Dog Ear
March 13, 2025
o I’ve been thinking about the divided nation we live in. People are so touchy now (and being a “people”, I suppose that extends to me). In my wife’s weekly coffee club, someone invited a clod who sat across from me and talked politics to the person next to him (in rude and belittling ways) until I silently got up and walked out. So I figured to try that reach-across-the-divide thing that people always tout. On one Facebook post, someone was claiming that it was right for the VA to be shuttered since there was supposedly massive fraud taking place. […]
February 27, 2025
ccording the media targeting senior citizens, I should have all my hair, be thin, and going off to play tennis (all day?) with my elf-princes wife. Sure, sure. As it is, I’ve got many life-injuries that ache a little more each day. And I’m missing my prostate, so I’m dealing with pelvic floor muscle exercises at every stop light. Getting up and bending under things gets harder and harder. Yes, it sucks. Getting older ain’t for sissies, right? While the physical is bad, the mental is worse. I’ve been dispatching our model railroad club (controlling trains) for over twenty years […]
January 26, 2025
o this brother-sister pair we know used to hang around with us a lot. They worked in my corporation and they always liked the experience of food. But not, it seemed, the experience of friendship. We’d agree to eat in some new, trendy place and agree on a time. Knowing that these places had just opened and other foodies were flocking there, the wife and I would get there about thirty minutes early, doing the line-standing and wedging into a table. And then we’d wait. And wait. Inevitably they would be late. Thirty minutes Sixty minutes. Oh, we’d get a […]
January 17, 2025
veryone hears those stories of the businessman who retires and is dead in six months. I know an ex-cop who got a blood clot because he sat around all day watching TV. I don’t have these problems. It really clogged up last week. I’m a good dispatcher in model railroad ops sessions. I’m actually requested most times. So when two good friends of mine, Tom and John, both had sessions on last week’s Thursday (tied into a train convention) I ended up spending the entire day dispatching two layouts, back to back. It was 12 hours of doing what I […]
January 1, 2025
‘ve started doing game design again. This is always one of my secondary hobbies – I made enough money to change my life with Eagles back in 1983. And then I designed Cybertank and Cybership for Games Computers Play. A lot of you have played my Pits of Seth games which I wrote over my entire life. And of course there was the massive Solar Trader which started off as more a dare between Jesse Markowitz and myself. Oh, and then a couple of years ago, I got into GameBooks with StoreyMinus and PathFinder, both on the Squiffy site. And […]
December 26, 2024
nother year passes. I had a very eventual year – earned an award from the Model Railroad association. Was involved with seventy model train operation sessions. Kept up with my writing commitments. Caught Covid (light version) and RSV (not so light, but ducked the associated Pneumonia). Went through two hurricanes. Usual stuff. And I read a lot of books. So the following list is not a New Yorker list or anything like that. It’s the books I’ve read and enjoyed. These are just the top selections from my own readings, managing (roughly) a book a week (or more) – I’ve […]
December 19, 2024
hose who know me know that the 2024 election didn’t go as I’d hoped it would. My thoughts on this are my own, and if you don’t understand, well, you probably can’t handle the truth. But a week before the general election, I got a weird email from the site (nice to know the contact link still works – nobody ever writes). Anyway, from way out in Culver’s Country, Wisconsin, someone wrote me via my site in all caps. It was a complaint, crabbing that I owned this domain and they needed if for another Robert Raymond who was running […]
December 12, 2024
or those of you who haven’t watched Rick and Morty, it’s a funny animated TV show over on Hulu. The idea is that it’s a loose lift of Doc Brown and Marty, played by a crusty (and often drunk) super-scientist and and his slow grandson. Sure, it’s nasty and the violence is gratuitous. But on the positive side, the show often makes stunning observations about our culture and especially our tropes. They will back-reference themselves and make occasional fourth-wall rim shots (such as, “You’ll remember back in season two…”) So I’ve watched all seven current seasons. However, all the way […]
December 5, 2024
s Poopdeck Pappy said in Popeye, “I come across my hating fair”. And I do. The other day on Facebook, I posted something about kids being little shits. A friend of mine had just quit the teaching profession, having been beaten, assaulted and mauled by her students. She’d had enough. This slots into my own personal thoughts on this subject. I don’t have kids. But I can’t tell you how many movies, dinners and airplane flights have been ruined by screaming children. And how many events, from bike riding to train shows to anything, have been tarnished with shitty teens. […]
November 28, 2024
kay, so I’ve got a flip phone. Yes, I’ve taken a lot of crap for it, the whole dinosaur thing. Ironically, they are making a come-back – people realize how invasive and consuming immediate internet gratification can be. It turns you into a drone. Now, my flip has its own problems – I keep it in my front right pocket – I can just get it in there with my keys and wallet (the left front pocket has my pocket watch – an old staple). But the problem with that is that there are some critical buttons on the outside, […]