random

WDP — Random Encouter with a Stranger

Fandango10 Comments

Describe a random encounter with a stranger that stuck out positively to you.

This random encounter with a stranger didn’t happen to me. It apparently happened to a woman who posted it on our local Nextdoor neighborhood app. I don’t know the woman who posted it, but I thought I would share it on my blog since it represents a random encounter with a stranger that had a positive outcome for the woman who posted it.

I went to O’Reilly Auto Parts to get some summer window washing fluid for my car. I had in mind to get a couple of other things and then asked about a special product that l’d heard of to clean/clear/brighten the plastic housings around the headlights of a car. My car is 12 years old now and the plastic covers around the headlights are quite foggy and filmy.

The nicest woman told me they didn’t have that product at the store, but that she had bought some on Amazon and had some in the back. She proceeded to go get it and when she came back out she was holding the product she got at Amazon and some clean cloths and asked me where my car was. I led her to my car and then she proceeded to clean and polish both headlight coverings for me! Who does that? What an awesome lady. I wish I had gotten her name. Kudos O’Reilly’s.

Just for the record, I am not promoting nor receiving any compensation from either Amazon or O’Reilly’s Auto Parts for this post.

TMP — Ups and Downs

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Every Monday, Paula Light, with her The Monday Peeve prompt, gives us an opportunity to vent or rant about something that pisses us off. Today, Paula bellyached about inconsistency, and discussed her frustration with the inconsistencies within WordPress. My “peeve” today is also about inconsistency and WordPress, but it’s not so much a peeve as it is an observation.Look at this chart. It graphs my number of visitors and number of views over the past month. Talk about inconsistencies. Some days I am favored with a relatively large number of visitors and views. Other days it seems like very few are interested in visiting my blog or viewing my posts. It’s somewhat puzzling to me because it often is unrelated to the number of posts I publish on a particular day. The ups and downs or highs and lows seem almost random.

Do your stats look like this, with these ups and downs from one day to the next? Or is it just me?

Anyway, that’s it. See, not much of a peeve. Just an observation. Have a happy rest of the day, whatever’s left of it in your part of the world.

Random Numbered Questions

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Rory, the blogger behind A Guy Called Bloke, has come up with a bunch of randomly numbered random questions. Clearly, methodical order and sequencing means little to Rory.

Question 7 — Does ‘methodical order and sequencing’ really matter?

That depends upon whether or not what you’re doing requires methodical order and sequencing. If so, then it probably does matter. If not, then probably not.

Question 3 — Given the choice, which historiographical era could you live in comfortably if you had to go back ‘in time’ and why do you think you could?

I’d like to go back to simpler time, like before Trump was elected President in 2016.

Question 9 — What type of advertising really ticks you off as in – it doesn’t matter what the product is … because of the way it is actually advertised you become instantly annoyed and hostile with the medium? (This is NOT a political campaign question.)

Ads for medications that list a series of possible adverse and/or life-threatening effects of taking the drug. That list scares the shit out of me, making me want to never even try the medication.

Question 83 — What topics or passions could you write freely and knowledgeably on for say 3000 words if you had to?

3,000 words? Seriously? My posts average only 227 words so far this year, down from 236 last year. So 3,000 words would be a stretch. Besides, I don’t possess enough knowledge or passion to write about any topic for 3,000 words.

Question 2 — What could you NOT do for money – given the obvious – so this is not about harming yourself or harming or murdering others – so aside from that side of things – what could you not just do for cash?

Write a 3,000 word post. (Okay, make me an offer I can’t refuse.)

Question 1 — When was the last time that you read something and it touched you in some deep dark way?

This morning when I read this article. Ted Cruz is insufferable.

Here’s something I recently saw that touched me in a deep way, although not necessarily a dark way.

Question 101 — How did you murder that person and how did you get rid of the body?

I killed her with kindness and devoured her body with love.

Fandango’s Friday Flashback — January 10

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Egads! I’ve been so focused on all of the tasks that have to be addressed between now and the time we move into our new home in early February that I completely forgot about my Friday Flashback post this week. Please forgive me for being a day late.

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of you earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember?

Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 10th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on January 10, 2014 on my old blog.

Random Questions

E5E4123F-3231-4DAE-9E8C-FA999170E829When I clean my ears with Q-tips, why is there always so much more earwax on the Q-tip I used in my right ear than on the one I used in my left ear?

Am I the only person whose finger sometime pushes through the sheet of toilet paper when wiping my butt after taking a dump?

If you can be overwhelmed and you can be underwhelmed, can you be just whelmed?

Why do women ask stupid questions like, “Do these jeans make my butt look fat?”

How many men, when asked by a woman, “Do these jeans make my butt look fat?” answer that question honestly?

Have you ever heard a man ask if his butt looks fat in his jeans?

Do Christians who deny evolution as “just a theory” also deny gravity as “just a theory”?

Am I the only one who can’t eat a pasta dish without getting at least a couple of stains from the sauce on my shirt?

Speaking about food, why do all of the foods that are not healthy for you taste so damn good while those that are good for you taste so damn awful?

If corn oil is made from corn and olive oil is made from olives, what is baby oil made from?

Is mauve really a color or is that just some sort of nonsense word that women use to make men feel stupid?

Why does hair now grow (and thrive) on parts of my body where it never grew before (and shouldn’t grow at all) and not grow at all where it used to and should, but doesn’t?

Why is it always so easy to say the things that you shouldn’t have said and so hard to say the things that you should have said?

Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways?

Do all men pee while taking a shower, or is it just me?

Do women pee while taking a shower, or is that too uncouth and not lady-like?

What do you say when someone says you’re in denial, but you’re not?

If a woman wears a pair of pants, a pair of gloves, and a pair of earrings, why doesn’t she wear a pair of bras?

Has anyone ever been fooled by a comb-over?

Why do you get on a train and on a bus, but you get into a car?

FOWC with Fandango — Random

Fandango23 Comments

FOWCWelcome to August 2, 2019 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 “random.”

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.

Battery Boost

Fandango14 Comments

F45E8A07-0361-4B68-BC57-A157667DF79CAccording to my iPhone’s Screen Time tracker, I average between 9-10 hours a day looking at my iPhone’s screen. You might think that’s a lot, but while I do have a laptop, I hardly ever use it. And I don’t have an iPad. So I use my iPhone for everything connected, including WordPress.

In fact, about two-thirds of my screen time is spent on my blog — writing posts, responding to comments, and reading and commenting on the posts of others. When not on WordPress, I am checking my newsfeed, using Google to search the internet, sending and receiving emails and text messages, checking the weather, reading books on my Kindle app, and playing solitaire while watching the news on TV.

My iPhone, an 8 Plus, is almost two years old and its battery life ain’t what it used to be. Most days, by around three or four in the afternoon, the battery icon in the upper right corner of my screen turns red, a sign that my battery is down to the last 20% of its charge. But I’ve still got another 6-7 hours of awake time. I don’t want to put my iPhone down for two of those hours while it’s charging.

So I bought a battery charging case for my iPhone. Not only does it protect my iPhone, like any other case will do, but if I press a tiny little button on the back of the case, it starts charging my iPhone without it leaving my hand or me having to be near an electrical outlet to plug it in to get the battery charged. The charging case doubles my iPhone’s battery life. And it only cost $35 on Amazon!

Yeah! Now I can spend even more uninterrupted time with my eyes glued to my iPhone’s screen. Life is great, no?

Friday Fictioneers — Guilt Trip

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694B803F-F277-496A-B4E4-7C02AF7F48A9It was supposed to be a simple matter. Kidnap a little rich girl, collect the large ransom, and let her go. No harm done. A happy ending for all. He’d have money, a mere a drop in the bucket for her wealthy parents, and the girl would be back safe at home.

But the scared little girl ran from him, fell off a bridge, and broke her neck. He buried her under the bridge, put rocks on the top of the small grave, and then, unable to cope with his guilt, drowned himself in the shallow stream beneath the bridge.

(100 words)

Written for the Friday Fictioneers prompt from Rochelle Wisoff-Fields. Photo credit: Rochelle Wisoff-Fields.

SoCS — Point Taken

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CBDA963C-B68B-40D0-B4B5-97B4219E0024Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt this week is less of a word than an action.  She wrote, “Your prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is ‘point.’ Open a book on your lap, close your eyes, and put your finger on the page. Whatever you land on, whether it be a word, a phrase, or a sentence, write about it.”

This challenge proved, um, challenging for me because I no longer have any physical books. Every book I currently own is an ebook that is in my Kindle app on my iPhone. So I couldn’t exactly open a book on my lap, close my eyes, and put a finger on the page, could I?

Instead, I opened up the Kindle app, handed my iPhone to my wife, and asked her to randomly pick a book, open it up, pick a page in that book, and then pick a word, phrase, or sentence on that page, highlight it, and copy it. She did, and I pasted it below:

“One day he rose from his arm-chair, and went to his library in search of a book.”

This sentence came from the Victor Hugo classic, Les Misérables. It can be found in “loc 442 of 27004.” That means it’s fairly early in the book. In the first one percent, actually. I can’t tell you what the page number equivalent would be in the print edition because I don’t have a print edition of the book.

I asked my wife why she chose that particular sentence to copy. She told me that she thought it was apropos for the prompt that asked us to select a book and to choose a line from it. And she also thought that it held some irony in that I don’t have a physical library with actual books, but instead have a virtual library with electric books. Very clever, my wife is.

As to the context of the specific sentence she selected from the book, I have no idea. It’s been quite a few years since I read Les Misérables, and I’m pretty sure I’d have to go back and read at least a chapter or two before that sentence to figure out who “he” is and why he went in search of a book.

But I don’t want to do that. So instead, I am writing about the process of finding a random sentence in a random book so that I can respond Linda’s rather random prompt in a randomly stream of consciousness way.

SoCS — Dom-De-Dom-Dom

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1B10EBD8-ABA5-4FF6-B3F1-1F896ED2740E“Hey Dominick,” Evan said, “Are you up for a game of dominoes?”

“Nah, Evan, you know you always dominate me in that game. I seldom win,” Dominick responded.

“Come on, man,” Evan said. “I’m dying of boredom here.”

“Well,” said Dominick, “my cousin just bought a new condominium not too far from the Superdome. Maybe we could head over there and check out his new domicile.”

“I don’t know, Dom. That seems kinda random to me,” Evan said. “Besides, didn’t he just get out of jail for stabbing his wife in her abdomen during some domestic squabble.”

“Yeah, but she decided to not press charges and he was granted his freedom last week,” Dom said. “But you’re right, maybe there’s not much wisdom in that idea.”

“I got it!” Evan said excitedly. “Let’s go over to that new strip club that recently opened.”

“You mean the Kingdom Come Club over on Fourth?”

“That’s the one, Dom,” Evan said. “Hey, you got any condoms around in case, you know, we get lucky?”

This bit of silliness was written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, where we are asked to use the word “dom” or words that contain “dom.”