This Is Drivel

Category: hobby

  • 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

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    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

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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.

photo of the author and the author's best friend