bird – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

July 2, 2020

Early Bird (DOG EAR)

se to be, back when I was a working man, that I’d need to wake up and be out the door in twenty minutes, riding the bike through hot and cold, watching for cars, figuring out my work. You can’t commute on a bike in Oburg while muzzy with sleep. So now that I’m retired, twenty years in the purple have left me altered. Now when the furry kids wake me up at 5am for their feeding, I can’t get back to sleep. I lie there, mind spinning up, unable to drop back into slumberland. So this morning I did […]

March 28, 2021

Steam Bird (Review)

ell, this one jolted me in surprise – written in the mid-eighties by Hilbert Schenck, who worked on feasibility studies for the USAF for a nuclear-powered bomber (impractical, given that conventional bombers could do the job easier, cleaner, and didn’t radiate like the bombs they’d just dropped when they returned home). Anyway, what caught me is that the story opens in a model train operations session (where, before Digital Command Control, they are using “microcomputers” (whatever that means in 1985) to simulate how steam engines work in their session). Overall, I really enjoyed the tension and repartee most sessions have. […]

February 16, 2024

Missed signals (DOG EAR)

o today, here’s a brief column about the earliest form of human communication: the gesture. In this case, it’s flipping the bird. Side note: Yes, the finger came about after Agincourt in 1415, but it is a gesture so I’m going with it. Now, I’m a cyclist. And a pedestrian. I walk and bike more than most people, and hence can tell you that most people drive like furious buttheads. Having been on the receiving end, I slow way down and swing way wide of any non-car humans. I’ve been hit by cars once while on foot and six times […]