Dog Ear
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, […]
November 21, 2024
t doesn’t take much of a stretch to imagine that I’m a liberal. Commute by bike. Live on a pretty gay street. Have friends of all nationalities. There are a couple of business I won’t buy from unless backed into a corner. Exxon, for the Exxon Valdez and their bullshit response. BP, for the same sort of thing in the Gulf. So that’s environmental. You might even say my wife and I have taken it a step further – we own a small (older) Mini Cooper and a newer Prius. For other concerns, I don’t buy from Chick-fil-a and Hobby […]
October 31, 2024
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 […]
October 17, 2024
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 […]