Dog Ear
May 15, 2025
f I know one thing about myself, it’s that I talk too much. I know that’s where my writing has all come from, the desire to get a story out, regardless of how long it takes, to share it with the world. The problem with this (and with the world) is that it really doesn’t care. The world has better things to do. And the older you get, the more things you experience, but the less people want to hear it. Young people have shorter attention spans. They don’t have time for a long story or joke to develop, to […]
April 2, 2025
ometime media and entertainment play a larger and unifying role in things. I had pretty important surgery today. There was 70% blockage of some of my blood passages in my heart. To make things worse, it’s called “The Widowmaker”. Happy thought, especially since in the week following the diagnosis, I suffered an episode of small but sharp pains right from that area. Of course, like your automobile, by the time I went back to the cardiologist’s urgent care it had stopped and I was fine. No sign of anything. That made me more than happy to follow the doc’s recommendation […]
March 27, 2025
o I got it bad. I’m kinda in a distracted point in my life. I have some critical surgery coming up, and the testing alone (with the various support activities) is really bugging me. And there is the continuing issue about the club trailer (a member put the title in his name and then died, and the DMV has been less than helpful). And then there is all the model railroading operations I do, often two to three times a week. And an older friend of mine who is having anti-social issues – that costs me time in the form […]
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 […]