’23 A To Z Challenge – D

Don’t be a horse’s ass!  Use some horse sense.  Someone once decried steam locomotive trains, saying that travelling more than 40 MPH would drive people insane.  Sorry!!  They came in that way.

The 20^th Century and the 21^st have been a period of great, rapid, technological advancement and development.  Some people are able to keep with part, or all of it, better than others.  Bigots sometimes denigrate middle-Easterners, by calling them camel-riders.  That sometimes is a good idea – the camel-riding, not the name-calling.

A scientific expedition to research a geographic anomaly in the Sahara, hired a Bedouin guide who was reputed to know the desert well.  They loaded him in one of their jeeps, and tore off into the sand.  After a day of driving they stopped, and asked him where they were, and where their destination was.  He had no idea!!  He knew the desert by how long it took to get to any part of it, by camel.

Trafficking in stupidity!

There are waaayyyy too many car drivers who should be restricted to horse-drawn carts, pulled by

DOBBIN

a horse, especially a quiet, plodding horse for farm work or family use.

A horse would be smarter than many drivers.  I don’t drive much anymore, but I DO watch some “Idiots in Cars” YouTube videos.  A horse would get out of the way of a lot of these accidents.  I’ve bitched that some people don’t drive past the hood of their car.  The worst of them don’t drive past the end of their nose.  These are the ones who should take a bus, a cab, or an Uber.

Oh, the road lanes separate ahead, and there’s a concrete divider with buttress at the end.
I’ll just keep driving right into it.
I’m going so slow, that someone is making a left-turn in front of me.
I won’t bother to swerve to avert a collision, or put on the brakes.  I’ll just drive slowly right into them.

A small rancher in Wyoming rode his horse several miles into what passed for a small town one evening.  He hitched Lightning outside a roadhouse bar, and went in and got snozzled.  At closing time he managed to clamber back into the saddle, smacked the horse on the rump, ordered Home, and slumped over the saddle-horn.

Lightning was happy to head back home, where there was food, and water, and other horses, so off he trotted.  Just outside town, an ambitious, officious State Trooper pulled the pair over, and charged the rancher with drunk driving.  Sometimes it’s just best to pay the damned fine.  Sometimes it ain’t.

He went to court, and argued to the judge that his horse was not a motor-vehicle as defined by law.  Also, in his condition, he was not in care and control of his autonomous transport.  The judge agreed, and dismissed the charge, saying that he felt the horse was the smartest of the three.

Saddle up and ride back on Friday, to meet Lyin’ Brian, my evil Fibbing Friday twin.  😉

’22 A To Z Challenge – Z

Our old mix-tapes had sides A and B.  It is only reasonable that their replacements should be CDs.

I used last year’s A To Z – Y post to babble about watching old black and white films on YouTube, an old and already, almost obsolete platform.  I thought I might close this year out by writing about an older system of watching even older moving pictures.  Ladies and gentlemen, Thomas Alva Edison Presents his fabulous

ZOETROPE

[ zoh-ee-trohp ]
a device for giving an illusion of motion, consisting of a slitted drum that, when whirled, shows a succession of images placed opposite the slits within the drum as one moving image.

ORIGIN OF ZOETROPE

1865–70; irregular <Greek zōḗ life + tropḗ turn

Western society has come so far, so fast, perhaps nowhere quite much as in Entertainment.  For centuries – millennia – a flickering candle was the zenith of amusement and attention-holding.  Technology has changed entertainment, particularly the visual arts – films, television, and videos.

A century ago, Lon Chaney – Senior – the great makeup genius and actor, played a Jekyll and Hyde type role in a film.  He walked around a ‘tree’ as Jekyll, altered nothing but the way he held his body and face, and came around the other side as the evil Hyde character.  Some women watching the movie actually fainted.  Play today’s Alien, or Predator, or even The Matrix, and we’d have the entire audience aswoon.

My attempts at entertainment are definitely spinning, and often best viewed through a narrow slit.  I’ve got to get out of this heavy white jacket.  I’ve got the month of April to put into motion.  😉

Flash Fiction #284

PHOTO PROMPT © Rochelle Wisoff-Fields

SPIN SPIN SPIN

The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.
I have to run faster and faster, just to stay in the same place.

It is pleasant to recline in the lap of technology – so many things to make our lives quicker and easier – but, there is a cost to pay.  Change has been thrust upon us, occurring more and more often.

Studies show if the maze is constantly altered, the lab rat eventually goes insane – which brings us to cops killing innocent people, and schoolboys committing mass murders.  It’s not the testosterone or guns. Our easy, effortless lives are killing us.

***

If you’d like to join the fun with the Friday Fictioneers, go to Rochelle’s Addicted to Purple site and use her Wednesday photo as a prompt to write a complete 100 word story.

Contrary To Popular Belief

Contrary to popular belief, the Internet doesn’t know everything.

My Mind recently went for a little walk, unaccompanied, but properly masked.  When it returned, it brought back a tiny piece of my childhood – a strange little piece called

UNEEDA LABORATORY

I know that it existed, because Mad Magazine did a send-up on it, and I once read an article saying that jokesters spoofed it with names like Igotta Laboratory, Wewanna Lab. and Theyhadda Lab.  Whether they ever heard of the Laboratory, smart marketers are still using the cutesy name to identify companies like, Uneeda Taxi, Uneeda Tire Center, and Uneeda Burger.

In my youth, I never investigated what Uneeda Laboratory researched, so I plugged it into both Bing and Google.  I got back a black hole.  😯  Nabisco made biscuits that they called Uneeda, back in the early 1900s.  There’s a coated abrasives firm which makes Uneeda wire wheels, sanding belts, and grinding wheels, but they market them as Tanis Brush.  They brag that they’ve been in business for 50 years, but my memories of Uneeda are 65 years or more old.

In the 1960s, there was a Brooklyn company that made a product called Uneeda Dolls.  The dolls are long gone, and the company was bought up by a Hong Kong firm called Tony Toys.  There’s a tiny village named Uneeda in West Virginia, about as big as a mole on a chipmunk’s nose.  It’s not large enough for another outhouse, much less a laboratory.  I’ve heard the joke that, “My home-town was so small; the McDonalds only had one arch.”  This village of 391 at a bend in a mountain road claims to have a McD’s, but there is no arch.

Dictionary sites don’t recognize the name.  It’s probably because I’m a grumpy old technological Luddite: I just don’t know what search terms to enter into search engines like Bing or Google.  When I enter meaning Uneeda, I am referred to the Nabisco biscuits, or the coated-abrasives, sites.  That’s what Uneeda is, not what the word means.

If I enter meaning name Uneeda, I am presented with 6 or 8 baby name sites which claim to know the meanings of every name, but don’t.

Meaning – baby boy name – Uneeda
Meaning – baby girl name – Uneeda

Each and every one of them is a Wiki-style site.  They all say, “We do not currently have a meaning for the name Uneeda.  If you have a meaning for the name Uneeda, please enter it.”

And so, the origin and history of the famous Uneeda Laboratory fades into the mists of time.  Have any of you ever heard of the Uneeda Laboratory?  If you know the meaning of Uneeda Laboratory, please enter it.

WOW #72

You young whipper-snapper snowflakes today….  This is how we did it in The Good Old Days!

I was recently reading an historical novel on my Kindle.  I came upon a passage where a female personal assistant (read secretary – at that time, a secretary was a lockable writing desk, and 50 years later, a typewriter was the person who ran the new-fangled machine) in 1850 NYC, produced a document for her lawyer boss on a

PTEROTYPE

I’ve run into some strange and uncommon words, but this one stunned me.  The word was coined near the end of The Golden Age, when learned men all spoke some Latin, and a little Greek.  Fortunately, I could just tap the screen to investigate this strange word.  It took me to a Wikipedia article about a predecessor to the typewriter. pterotype – Google Search

File:Pterotype.jpg – Wikipedia

During further research, without even asking, dictionary.com first took me to ‘Stereotype,’ and later offered me ‘Proterotype,’ which is the first example of any new article. So, this is the proterotype of the pterotype.

Historically, technologically, we have come so far, so fast.  I can just imagine trying to pound out a letter, using this monster.  The lawyer might better have used the services of Bartleby the Scrivener.  I’ll keep my word-processing program and Spell-Check, thanx.

Flash Fiction #260

                        PHOTO PROMPT © Russell Gayer

FLYING CAR-PET

I can’t believe that this van is flying.  There must be some kind of technology involved.  Anti-gravity is tough enough to accept – but MAGIC??!

It’s not MAGIC magic.  It’s just that some of us have learned to harvest and direct cosmic radiation.  Harry Potter’s car flew.  I often wonder if Rowling is one of us.

But people must be able to see us.  I’ve never heard even nut-case reports.

The diffraction field makes people view us as birds, or distant airplanes.  We might even be some of those government UFO reports.  We’ll need to wash the unicorn shit off later.

***

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

’20 A To Z Challenge – Z

And the First shall be Last, and Last shall be First.  At last we are approaching the first of a new alphabet challenge – But first, the word

ZENOSYNE

zenosyne – The sense that time keeps going faster. .Coined in 2012 by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/ a project to create a compendium of invented words for every emotion we might all experience but don’t yet have a word for.  And Keta – an image that inexplicably leaps back into your mind from the distant past.  Koinophobhia – the fear that one may have lived an ordinary life.  Wytai – feature(s) of modern life that one may consider absurd, like zoos, drinking milk, or organ transplants. 

Morii is the desire to capture a fleeing experience, something we try to do incessantly every waking minute of our lives these days, with Instagram stories, photographs, and snaps.  Lacheism is a longing for clarity of a disaster or apocalypse.  Lilo is a friendship that can lie dormant for years only to pick right back up instantly, as if no time had passed since you last saw each other.  Astrophe – the feeling of being stuck on earth when there is an entire universe or beyond to explore.  Modus tollens – is the feeling that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense any more. 

Onism is the realization of how little of the world you will experience.  Socha is the hidden vulnerability of others.  Lutalica is the part of your personality that doesn’t fit into categories.  Vemödalen is the fear that everything has already been done, and Avenoir is the desire to see memories in advance. 

We take it for granted that life moves forward.  But you move as a rower moves – facing backward.  You can see where you’ve been, but not where you are going.  And your boat is steered by a younger version of you.  It is hard not to wonder what life would be like, facing the other way.

Klexos is the art of dwelling on the past.  Your life is written in indelible ink.  There’s no going back to erase the past, tweak the mistakes, or fill in the missed opportunities.  When the moment’s over, your fate is sealed.

Xeno is the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a flirtatious glance, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone.

Mahpiohanzia is the disappointment of being unable to fly.  Being unable to stretch out your arms and vault into the air, having finally shrugged off the ballast of your own weight and ignited the fuel tank of unfulfilled desires you’ve been storing up since before you were born.

Trumspringa is the temptation to step off your career track and become a shepherd in the mountains, following your flock between pastures with a sheepdog and a rifle, watching storms at dusk from the doorway of a small cabin, just the kind of hypnotic diversion that allows your thoughts to make a break for it and wander back to their cubicles in the city.

Kairosclerosis is the moment you realize that you’re currently happy—consciously trying to savor the feeling—which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart and put it in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it’s little more than an aftertaste.

Sonder – the realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as yours
Opia – The ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.
Monachopsis – The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.

Kenopsia – The forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people, but is now abandoned.

Mauerbauer-Traurigkeit – The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends that you like.

Énouement – The bitter-sweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.
Vellichor – The strange wistfulness of used-book shops.

Anticipointment – The sinking feeling when anticipation fails to be the greater part of pleasure.
Jouska – A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.

This man obviously had way too much time, sitting by himself in the attic.  I don’t know whether he should have taken more drugs – or less.  At least he got an entire book out of it – portions of which I have stolen researched, and used for free, for this post.

The same old alphabet begins with brand-new words in a couple of weeks.  This year, C may be for Compulsive.

The League of Sedentary Gentlemen

I have joined a prestigious, if none too exclusive club.  The League of Sedentary Gentlemen graciously offered me an honorary membership, just because I mentioned that my idea of exercise is a good, brisk sit.  I questioned accepting membership in a group that would accept me as a member

They all sit around (what else) texting each other with suggestions for the best way to get a wife, or grandkid, or a guilt-ridden neighbor to bring them another beer or a fresh mint julep.  Well, most of the rest of them do.  I’m an old technological Luddite, still trying to figure out the intricacies of these new-fangled touch-tone phones.

I tried to talk one or more of them into coming over to the house and explaining it to me, but none of them want to leave the safety and comfort of their living room or front porch.  They claim that if they relieve pressure on their butt-cheeks, their prostates will swell.

I’ve spent a good chunk of my life, fetchin’ and totin’ for other folks.  I just thought that it was time to sit back, take it easy, and deeply cogitate about… sittin’ back and taking it easy.  There are no problems that are too deep or complex, that they can’t be addressed with the judicious use of a remote control, and/or an intercom or walkie-talkie.  I’ve got this COVID ‘sheltering at home’ thing down to a fine science.

I have so impressed so many of the group, that I am considering standing for election as President of the League, but standing can get you tossed out of this loosely rational knit organization.  I expect to sit, comfortably, both before and after I achieve total control.  My dynamite campaign trick will be to distribute a NSFW photo of my ass, showing the corduroy marks from the extra pillow that I added to my computer chair.

I have a lot of great ideas for the League, that don’t involve strenuous movement.  I’d like to set up a group of online webinars, with titles like, ‘Leaving the Rocker/Recliner To Go To Bed: Good Idea, or Bad?’ – ‘How Do You Know When You’ve Had Enough Nothing?’ – ‘Door-Dash, Skip The Dishes, and Uber-Eats: Pillars of the Republic! and ‘Screened Front Porches: Salvation Of The Nation!’

I might become so famous and well-known that I could sit on the Supreme Court – as long as I get an aide who will wheel me into the courtroom.  What is your position on abortion?  Recumbent, on the couch.  The sun can rise every day, but I am not that motivated.  I have an irresistible force to remain an immovable object.

I wouldn’t object if you expressed your unwavering support for my plan.  I’ll take your word for it.  It’s not like I’m going to actually get up and check.

Another labor-saving position

 

Tell Me If You’ve Heard This One – III

Why did the chicken cross the lexicon?  To get to the other side of the dictionary.
What’s the good word?  All of them.  Look out vocabulary, here they come.

Adjutant – Adjutant is a military appointment given to an officer who assists the commanding officer with unit administration, mostly the management of human resources in army unit.

Argute – Sharp, perceptive, shrewd. Origin: from Latin argutus, past participle of arguere ‘clarify’….

Bamboozle – to deceive or get the better of (someone) by trickery, flattery, or the like; humbug; hoodwink (often followed by into): to perplex; mystify; confound.

Bamboozle is one of those words that has been confounding etymologists for centuries. No one knows for sure what its origins are. One thing we do know is that it was originally considered “low language,” at least among such defenders of the language as British satirist Jonathan Swift, who hoped (and predicted) that it would quickly fade from the English lexicon.
The earliest meaning of bamboozle was “to deceive by trickery, hoodwink,” which is why some believe that it arose among the criminals of the underworld.

Clusterfist – First found in the 1600s, clusterfist can refer to a few types of disappointing individuals. In one sense, cluster means clumsy, and a clusterfist is a type of oaf or boor.  Clusterfist in Community Dictionary is someone who is “tighter than Kelsey’s peanuts” regarding parting with a buck; a parsimonious peckerhead.

A young Black woman recently wrote about how shocked and embarrassed she was to find that her name, Ebony, was a porn category.  😯  EVERYTHING is a porn category.  The modern definition of clusterfist is a fisting of someone simultaneously by over 6 individuals usually leading to severe pain and hilarity at just what a muppet that individual had been for agreeing.

Coracle – (especially in Wales and Ireland) a small round boat made of wickerwork covered with a watertight material, propelled with a paddle.

Frangible – fragile · breakable · brittle – easily broken · easily damaged · delicate · flimsy · insubstantial

Friable – easily crumbled – powdery – dusty – chalky

Futz – Informal futz (around) with, to handle or deal with, especially idly, reluctantly, or as a time-consuming task

Glassine – Glassine is a smooth and glossy paper that is air, water, and grease resistant.  Another Technological obsolescence term, while still available, almost every use of glassine has been replaced by ubiquitous plastic.

Insouciant – free from concern, worry or anxiety – carefree – nonchalant

Intrepid – resolutely fearless, dauntless, daring, bold
If you haven’t, you can read a book titled A Man Called Intrepid, about which, several historians claim that he fudged the facts about his intrepid WWII British Intelligence career.

Keloid – an area of irregular fibrous tissue formed at the site of a scar or injury.

Lieutenant – a deputy or substitute, acting for a superior – from French, lieu – in place of, tenant – holding

Logorrhea – pathologically incoherent, repetitious speech – incessant or compulsive talkativeness – wearisome volubility  Therefore, a Logo is a symbol which constantly ‘speaks’ for its corporation.

Melmac – For those of you TV snobs and binge-watchers, who thought that Melmac was only the home planet of ALF, it is actually a brand of dinnerware moulded from melamine resin, popular in the mid-twentieth century.  That’s the stuff that the Chinese tried to poison us with, by putting it baby formula and pet food, before they unleashed COVID19 on us.

Rapacious – practicing pillage or rapine, greedy or grasping, (of animals, esp. birds) subsisting by catching living prey, ravenous, voracious  (Does it remind you of any politicians you know?)

Scree – a mass of small loose stones that form or cover a slope on a mountain.  That is the normal definition, but since the word was found in a poem which included screeching seagulls, it is onomatopoeia for their cries.

Scritch – Speaking of seagulls and onomatopoeia, depending on how and where it is used, it is a dialect form of either screech, or scratch.
It’s also something that my cats and dogs climb into my lap, to demand from me.

Scumble – Verb: To modify (a painting or color) by applying a very thin coat of opaque paint to give a softer or duller effect.  Noun: a thin, opaque coat of paint or layer of shading applied to give a softer or duller effect.

Shambolic – Shambolic, “disorganized; messy or confused,” is a colloquial adjective, used mostly by the British. The word is a combination of shambles and symbolic. Shambolic is a fairly recent coinage, entering English about 1970.

Tartuffery – religious hypocrisy, or pretention to excellence in any field

Truculent – adj: eager or quick to argue or fight, aggressively defiant

Varlet – a knavish person; a rascal, a menial servant, a knight’s page
Origin of varlet: 1425–75; late Middle English < Middle French; variant of valet

’20 A To Z Challenge – Q

My mind grinds fine, but exceeding slow.

The lesson for today is taken from the Second Book of Archon, Chapter II: Verse 6.  Words beginning with the letter Q, while a bit more plentiful than those with X, Y, or Z, are not thick on the ground.  The word of the day is

QUERN

a primitive, hand-operated mill for grinding grain.

The first time the wife and I went to Charleston, SC, we continued on past to visit the Middleton Plantation.  Yankee troops burned the original mansion down.  All that remains are the stone and concrete veranda, and the slaves’ quarters at one end.  These now comprise a small museum, and the living quarters of the current owners.

Still, the building is larger than many homes in upscale, gated communities.  I can only imagine how grand and epic the original structure must have been.  Included in the museum are three Faberge eggs – one complete, and two missing their internal hidden treasures.

The plantation sits beside a long stretch of slow, shallow, river.  The biggest cash crop was rice, but, up on the flats, cotton was grown as well, along with fruits and vegetables for sale, and to feed the residents.

Huge amounts of corn flour and corn meal were required to supply annual dietary needs.  The river could not be used to drive a mill, so dried corn was fed into small hand mills – querns – and ground down.  Adult and adolescent slaves were needed for other plantation tasks.  This job usually fell to Negro tweens.  A hardwood dowel handle was inserted into the upper mill half, and children spent ten or twelve hours a day – alternating arms, turning and turning and turning….

Not to downplay the evils of slave ownership, but poor white folks – and free Negroes in the North – used to face mind-numbing, and body breaking, drudgery to keep themselves alive and fed.  The modern motorized technology has replaced most of these types of onerous tasks, but has made many first-world citizens physically soft and weak.  To achieve what honest labor used to provide, it has been replaced by ‘The Gym.’  Run 5K on a treadmill – but don’t actually get anywhere.   😯