In the ink well

Dog Ear

April 23, 2020

Bumper Stickers (DOG EAR)

’ll admit that Facebook really brings out the worst in me. Mostly because of you twits. With all that’s going on in the world, all the blame, counter-blame, the alternative history; it’s like I’m Don Quixote and every idiot out there is a windmill. I’m easily baited by faulty logic, simplistic equivalencies and straw man projection. I feel the need to answer. And then I feel the need to check for the reply, so I can answer, reply, answer, and the monkey’s got his fist in the anthill hole again. I had to drive an hour out of town to […]
April 16, 2020

Plague Doldrums (DOG EAR)

’m really getting the concept of life in a plague and political turmoil. In many of the historical novels I read, plagues happen. Generally the town becomes quiet save for the rumble of the carts carrying away the dead. At the edge of town, spades eat at the soil, expanding the plague pits. Occasionally doors are marked with an X or whatever to mark a contagious house. And I haven’t lived under a rise of fascism, through I read all about it in Winds of War. Now we have crazed political responses (we just cut funding to the World Health […]
April 9, 2020

Fyre Thoughts (DOG EAR)

unkering down for the third week of quarantine and making scans of Hulu for just about anything watchable. Found something called Fyre Fraud which looked curious. It’s a documentary about a total failed (and pretty fraudulent) concert that dumped thousands of Millennials on some desert island in the Bahamas. Good flick. Yes, I’m old enough that I didn’t know anything about this – totally off my radar. But what was really interesting was how the Fyre organizers (and their legion of support staff, social organizers, investment opportunists and social gadflies) did this. I’ve had my brush with fame and self-promotion. […]
April 2, 2020

The creativity dump (DOG EAR)

his is strange. I’ve just seen whole days slide by that I cannot account for. When I started retirement six months back, every day was a golden chance to work on stuff, get things done. I was writing, coding, bike riding, going to two clubs, everything. And now suddenly there is a stay-at-home order and I’m stuck. I’m noticing (and just speaking for myself here) that my creativity is in the crapper. I just feel bored with everything. I can’t confirm the origin of these feelings, of course, but there is always the element of worry. We live pretty tight […]
March 26, 2020

Writing Dirty, Staying Clean (DOG EAR)

kay, you vanillas – please try to stick with this until the end of the piece. So we’re in the middle of a pandemic, one that a lot of people (especially young people) don’t take seriously. Lots of parties, trips to theme parks, all that. I’ve posted numerous things on Facebook on the importance of distancing but it hit me – outside of my nieces and a couple of young guys who don’t like me anymore I don’t think there are many people under twenty-five in my FB friends. So either you already know it or you’re not going to […]
March 19, 2020

Days of plague and the new media (DOG EAR)

o for last week’s column, I wrote something about people forcing their phone media on you. That afternoon, I met three crazy ex-work ladies at Applebees and hung out with them for about four hours. As we bid each other goodnight, little did I imagine how different everything would be a week later. Now we’ve been staying homeside for about five days. Very quiet. Been working on my games and my writing. Still doing bike rides. Even took the wife out on the tandem to a small park where we ate dinner on a bench, just to get out of […]
March 11, 2020

Pushy Media (DOG EAR)

o I’m an old guy. I only started carrying a phone because I’m cycling in this crazy city (Orlando). And it’s an old flip phone I’ve had for a decade. People walking on the nature trails around here piss me off when they have their heads in their phones. And drivers with phones (which is illegal), don’t get me started. Not a fan. But something that’s really become an issue – with all the content and bandwidth available, people are watching more stuff, and they are watching it louder and louder. On the train I ride, it’s become an epidemic […]
March 5, 2020

Podcast (DOG EAR)

aw an interesting thing today (a Sunday) – the wife and I decided to walk over to a local eatery to have breakfast. We’ve done dinner there a couple of times – it’s a little pricy but very eclectic and trendy and rather fun. And it’s the only place I can get what is becoming my favorite drink, Arrogant Bastard Beer. Only not for breakfast. This breakfast, we ordered our food and sat down, only to see two young guys sitting in the back corner with a bight light shining on them, bantering furiously away about StarWars, Jurassic Park, remakes, […]
February 27, 2020

Best of 2019

t hit me a few weeks back that I had completely forgotten to do my best books of 2019 (something I’ve been doing for a few years now). Well, better late than never, I suppose. I will add this generic comment that, looking back, outside of enjoying The Expanse and suffering through (in, in retrospect, appreciating Infinite Jest), there wasn’t anything that really blew me away (or made me tear up or fob onto friends) last year. So, without any particular order, here’s my faves from 2019. Don Quixote – this includes both books. I really did enjoy the adventures […]
February 20, 2020

Toil (DOG EAR)

kay, I just got out my second edition of the Journal Box, the National Model Railroad quarterly newsletter. On the good side, it was not the suddenly can-you-do-it rush it was the first time around. And I wasn’t fighting an unfamiliar tool (MS Publisher). And we had a hard submission deadline – Feb 15th at midnight, and NO EXCEPTIONS (last time they were trickling in two days later, tormenting my formatting with every inclusion). So things were a lot more stable. Still, last Thursday I started cleaning up a copy of the first one I’d done for the second. Looked […]