Dog Ear
January 26, 2023
ing ting!” went the bell of the coffee house. “One cup, black, please,” I told the young guy behind the counter. He eyed my shirt. “Hey, which anime is that?” I had to look down – I wasn’t sure how I dressed that morning. “Oh, this is ‘My Hero Academia.” He told me his roommate watched it but he loved Bleach. I had to confess that I was dragging through it. Once the coffee was up, I went outside to read in the sun. But it was interesting that we could chat over a shirt. Look, I read some manga […]
January 19, 2023
ough Sunday night. Went to the clubhouse to help unload modules (even though I’m still in the mask-for-safety aspect of post-covid). Came home. Wrote a blog detailing the show. And then, while it was still in draft status, I poked around. My updates were showing some issues and it told me I needed to upgrade my PHP. I clicked the UPDATE button. It should have been marked APOCALYPSE. It said it would take a minute. Twenty minutes later, the site was still in maintenance mode. I closed that browser and opened another. I was told my site suffered a critical […]
January 12, 2023
o I got railroaded (har-dee-har-har) into giving a two hour-long clinics at Protorails, a convention of model railroaders who focus on the prototypical. Mine was named TT&TO for Dummies, an introductory course about how trains were dispatched from pre-Civil War until recently (when you don’t have any direct communication or control over the crews). I took a Dale Carnegie at work a couple of years back. It taught me a couple of things: First, you need to prepare, testing out your speech to make sure you have it down flat, that you can pick right back up after an interruption […]
December 29, 2022
t’s time for my site tradition, a review of the best five books from 2022. Of course, these aren’t when they were published but that I read them this year. Now, to be truthful, there wasn’t a lot that I remember that knocked my hat off this year. However, let me take a quick peek into my records and list the top five. And they are (in order from the beginning of the year)… Steamboats Come True (Review) – A very interesting history of the development of the steam boat and its importance to the settling of America. With a […]
December 22, 2022
s I’ve mentioned, I’ve written erotica in the past. Even got paid for it. But that isn’t what this piece is about. One of my other interests in Zen meditation. We’ve joined a small group that meets in a bookstore Sunday night. It’s a very small and tight group and the master is very knowledgeable. Whether it’s making a difference, I cannot say. After the temple formalities are done, we go through two chants. To my surprise, the master mentioned that we had a word change. The original chant read as follows: Far apart from every perverted view one dwells […]
December 15, 2022
nteresting find today. I was going through my drafts and found one from a year or so old. It was a bit where, in high school, I made friends with a guy from the smoking lounge and thought that, by knowing me and playing military games with me, he’d maybe take a higher path in life. But then I went over to his house (shabby and run-down) and met his drunken, abusive father. The guy slapped the shit out of his son and then told me to get the f**k out. Which I did. I never hung out with the […]
December 8, 2022
f there is one thing that peeves me, it’s when I misspell something (as I just did for mispell) and someone tosses that comment my way; “I thought you were a writer.” It happened the other day. Was at a party and some of the younger goers wanted to play a tile-based game where you kinda play scrabble against each other in a dead-heat rush. So out of three games, I didn’t win at all (though on the second, I was a contender). But at the end of the third game, two of the more-successful players actually took my tiles […]
December 1, 2022
o instead of one of my dystopian movies, one recent Friday night I selected one I thought JB would like, Book of Love, an Amazon flick from 2022. Well, she liked it. I was amused by it, but the more I thought about it, the madder I got. So, the plot is this: Henry Copper is a very nebbish author who has spent five years on a novel that nobody likes. He wrote it from his own heart, his cold suffering lonely heart, reaching out to those like him. It is a book about chaste and unfulfilled love. The book […]
November 24, 2022
poilers spoilers spoilers! Spoilers for Carnival Row. For those who don’t know it, Carnival Row is an interesting show on Prime. It tells the tale of a fantasy world where an “English” nation, and specifically a steam-punky “London”, is pressed with a wave of immigration, specifically fairies and satyrs and the like. In the story, it turns out (last call for spoilers!) Piety Breakspear – the wife of the liberal chancellor – has been practicing necromancy (grafting dead things together and bringing them to life of sorts). The hero – Philo Philostrate – gets chased into her lair (under the […]
November 17, 2022
‘ve got three people in my life who really know how to talk. Sometimes I’ll call them for a quick word. A question. Or just to check on on them. Sometimes they call me (usually when I’m playing a game or watching something on TV, sigh). Regardless, once the get their verbal boilers up to pressure, they are full steam ahead, no stopping them. And no getting a word in edgewise. One guy, when he tells a story, fills in every unneeded detail. And in the middle of what he and I both know is tedious exposition, he’ll even say […]