This Is Drivel

Category: hobby

  • The End

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    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.

  • A Different Boy

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    Robert Goddard was the father of American rocketry, or maybe something more like the crazy uncle. Like Tsiolkovsky in Russia and von Braun in Germany, he not only cobbled together working rockets, he was inspired by a compelling inspiration to fly to other planets, which was crazy talk in his day, and I mean people… Read.

  • Memory-free

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    I have no idea where I was or what I was doing the night I heard John Lennon died. I remember seeing plenty of television news stories with video of people weeping and lighting candles, but when I try to recall the first time I heard about it, I just can’t. It simply didn’t make… Read.

  • Old Paint

    Paint for scale models used to cover in just one coat when I built plastic model airplanes by the dozen many, many moons ago. Now it doesn’t. What the hell’s up with that? I’ll grant you, a few other things have changed since then: Not all of the models I build now are plastic. Some… Read.

  • Shameless plug

    The book that I’m currently devouring is The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, an economist who writes articles for media outlets like Bloomberg. I was a little worried this would turn out to be a great big yawner, even while it has a relevance to contemporary times so intimate that I shouldn’t even say how… Read.

  • Playing Trains

    Today is Play With Your Toy Trains Day all across this great nation of ours. I hope you were sprawled across the living room floor piecing together track and crashing choo-choos into one another a la Gomez Addams, or in your attic adding another building to the sprawling iron road empire you’ve been steadily assembling… Read.

  • Truman – Finished!

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    I finished it! It’s been about three weeks and almost a thousand pages after I started, and I am honestly sorry it’s over. I think I can say this is the best biography of anybody by anybody I’ve ever read. Maybe I’m biased a bit by the fact that I’m a huge fan of David… Read.

  • Dancing Fools

    I’m torn: I’ve got less than 120 pages left and then I’m finished with David McCullough’s Truman. I should be upstairs on the sofa finishing it off right now, but I couldn’t let the night pass without banging out some drivel. So here you go: Dance night tonight. It’s been at least two months since… Read.

  • Pound Sand

    I was almost supernaturally compelled to write to Grant and Martha, the hosts of A Way With Words, after I heard a listener who spoke Swahili call in to ask why people say “slept like a log” because, obviously, logs don’t sleep much. He was calling as much to find out the origin of the… Read.

  • The Keys to Love

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    I came within seconds of buying another old typewriter I found at the thrift store today. Not the one in the picture. That one was way too expensive. They were asking so much that I got the feeling it would still be there next week at a greatly reduced price, even though I don’t know… Read.

photo of the author and the author's best friend