Month: May 2020

Chip Off the Old Block

Fandango52 Comments

Tomorrow is the day that WordPress is mandating the use of its new Block editor on its app and on WordPress.com. I really wish they wouldn’t do that. It’s putting a lot of undue stress on me.

I like the Classic editor and I see no valid reason for WordPress to abandon those of us who been around for a while. Why must they imposing this change on us? The Classic editor is not perfect, but why not leave well enough alone?

But being someone who is at least willing to give change a chance, I experimented with the new Block editor. I opened up my iPhone and clicked on where it said “Try the new Block editor.”74566D35-09A0-4B65-853A-9619E11FBB56So I did. And it seemed pretty easy. It said “Add title,” which I did. Then it said “Start writing,” which I did.3807FD3F-3C78-434B-AB06-01684B66D83FSo far so good, right? I wrote a few words and the plus sign on the right disappeared. I noticed the plus sign at the top left, so I tapped that. And this showed up, taking up my entire iPhone screen.32D7E5AC-7289-4E3A-8C02-A28F6BB4004FI didn’t know what to do so I hit the X in the upper right. Then I hit settings icon and this showed up:14FFB470-2A67-478A-A1C3-5CB87EB6D413WTF? I started tapping here, tapping there, and got totally lost. And that was the point, after an intensive 90 second effort, I frantically searched for and miraculously found the “Switch to Classic Editor” link.5589474F-DE1E-4C74-B52F-E7F99AC40F00I tapped on that and now I’m not going back to the Block editor. Ever! I guess I’m just not a chip off the old [or the new] block. Editor, that is.

Who Won The Week? 05/31/2020

Fandango18 Comments

10CC3057-4EEA-4C80-B8C1-700C0FC6C906It’s time for another Who Won the Week prompt. The idea behind Who Won the Week is for you to select who (or what) you think “won” this past week. Your selection can be anyone or anything — politicians, celebrities, athletes, authors, bloggers, your friends or family members, books, movies, TV shows, businesses, organizations, whatever.

I will be posting this prompt on Sunday mornings (my time). If you want to participate, write your own post designating who you think won the week and why you think they deserve your nod. Then link back to this post and tag you post with FWWTW.

For this week, I have chosen Darnella Frazier.2722E915-0CA3-4651-A7D8-7D38C2DD0398She is the 17-year-old girl who took the video of George Floyd being suffocated and killed by four Minneapolis police officers on Monday. Her 10-minute video shows Floyd clinging to life and eventually becoming unconscious. Floyd later died at an area hospital. His death has caused a firestorm of controversy and has led to numerous protests across the country.

Frazier said that she is traumatized after recording the officer, who has since been arrested and charged with third degree murder, using his knee to suffocate Floyd. She went on to explain how since the video surfaced, people have found her online social media pages and have been criticizing her for not stepping in to do more for the victim other than recording.

If not for her video, which she posted on Facebook, Floyd’s death at the hands of the police might have gone almost unnoticed. But her video went viral and because of it, the whole world witnessed a brutal and totally inappropriate and unnecessary murder of a black man at the hands of white police officers.

Sadly, but given the divisions in our country and the nature of social media these days, not surprisingly, people are harassing Frazier online. She’s being lambasted for posting the video and not intervening, even though she is heard in the video asking police many times to stop pinning Floyd. She posted, “I am a minor! 17 years old, of course I’m not about to fight off a cop.”

And now it’s your turn, folks. Who (or what) do you think won the week?

Song Lyric Sunday — Cinnamon Girl

Fandango26 Comments

For this week’s Song Lyric Sunday, Jim Adams tried to spice things up, giving us the words Cinnamon, Mint, Parsley, Pepper, Rosemary, Sage, Salt, and Thyme to use as our theme. As tempted as I was to go with Simon & Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair — Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme,” I decided, instead, to go with Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl.”

“Cinnamon Girl” was a song written and sung by Neil Young from his 1969 album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, with his band, Crazy Horse. The single was released the following year and it reached number 55 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1970.

Young wrote “Cinnamon Girl,” along with two other songs from that same album — “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Down by the River” — while suffering from the flu and running a 103° fever at his home in Topanga, California.

The song is about a singer daydreaming for a girl to love, singing that he waits “between shows” for his lover. Young never said specifically who the Cinnamon Girl was, although he once said that he “wrote this for a city girl on peeling pavement coming at me thru Phil Ochs eyes playing finger cymbals.” Ochs was a folk/protest singer active in the ‘60s who had issues with his mental stability and paranoia.

Young’s muse for the song was supposedly ‘60s folk singer Jean Ray. He admitted to having a crush on Ray. When asked if she was the Cinnamon Girl, Young said, “Only part of the song. There’s images in there that have to do with Jean and there’s images that have to do with other people.”

Here are the lyrics to the song.

I wanna live
With a cinnamon girl
I could be happy
The rest of my life
With a cinnamon girl

A dreamer of pictures
I run in the night
You see us together
Chasing the moonlight
My cinnamon girl

Ten silver saxes
A bass with a bow
The drummer relaxes
And waits between shows
For his cinnamon girl

A dreamer of pictures
I run in the night
You see us together
Chasing the moonlight
My cinnamon girl

Pa send me money now
I’m gonna make it somehow
I need another chance
You see your baby loves to dance
Yeah…yeah…yeah

FOWC with Fandango — Thief

Fandango24 Comments

FOWCWelcome to May 31, 2020 and to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). It’s designed to fill the void after WordPress bailed on its daily one-word prompt.

I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (US).

Today’s word is “thief.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments.

The issue with pingbacks not showing up seems to have been resolved, but you might check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. You will marvel at their creativity.

I’m a One-Percenter

Fandango29 Comments

84F7BC65-D43D-4712-BF23-763D166EF1DEFive months ago today I had surgery on my left ear to remove a mass that was growing just inside my eardrum. The outcome of that surgery was a mixed bag. The surgeon was able to remove the mass, but that nasty mass managed to eat one of the tiny bones that connect the eat drum to the inner ear. As a result, I’m deaf in that ear and, if I ever want to hear from the left side of my head again, I’ll need another surgery to have a prosthetic bone implanted. Bummer, huh?

But that’s not the worst of it. As I wrote here in February, one of the strange, unexpected, and disconcerting consequences of the surgery was that I lost my sense of taste. I can no longer taste the food that I eat.

I did some research on this phenomenon, and I learned that, due to a nerve of taste that runs under the eardrum and brings taste to the sides of the tongue, a loss of taste after ear surgery can occur in up to 10% of ear procedures and that loss may last for a few months.

But it’s been five months since my ear surgery and everything I eat is still tasteless. Enjoying delicious-tasting food is one of life’s pleasures and it’s killing me that I don’t get much pleasure out of eating these days.

Last week I called my doctor about the follow-up surgery, but he said that non-critical and non-emergency surgeries are on hold until the whole pandemic thing passes. Then I asked him about my continuing inability to taste anything and how long he thought it will be before I regain my taste. He said that only about 10% of those who temporarily lose their sense of taste after middle ear surgery lose it permanently, so there’s a slim chance I still might eventually get back my ability to taste food again.

“Great,” I said. “10% of those who have middle ear surgery experience a loss to taste for a few months and only 10% of them lose it permanently. How lucky am I to be in the 10% of the 10% who permanently lose their ability to taste food.

He chuckled and said, “Look at it this way, you can now claim that you’re part of America’s top one percent.”

SoCS — Spaying, Spraying, and Splaying

Fandango15 Comments

“The vet said we need to bring our cat in this week to have her neutered,” Molly told her husband.

Bill did a spit-take and let the coffee he was sipping spray all over the kitchen table. “Then the vet has to come to our place and do it,” he said.

Molly looked at Bill like he was crazy. “Oh for crissake, Bill,” she said. “You know that veterinarians don’t make house calls in order to spay cats at people’s homes. You need to bring the cat to the animal hospital for that.” Then she handed him a paper towel and told him to clean up the mess he made on the table.

Bill grabbed the paper towel and dabbed up the coffee. “Well then, you’re going to have to get her in the damn cat carrier,” he responded. “Whenever I would try to cram her into her carrier, she would splay her four paws wide and I never was able to get her in it.”83800A0C-0CFE-4F04-85A9-56532446CFB0Written for today’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt from Linda G. Hill. Our task was to write a post using “spay,” “spray,” and/or “spray” in it. Done, done, and done.

FOWC with Fandango — Homecoming

Fandango15 Comments

FOWCWelcome to May 30, 2020 and to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). It’s designed to fill the void after WordPress bailed on its daily one-word prompt.

I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (US).

Today’s word is “homecoming.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments.

The issue with pingbacks not showing up seems to have been resolved, but you might check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. You will marvel at their creativity.

Music Challenge — Midnight at the Oasis

Fandango5 Comments

8AA12469-70CF-497B-B6AB-8D539E6B5D2CIt was kind of late, but James walked into the Oasis Bar to grab a beer before he resigned himself to spending yet another night alone. He was surprised that the place still looked exactly as it did six years ago, when he first met his wife, Sara, who was tending bar there. It had been two years since their divorce and this was his first time back at the Oasis since then.

James took a stool at the bar and asked the bartender for a Heineken. When the bartender brought the beer to James, James asked him how long he’d been tending bar at the Oasis. The bartender thought for a moment. “I started in 2015, so around five years,” he said.

“Did you know Sara Hart?” James asked the bartender.

The bartender wrinkled his brow. “I may have met her, but I think she left shortly after I started. If I remember correctly, she married some regular customer at the Oasis, a real asshole they say.”

“Yeah,” James said. “I’m that asshole.”

“Oh, man,” the bartender said, “I’m sorry. No I didn’t really know her and definitely not you. You seem like a decent guy. How’s Sara doing these days?”

“That’s a good question,” James said. “We split two years ago.”

The bartender reached down and pulled out another Heineken from the cooler. “This one’s on the house, pal.”

James and the bartender chatted amicably for about half an hour when James looked up at the clock behind the bar. “Jeez,” he said, “it’s almost midnight.”

The bartender smiled. “Yeah, midnight at the Oasis,” he said.

James let out a big sigh, got up from the bar stool with a look of melancholy on his face, and said, “That was Sara’s and my song.”

Written for the Music Challenge from Jim Adams over at Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie, and for Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (resign).

Friday Fictioneers — Burn Notice

Fandango13 Comments

5DBF7CB0-665E-4630-A4A8-C006159A7214He’s late, Susan thought. She looked at her watch. 11:10 pm. She picked up her phone and opened his text message. “Urgent. 11:00 tonight. The usual place,” it said. She looked up at the fountain, the famous Lotus Fountain, the “usual place,” and wondered if something had gone wrong. It’s unlike him to be late, she thought.

Her phone vibrated. It was a text. “We’re burned,” it said. “Get to the safe house now. Meet you there.”

Susan stood up, looked around and rushed to her car. She didn’t see the shadowy figure coming up behind her until it was too late.

(100 words)

Written for today’s Friday Fictioneers prompt from Rochelle Wisoff-Fields. Photo credit: David Stewart.