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Week 503: Further Adventures in Wildlife; Six Pack of Encouraging Words; and “Like, Boo, Dude”–PDQ Peety’s List of 80’s Halloween Horror Films

Wildlife

I have either finished turning invisible or the local wildlife considers me as threatening as Jane Jetson. The wild things are taking advantage of our slipping sense of surrounding and are slowly, yet steadily organizing. I present three instances for your examination. (And although some of you will not detect acts of duplicity in these seemingly random events, I say that is what they want us to believe.)

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Week 498: Not So Instant Karma; Two Special Announcements and the Week That Is

The Wheel Grinds Patiently

In 1968, at the age of nine, I allowed a classmate we will call “Louise Haas” (not her real name, but close) to get a lecture for something I did. The offense was cussing. It was recess and I had told someone to “eat shit” or something of that third-gradely nature, unaware that the playground monitor was in earshot.

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Week 496: End of Days Jobs

Walter Orthmann died at age one-hundred-two this month. He holds the known world record for most years working for one employer. Mr. Orthmann labored at a Brazilian textile plant from 1938 to 2022; from age sixteen to an even hundred. Eighty four years.

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Week 494: Mendacity; Come Home Rutherford B. Hayes; Cool Stories to Beat the Heat; Health Tonics

Mendacity and RBH

Ostriches do not stick their heads in the sand to avoid the Awful Truth. That mendacity has been around since Roman times and should be purged from the metaphor store. Only people behave that way, and when an animal does the same, you can rest assured that she/he is only mocking you.

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A Nice Day by Gene Bray

Red Hook Brooklyn 10am. I wake up and look out my 11th floor window.

 Oh my God. The sky.  I’m blasted. I’m overwhelmed. By blue. But not just any blue. Royal Blue. Stunning Royal Blue from horizon to horizon. It’s usually a dirty, featureless gray  

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Week 492: Parental Wisdom; August Reading; Food and Fodder

Parental Guidance

There’s one bit of advice that my late father gave me when I was too young to scrutinize advice, yet it remains something I’ve neither forgotten nor defied: “Don’t eat canned stewed tomatoes.”

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Sign Of The Times Too (The Mile-Stone Inspector)

Bernie loved this day and age.

Before, he was always cold.

He never had enough to eat.

And he hated to admit it, his weakness, his curse, his companion, his reason to stay alive was the sauce. These days he had as much booze as he wanted…Well…

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Week 488: The Classics and “Hey, the teacher smells like beer.”

But First a Special Announcement

The Special Announcement:

Our Sunday features continue to thrive, especially the long standing rerun and the relatively new interview segment. And what we call the Auld Author has done well, but we feel that restricting it to the fairly obscure and/or nearly forgotten is unfair to well known works, which need to be kept alive lest they fall into obscurity.

So we proudly announce that articles about famous authors and books will now be welcomed. For example, you may either extol something like Stephen King’s unabridged The Stand or even let fly against it because you feel that the short version is better. (That is an actual opinion held by yours truly.)

We believe that highlighting works that more than one person is familiar with will stimulate conversation to an even higher degree.

Still, if you do have an obscure or lost subject, we are still happy to see it come in.

One bit of caution: back in the old days, in New York City, there was a practice called “log rolling” (called that for a reason that appears lost to time), in which author friends who did reviews at different publications gave each other rave notices to plump up sales. I would never suggest that any of our esteemed contributors or readers would use this feature to tout a pal’s book if I didn’t believe that some of you are capable of it!

We hope to see your articles flood the inbox. And if there are any questions, we will be happy to answer them.

We Now Return to Regular Programming

The worst thing that can happen to an author is to become the object of assigned reading in high school. Somehow William Shakespeare continues to survive that curse, but it has been the kiss of death for historical authors who do not always deserve the “boring” label. Boring is in the yawn of the beholder and should not be an automatic reaction to something your fifth period Lit teacher has dumped into your life.

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General Fiction, Short Fiction

The Designated Shepherd by Leila Allison

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“Hi,” I said when Anna-Lou finally answered the door. She looked like hell but that greatly improved when I showed her a thirty milligram bottle of Methadone. I had guessed her situation correctly and for the first time in ages I had the power to ease suffering.

“Sarah–what?” She said, confused, as she had a right to be. I imagine she experienced a moment similar to wishing for something utterly impossible and seeing it come true. In the forty years I had known her, not once had I directly addressed “her condition.”

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Week 484: Omens and Owomens of the Superstitious World; A Week of Good Works; The Latest Ten on the Unsteady Jukebox (Part Three)

Every night I sit here and bring submissions aboard. Although necessary and the soul of this undertaking, the “hi-how-are-ya” task gets redundant after a while, especially when there are twenty or so waiting. All that politeness and language watching is alien to my being and sometimes I will send a unique reply that either proves that I am not an AI, or if I were one that maybe a refund should be asked for from the Robot Store.

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