Category: hobby

  • Clamp this!

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    Cleats! Millions of ’em! I’ve been gluing these little bastards to the benchwork all week long, five at a time, because I have ten two-inch C-clamps and that’s all. I could go buy more, but I’m such a cheapskate that I haven’t been able to bring myself to bust open my wallet and spend a Read.

  • Your Argument Is Invalid

    And now, time for Ask An Atheist: Q: How can you have any morals if you don’t believe in god? A: For many years I’ve heard atheists dance around this question, claiming they can form their own perfectly respectable moral codes using logic or ethics or other rhetoric that sounds actually kinda plausible. But here, Read.

  • Apollo 18

    The announcement that there’d soon be a movie released about Apollo 18 caught my eye because it had the word “Apollo” in it and because there was no 18th mission to the moon. This monster movie is supposed to explain why that is, which got me all jazzed up because, you know, rockets and astronauts Read.

  • Big Box

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    It’s another post about the big plywood box I’m building in the basement! I keep adding to it even though I haven’t brought it to your attention in quite a while. If I had, the posts would have looked something like this: It’s a big box. It’s a bigger box. It’s an even bigger box. Read.

  • Boooooard!

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    Day One of the Rebuild of the New Lost Continent Railway: The benchwork. [I know it looks like a big, empty box with no sides. Play along with me here.] I’ve been pecking away at this a little bit through the week, whenever I could find an hour or two after dinner. The frames at Read.

  • Train Wreck

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    WHAT HAVE I DONE? I demolished my model train layout this weekend. The original section still stands, but only because it’s going to take me the better part of a day to disconnect the electrical fixtures and unscrew all the hardware that I’ve attached to it over the years. I’m hoping to begin rebuilding later Read.

  • John Armstrong, you’re a genius

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    John Armstrong was a freaking genius, was he not? This is just the kind of layout that makes boys big and small pucker their mouths and go “Oooooo!” Or at least that’s what it did to me. I go gaga for layout track plans with lots of track looped on top of itself with a Read.

  • The Path Between The Seas

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    I enjoy reading about the turn of the century quite a lot. Not the last turn of the century, that one was a cosmic let-down. I’m talking about the ten or fifteen years on either side of the line dividing the 1800s and the 1900s. It’s easily the most interesting history of modern humankind. On Read.

  • Dynamite Ed

    Politics was a lot more fun back in the day: … delegation-selection proceedings were under way in several states that had not yet adopted the primary system. On 23 January, Oklahoma’s Fourth District Republican convention grotesquely dramatized the factionalism of a party splitting three ways. The local committee chairman, Edward Perry, was a Roosevelt man Read.

  • The End

    Recently finished books: Millenium, by John Varley – based on the short story Air Raid, and I’m not sure I can say making it into a book improved it. The short story wowed me so much that it resurfaced in my memory just last week and and sent me searching the internet for it. When Read.

photo of the author and the author's best friend