his mother (happily) suggests they dry it and feed it. Given that they have only just arrived in India from England and moved into a recently empty bungalow, this proves to be a good idea given the fact that there as a couple of cobras living in a hole in the garden, and thirty-plus eggs warming up to hatch […]
May 8, 2016

OpsLog – LM&O – 8/3/2016

 promised I’d write this. As mentioned in our last thrilling adventure, the layout had gone down hard with electrical shorts knocking out the line from Calypso to Hellertown. Over the weekend (and right after this session – was I tired) we met at the club and figured out what the problem was (a broken turnout motor was the culprit). And so now we had a working layout and a half dozen trains blocking the main here and there. Kinda like if the rapture came and only locomotives went to heaven. So after a long day at work, after dinner and […]
May 8, 2016

M6 over the gun range (5/7/2016)

kay, went out with CFAS to the Geneva Gun Range for a clear-night sky with lots to see. And even after a year in this hobby, there is so much to learn. For example, I need to mount a laser beam on the side of my spotter scope. The spotter scope is great for locking on big bright objects. However, for lesser ones (or at high angles) it gets harder. Tonight’s goal was M81, a galaxy just off the tip of the big dipper. And I looked and looked, but simply coudln’t get enough of a line up to go […]
May 12, 2016

An unholy experiment (DOG EAR)

he screw was a half inch long, wickedly sharp and corkscrew-twisted. Tossed without thought into a truck bed, it had rattled out as the wheels bounced across the uneven railroad crossing. And there it had lain, piercingly sharp, until I’d wheeled along on the bike on my way to work. Somehow the passage of the front tire set it to dancing, it binged butt-first against the concrete just in time for the trailing tire to strike it dead on. Bang! A reverberating shock shuddered my frame as I rode over it again and again, the tip of the screw hitting […]
May 14, 2016

Laser sharp (5/15/2016)

y brother is coming out tomorrow. First problem – no good restaurants open on Sunday night (I thought Orlando was hipper than this). But before he came out I wanted to fiddle with my new laser sight. Some assembly required. Not too bad. And once I got the entire scope set up in the backyard, I tried to shoot at the second-biggest object in the sky – Jupiter. This took some doing – I lined it up with the old sight and eyeballed the gas giant with my most generous lens. Once I got it lined, I dropped off the […]