Another week, another Saturday Posting!
Week 592 if I’m not mistaken.
I wondered why I had so many random stories this week. But I realised why, I held the newspapers back and hadn’t read them for a few days, most of this nonsense, I found today. It’s actually a bit of fortune as I had very little to go on. What I did have can wait for another day.
Continue reading “Week 592 – R.I.P The AP, Julius Is Second And No Nail Varnish.”
Birthday Well Wishes
Happy 250th Independence Day to America! (and to everyone also born on this date, Eva Marie Saint at a whopping 102 and Elliott the Header Pigeon who is attending the Extreme Cigarette Butt Eating Contest in Philadelphia this holiday weekend ). It may not be in season for some to say nice things about and to America, but the U.S.A., like most places is far more good than bad and is a collection of people–not just one person. To all who sneer, I suggest you read what J.C. had to say on the subject of stone casting. And although it is further ironic that the UK should wish the former colonies happy birthday, just think how chaotic things would be if the Revolutionary War had gone the other way. PM Trump anyone?
Now, On with the Show
Asking writers why they write is pointless. It’s the same reason why kleptos steal and killers kill; it is a mental compulsion, sometimes good sometimes bad and always somewhere along the borders of insanity. Some people have the writing disease way worse than most. The bad off will cut words into their skin if they have no other way of getting the job done (and for the visual artist, Van Gogh’s ear-ectomy definitely got a lot more than a thousand words across). Most of us can control ourselves to the extent we can wait until a saner method is handy. But the answer is always the same. Writers write because they are writers. Birds bird. Lizards lizard. Maggots get compared to unsavory people. Writers can go through long periods of inactivity (for some that may be weeks, for me not even a day), but there will always come a time when it must happen, or (to quote Hemingway) we state: “I feel fucked inside.”
Continue reading “Week 591: Natural Born Quillers”
Woke up to frosted window panes and frozen pipes. Marta and I made do with the gas stove, lighting it old school with matches against the hissing invisible stream. Water supply was low, but would last us a few days. The driveway had vanished beneath the white, with only the stitch of barbed wire fence to mark road from field. While I was attaching the snowplow blade to the truck, Marta called out from the house that Pam, our neighbor, wasn’t answering her phone.
Continue reading “Cup of Flour by Tim Boiteau”
(published 2003)
It amazes how time blasts along. This book, at one time, a Great New Thing, a Booker Prize winner, now celebrates its twenty-third birthday.
Continue reading “Auld Author – Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini”
Week 590 has crept up on us.
I am writing this before Scotland’s last group game at The World Cup. They began well with a win over Haiti. Let’s just say that the game with Morocco didn’t go so well. After seventy seconds, the whole of Scotland screamed ‘Awwwwwww FUCK!!!!!’
Continue reading “Week 590 – ‘A Scottish Soldier Is Worse’, ‘Perfect Skin’ Is As Good And A Happy Century!!!”
“Dirty glass…Fuck!”
…The first time that Martin had really focused on a dirty glass was decades back, in another one of his lifetimes. He’d had a few lifetimes and each had caused him a different level of grief.
Martin thought back to that morning at 8.00am, when he had been told that he had to check on a property. He found that depressing, fuck all was said about checking on the resident, no, he had to check on the property.
He pulled up beside the row of Maisonettes and sighed as he saw that the main entrance door was hanging off its hinges. He headed into the building. It always made him laugh that this was a building that you had to go inside, to go upstairs, to then go outside to get to the front door. He rattled the door. He could hear some mumbling and drunken giggles, “I hope that’s a lovely lady with nice tits!!”
Continue reading “Dirty Glass by Hugh Cron – Adult Content”
A piece that didn’t fit neatly into any category and yet was just too good to let to. So, a Sunday Treat from long time friend of the site Michael Bloor. Check out his back catalogue, it’s impressive.
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever – Njal the Beardless, Life Coach by Michael Bloor”
We should keep the past closer than we do our enemies. There is much ago worth remembering, and not just in what George Santayana had to say.
For example, nearly a hundred years ago, the great Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) penned a bit of advice that, upon my finding it some seven decades down the road, has stayed with me and is one of the few guide stars in my life (I live in one of the cloudiest places in the world, so my guide stars are often metaphorical and/or flat out imaginary). Regardless, in her “Constant Reader” book review column, published by the New Yorker on Saturday, 28 January 1928 Mrs. Parker wisely warned readers against the perils of assumedly healthy eating and at the same time averred a particular form of hydration that has always been superior to simple and extremely boring H2O. (As it goes with natural items found in abundance, drinking water when choices are plentiful is as dull as dentist office decor.)
Continue reading “Week 589: Blessed Benedictines and Bad Celery”
“I’ll flip with you for who gets to do the spacewalk.” Jonar affected nonchalance as he and Mirth entered the lift labeled South Maintenance Bay #14. Mirth was planet-born. She didn’t even notice the oddity of such terrestrial words as ‘South’ stenciled on the passageways and lifts of a rotating space station. Jonar wondered if she had somehow converted her picture of the complex decks, lifts, and corridors of the giant, wheel-shaped stargate into Cartesian coordinates in her mind. To the station-born, like himself, such terms were complete nonsense. The designers of the Pleiades SuperTelpher should have used terms like out/in and spinward/anti-spinward. So obvious for something spinning in space.
“Huh?” Mirth looked up from her tablet where she was furiously directing her Avatar to beat Solo to the Emerald Cave where the spice minerals were found. She mentally gestured ‘Pause’ to the VR and asked, “What do you mean, flip with me? If you think that’s a new way to get what you want I’m not going for it. You might as well give up, Jonar.” She turned back to her tablet, wishing she had the implant version of the game so she wouldn’t have to hold something. But it was expensive, and she was still paying off her school loan.
Continue reading “Nickel by Steve Eckroad”
Well here we are at Week 588.
I was going out on Tuesday to a swanky restaurant and I thought about wearing a tie. Not just a tie, I’ve been in trouble for doing that before. I realised that apart from weddings and funerals, I only think about wearing a tie but never do. I think a tie is smart. I have quite a few. I’ve lost three stunning black ones due to loaning them to people for funerals.
Continue reading “Week 588 – Has America Enough Tennents? You’ll Need More…Seriously, Import more!!!”
literally stories 