Flash Fiction #94

PHOTO PROMPT © Mary Shipman

HARD-TIME MACHINE

They’d spent a wonderful week at the little lakeside tourist town when he finally succumbed to curiosity about the sign. It read;

TAKE A TRIP IN A TIME MACHINE
Shuttle Leaves At
9:00AM 11:00 AM 1:00PM 3:00PM

The psychedelically-painted hippie love-bus dropped them off at a moribund factory, next to another bright sign declaring;

Welcome to Terri’s Temporal Temple
Come on in and see how your
ancestors lived 150 years ago
(And our Amish neighbors still do)

It was a cute come-on for a ratty little antique shop, but the tour was educational. Our pioneer ancestors worked hard! Vive technology!

***

Go to Rochelle’s Addicted to Purple site and use her Wednesday photo as a prompt to write a complete 100 word story.

April Challenge – B

This blog-post is brought to you by the number 3.1415926, and the letter B.

Basement; a story of a building, partly or wholly underground.

***

When they were first married, they were madly in love, always together. Couldn’t keep their hands off each other, joined at the hip – frequently. Went everywhere together.

He had to go to work to support his wife, and soon, their children. She became a housekeeper, remaining at home, to cook and clean, and raise the kids.  Still, they loved each other, and often expressed it – a quick kiss or a pat on the bum.

His career progressed. He worked longer hours and had to take courses.  When she wasn’t tied up with the kids, she got to coffee-klatch with other neighborhood wives, but they always made time for each other.

While they still liked each other greatly, and showed it, they found that they had different interests. He took up golf; she joined a bowling league.  He read only best-sellers and wondered what she got from the Historical Romance novels she read.  Still, there were the pecks on the cheek, and the rubbing of a forearm.

His job required him to travel occasionally. When he was out of town, she took the opportunity to visit a sister he considered a loud-mouthed trouble-maker.  When he returned home, they had little of interest to discuss with each other.

She moved into one of the children’s abandoned bedrooms, because ‘he snored.’ He might not snore if she didn’t stay awake all night, reading.

With the kids married, or off at college, organized evening meals became infrequent. One or the other might make food for them both, but it was seldom eaten together at the table.  She lounged in her bed and watched Downton Abbey.  He rocked back in the rec-room recliner and watched baseball or football.

One day he realized that they hadn’t spoken a word to each other in days – and he didn’t worry about it. They were down to having corridor sex.  If they met in the hallway, she would hiss, “Fuck you!”  He would reply, “Screw you, Bitch.”  Life had become an armed truce.

He realized that living together – separately, was better than splitting up. His benefits package covered her.  They only had one cable TV bill, one phone bill, one Internet provider.  The mortgage was retired, so neither would have to rent an apartment.

One day though, she gravely approached him, and told him that she wanted her space – without him in it. Somewhat sadly, he signed the divorce papers, and made arrangements to sell off the house and contents.  That was how he had come to be living in this basement, bachelor apartment.

 

Bottle Babies

Two guys in a life raft in the middle of
the ocean.

One sees an old bottle floating. He picks
it up and rubs it, and a genie comes out.

The genie says, “For letting me out, I will
grant you one wish.”

The guy says, (without thinking) “Turn this
ocean into beer”. And the ocean turns into
the best beer anybody has ever tasted.

The second guy says to the first, “You idiot,
now we’ll have to piss in the boat”.

***

Two old men sit on a bench in a park when one of
them asks the other:
“How many times can you have sex”?
“Not more than twice”, replies the other old man.
A few minutes of silence, then the first old man asks again:
“Which of the times is the best one then?”
“Hmmmm, I think the one in Spring.” says the other old man.

***

How do you find a blind man in a nudist colony?
It’s not hard.

***

Single women complain that all good men are
married, while all married women complain about
their lousy husbands.

This confirms that there is no such thing as a
good man.

***

A flashlight is a case for holding dead batteries

***

How many men does it take to change a roll of
toilet paper?

We don’t know, it has never happened.

***

A guy from up North (Canada) goes into a
classy bar in the South (States). This
bar has a dress code, and the maître d’
demands he wear a tie.

Discouraged, the guy goes to his car to
sulk when inspiration strikes: He’s got
jumper cables in the trunk! So he wraps
them around his neck, sort of like a
string tie (a bulky string tie to be
sure) and returns to the bar.

The maître d’ is reluctant, but says to
the guy, “Okay, you’re a pretty
resourceful fellow, you can come in…
but just don’t start anything”!

***

Your kid may be an honors student,
but you’re still an idiot!

Flash Fiction #93

PHOTO PROMPT © Madison Woods

IMPRISONED INFINITY

Barbed wire tamed the Wild West. It had been Terra Incognita – the land beyond the law.  Its business was Beef.  Myriad cattle grazed millions of open acres, giving birth a century later to McDonalds and Burger King.

Then came the farmers – Sodbusters.  The cost of enough lumber, on the treeless plain, to keep cattle from crops, was exorbitant.  But then came the wire salesman, offering a cheap solution that was horse-high, bull-strong, and pig-tight.

Even men with no property deeds objected to being fenced out of once-open land. Wire wars were fought, but eventually, civilization moved west, and peace prevailed.

***

Go to Rochelle’s Addicted to Purple site and use her Wednesday photo as a prompt to write a complete 100 word story.

Book Review #11

Title: A World Lit Only By Fire

Author: William Manchester

When I published my Torture of Faith post, my well-read and well-respected visitor, Jim Wheeler, suggested the above book as background reference reading, to explain the historical era.

As too often happens, I whined and wheedled. My library didn’t have a copy that I could borrow for free.  The nearby Chapters bookstores didn’t have a copy in stock.  I could order one, but objected to actually paying for it.  Jim sensibly reminded me that I had obtained the copy of Malleus Malificarum(Wiki link) thru Inter-Library Loan; I could do the same with this one.

The book eventually arrived, not from the gigantic Toronto Library system, but from the King Township Public Library – Nobleton branch. King Township is part of what is known as the Holland Marsh, the most fertile part of Southern Ontario, north of Toronto.  Nobleton is a town of 4000 located within it.  Why this rural area would have a copy of this book, when the metropolis doesn’t, is a mystery.

I was in love with it before I even got through the introduction. It introduced me to the word ‘catenas’, which are things or occurrences that lead inevitably, like links in a chain, from one to the next.  Like the chain they describe, I linked it to two other words I already knew, ‘catenary’ which describes the shape of a free-hanging chain, (Think McDonalds Golden Arches – or the St. Louis arch.) and ‘concatenation’, which is the formation of a chain of events.  I know!  There’s only two people in the world who give a shit about this verbal trivia – and I’m both of them.

This book describes Europe from about 1500 to 1550, just at the end of the Dark Ages, and the beginning of the Renaissance. Martin Luther and Henry the Eighth both split from The Church, and it was losing control, and its collective mind.  Catholics tortured and burned Protestants at the stake.  Protestants tortured and burned Catholics.

This book should be required reading for all the blindly-believing ‘Good Christians’, especially Catholics. It describes over two hundred years of some of the most sinful, licentious behaviour of The Church, from the local priests, right up to the Archbishops and Pope.  The Church was operated for the benefit of the religious leaders.

Tithe money bought opulent palaces and jewels and extravagant clothing – and wars to conquer countries to wring more money from. While thousands starved in the fields, the Pope threw lavish, drunken parties.

Sex was a competitive sport. The Vatican supported two whorehouses, which explains people with the name Pope.  They are descendants of bastard sons.  Many convents operated as brothels, funneling money from the nobility and rich merchants into The Church.

Positions in The Church were bought and sold, so that the buyers could gain more power and income. Several Popes simply appointed friends and relatives.  One Pope made Bishops of two young nephews who had absolutely no religious training.  Indulgences were handed out like Halloween candy.  If you gave The Church enough gold, you could commit any act, and still go to Heaven.

I’ve run into most of this information piecemeal, but it was both pleasant and disturbing to see it all laid out in an all-you-can-sin buffet. The religiously-naive would be horrified to see the quiet, historical listings of all the mistakes of the ‘Infallible’ Popes, the changes in the ‘unchanging’ Catholic Church, and the gamut of sins of all the ‘Holy, Sanctified’ religious leaders.

Until this time, many rulers, both religious and nobility, were illiterate and ignorant – and proud of it. Peasants knew only what they were told. Even the elite were only vaguely aware of occurrences at any distance, and days, weeks, months after they occurred.  After Gutenberg perfected the printing press, more people learned to read, and knowledge began flowing – the beginning of the end for the Church’s control.

The Church had invented Purgatory as an extortion racket. It all came to a head when one Pope wanted money to wage yet another war.  The selling-indulgences scheme had folded faster than a Kardashian at a spelling bee, so the Pope announced that, for those who ‘donated’ enough gold, time spent in purgatory by relatives could be reduced or eliminated by his prayers.

The now widely-read Martin Luther published a tract questioning if that were true, and asking why the Pope wouldn’t do so merely for the sake of supposedly good Christian souls and their obedient kin still here on Earth, and not for the money, “like some brazen harlot”.

While it could still use some updating and improvement, the Catholic Church is a thousand times better today than it was five hundred years ago. If you’d like a look at a time when peasants were regarded as worth less than the animals they kept, and society was run to wretched excess by hypocritical, entitled rulers, both secular and religious, this would be an enlightening book.   😯

April A to Z Challenge – Eh

When is an April A to Z Challenge not an April A to Z Challenge?  When it’s a Frank Sinatra April Challenge!  I’m going to accept this challenge, but, as usual, I’m going to do it my way.

There is no way that I could ever write and post 26 alphabetical blogs in one month, especially with weekly Flash Fictions and other time-sensitive thoughts. I am going to try to post them from April to April.  Every couple of weeks, I’ll slip one in among my regularly scheduled insanity/inanity.  I’m already 2 weeks behind, so here’s number one.  (This is alphabetical. Shouldn’t that be letter A??!)  😯

Advent – a coming into place, view, or being; arrival:

Arrival- the reaching or attainment of any object or condition:

April – from Latin ‘aprilis’, meaning to open (up)

Articulation – using language easily and fluently; having facility with words:

All four of these words fit into this post. Since this is the first in a, hopefully completed, series, this is my advent.  I finally got my ass off my keyboard, and applied my fingers.

Since the definition of ‘advent’ includes the word ‘arrival’, I’ll mention it also.  The definition above includes the terms reaching and attainment, almost unintentionally implying completion.  I’m still 25 words away from completion of this project, but I have reached the starting line and attained a mission.

Speaking of starting lines….Why are comedians making ‘end of the world’ jokes like there’s no tomorrow?

April, the month, and the name, is a good time to ‘open up’ this series.

I like to think that I have articulation – ease of language usage and fluency, having facility with words.  While I still possess these, I avoid being placed in a facility with wards.

Articulation has another meaning also, involving bones and joints and physical movement. More and more, I find myself using handicap parking spots, even when I’m alone in the car, because the arthritis pain in my right hip is increasing.  I can’t drive with my wallet in my right ass pocket.  I have a gay fanny-pack for summer, and an inside pocket in my leather jacket for cold weather.

I wondered if I’d forgotten how to put socks on, because I was finding the front seam balled up under my toes, like walking on a pen. When I paid more attention, I found myself walking duck-footed on the right side to ease the ache, putting pressure on the foot from a non-standard direction, causing the sock to slip and bunch.

What? You expected more?  That’s it for today!  Come Back later, for Bigger, Better Blogs.

Flash Fiction #92

PHOTO PROMPT © Kent Bonham

KEEP CALM AND COLOR ON

Henry was a binary fellow even before the internet. He only had two settings about everything – on/off, good/bad, yes/no, light/darkness, black or white.

His wife got him to a therapist who urged him to add a little color to his opinions. Soon, Henry had learned to add the red of anger, the brown of sadness, the blue of serenity, the beige of apathy, the yellow of interest, the green of life, even the plaid of uncertainty.

Finally, Henry was a much more colorful person, only now; his life’s design looked like it was laid out by a drunken dung beetle.

***

Go to Rochelle’s Addicted to Purple site and use her Wednesday photo as a prompt to write a complete 100 word story

A View Of Islam

This is a good reminder.  It doesn’t matter if it is a German’s view, or a Brit’s or a Canadian’s, an Aussie’s, or whatever.  It better become the prominent view in the US as well.

To one and all ~ This is well worth the time to read. We all need to wake up before it is too late for our children and grandchildren. Please peruse this one.  

A  German’s View on Islam  

This is one of the best explanations of the Muslim terrorist situation. His references to past history are accurate and clear. Not long, easy to understand, and well worth the read. The author of this is Dr. Emanuel Tanya, a well-known and well-respected psychiatrist, a man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism.

‘Very few people were true Nazis,’ he said, ‘but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come.’ 

‘My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.’

‘We are told again and again by ‘experts’ and ‘talking heads’ that Islam is a religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectre of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.’

‘The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honour-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.’

‘The hard, quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the ‘silent majority,’ is cowed and extraneous. Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China’s huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.’

‘The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet. And who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery? Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were ‘peace loving’?

‘History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.’

‘Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.’

‘Now Islamic prayers have been introduced in Toronto and other public schools in Ontario, and, yes, in Ottawa, too, while the Lord’s Prayer was removed (due to being so offensive?). The Islamic way may be peaceful for the time being in our country until the fanatics move in.’

‘In Australia, and indeed in many countries around the world, many of the most commonly consumed food items have the Halal emblem on them. Just look at the back of some of the most popular chocolate bars, and at other food items in your local supermarket. Food on aircraft has the Halal emblem just to appease the privileged minority who are now rapidly expanding within the nation’s shores.’

‘In the U.K, the Muslim communities refuse to integrate and there are now dozens of “no-go” zones within major cities across the country that the police force dare not intrude upon. Sharia law prevails there, because the Muslim community in those areas refuse to acknowledge British law.’

‘As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts – the fanatics who threaten our way of life.’

Lastly, anyone who doubts that the issue is serious and just ignores this post, without sending it on, is contributing to the passiveness that allows the problems to expand.

Extend yourself a bit and send this on. Let us hope that thousands world-wide read this, think about it, and send it on before it’s too late, and we are silenced because we were silent!!!

 

 

 

What A Buzz

These are the latest buzzwords to add to your
corporate vocabulary.

Blamestorming – Sitting around in a group
discussing why a deadline was missed or a
project failed and who was responsible.

Seagull Manager – A manager who flies in,
makes a lot of noise, shits over everything
and then leaves.

Blowing your buffer – Losing your train of
thought.

Salmon day – The experience of spending an
entire day swimming upstream only to get
screwed and die in the end.

Chainsaw consultant – An outside expert
brought in to reduce the employee headcount,
leaving the brass with clean hands.

CLM – Career-limiting move – Used among
microserfs to describe ill-advised activity.
Trashing your boss while he or she is within
earshot is a serious CLM.

Depotphobia – Fear associated with entering a Home
Depot because of how much money one might spend.

Adminisphere – The rarefied organizational layers
beginning just above the rank and file.
Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are
often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to
the problems they were designed to solve.

Dilberted – To be exploited and oppressed by your
boss. Derived from the experiences of Dilbert, the
geek-in-hell comic strip character.
“I’ve been dilberted again. The old man revised
the specs for the fourth time this week.”

Flight Risk – Used to describe employees who are
suspected of planning to leave the company or
department soon.

404 – Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide
Web error message “404 Not Found”, meaning that
the requested document could not be located.
“Don’t bother asking him…he’s 404, man.”

Generica – Features of the American landscape that
are exactly the same no matter where one is, such
as fast food joints, strip malls, sub-divisions.
Used as in “We were so lost in generica that I
forgot what city we were in.”

Keyboard Plaque – The disgusting buildup of dirt
and crud found on computer keyboards.

Ohnosecond – That minuscule fraction of time in
which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG
mistake.

Percussive Maintenance – The fine art of whacking
the crap out of an electronic device to get it to
work again.

Prairie Dogging – When someone yells or drops
something loudly in a “cube farm” (an office full
of cubicles) and everyone’s heads pop up over the
walls to see what’s going on.

Telephone Number Salary – A salary (or project
budget) that has seven digits.

Umfriend – A sexual relation of dubious standing
or a concealed intimate relationship, as in “This
is Dale, my…um…friend.”

Yuppie Food Stamps – the ubiquitous $20 bills
spewed out of ATMs everywhere. Often used when
trying to split the bill after a meal:
“We all owe $8 each, but all anybody’s got
is yuppie food stamps.”

 

 

Flash Fiction #91

PHOTO PROMPT © J Hardy Carroll

HOW DRY I AM

Mankind is a blight upon the face of the Earth. I believe the line in The Matrix which says Humanity is like a virus.

This was a nice little town, until someone drilled a large-bore water well. Even then, it was happiness and prosperity for thirty years – till the aquifer went dry.

Then there was no more water for drinking or manufacturing. The water-dome collapsed, the soil compacted, and entrances at ground level, now needed ladders to get up into.  People moved away, plants and animals died, and the town, with its proud history and spirit, died with them.

***

Go to Rochelle’s Addicted to Purple site and use her Wednesday photo as a prompt to write a complete 100 word story.