Fandango’s Flashback Friday — March 24th

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your 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 Flashback Friday 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 24th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.


This was originally posted on my old blog on March 24, 2012. You might notice that back then I used to write much longer posts.

Cutting Your Nose to Spite Your Face

Who hasn’t heard, at one time or another, someone say, “He cut off his nose to spite his face”? It’s an idiom, a common expression used, perhaps even overused, to describe a needlessly self-destructive response to a problem, like when you do something crazy that will get you in trouble and cause more harm than good.

Legend has it that the expression originated way back in the 12th century when pious women disfigured themselves in order to protect their virginity. Hey, you’ve come a long way, baby, over the past thousand or so years.

Speaking about cutting off body parts, an Egyptian woman turned out to be quite the cut-up. She decided to exhaust her husband by having sex with him all night long. Once he fell asleep, exhausted as planned, this human praying mantis stabbed him to death and cut his body into little pieces, which she then threw into her backyard, where they were consumed by stray cats and dogs.

The woman calmly sat on her balcony, she confessed, and watched the cats and dogs eating the pieces of her dead husband’s body. “Every time they finished a piece, I threw them another,” she said. I guess she didn’t think the sex was that good.

How about the Californian who tried to poison his wife by putting paint remover in her cereal? Fortunately for his wife, she detected a “horrible taste and smell in her Rice Krispies” and stopped eating, thus avoiding any serious harm.

Of course, the husband claimed that he “accidentally” spilled paint remover into his wife’s cereal bowl. One way of preventing such “accidents” is to be sure that you’re not keeping paint remover in your refrigerator.

And as long as we’re talking about ingesting toxic liquids, did you hear about some guy in North Carolina who decided to light up a cigarette after having taken a swig from a jar of gasoline? Sure, having a cigarette after sex back in the day…before smokers were stigmatized…seemed to be the norm. Maybe it was the calm after the storm or just some way of avoiding that post-sex awkwardness or having to actually talk to the person you just diddled.

But what was this dude thinking when he decided to grab a smoke after drinking from a jar filled with gasoline? Supposedly he mistook the jar of gas for a beverage, and once he took a big gulp and realized it was gasoline, he spit it out. He then went outside to smoke a cigarette and guess what happened to him? He burst into flames, Duh! He was transported to the UNC Burn Center in Chapel Hill, NC, were he later died.

Here’s an idea for a new warning label to put on cigarette packs. SMOKING CIGARETTES IMMEDIATELY AFTER DRINKING GASOLINE MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH.

I swear, I’m not making this up!

FOWC with Fandango — Urge

FOWC

It’s March 24, 2023. Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).

Today’s word is “urge.”

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. Please 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. Show them some love.

One Minute Fiction — I Gotcha

I gotcha, Sam said to himself when he peered around the thick concrete column. He aimed his digital camera toward the couple sitting on the bench. This is going to earn me a pretty penny, he thought, smiling as the shutter snapped.

Early the next morning, Sam went to the editor’s office of the tabloid he sells a lot of his photos to. Sam pulled pulled out his camera and handed it to the editor. “You wanted proof that the young trophy wife of that senator is having an affair? Well here it is!”

The editor looked at the image on Sam’s digital camera and said, “What’s this? A photo of some brunette with a ponytail sitting with some guy on a bench beneath a roadway underpass? They could be any two people. Where’s the close-up so I can see their faces? This is worthless.”

“They saw me after I took this shot,” Sam said defensively, “and ran off. But I swear it’s her.”

“Sorry, Sam, I can’t use it. You want cash, bring me something I can use,” the editor said. “Now get the hell outta my office.”


Written for Cyranny’s One Minute Fiction Challenge. Photo credit: Cyranny.

Thursday Inspiration — Summer Breeze

For this week’s Thursday Inspiration prompt, Jim Adams has instructed us to respond to this challenge by either by using the prompt word peace, or going with the above picture, or by means of the song ‘Summer Rain’, or by going with another song by Johnny Rivers, or anything else that you think fits. I decided to go with the song “Summer Breeze” from Seals & Crofts.

In the summer of 1969, Jim Seals and Dash Crofts released their first album as a duo. “Summer Breeze” was their first hit single, appearing on their fourth album in the fall of 1972. Their next single, “Hummingbird,” also evoked nature and was a solid hit. They later scored with “Diamond Girl” and “Get Closer.”

Seals & Crofts were devoted to the Baha’i faith, and believed that by writing about life itself, many meanings would emerge for the listener. Seals said that “Summer Breeze” was “a very simple song about a man coming home from work and hearing the dog barking and things like that.”

The refrain “Blowing through the jasmine in my mind” was something Seals & Crofts used to bring about feelings of contentment, harmony, and peace in this song, which is a feel-good classic about enjoying some simple pleasures in life with the ones you love. Seals explained, “We operate on a different level, we try to create images, impressions and trains of thought in the minds of our listeners.”

To me, the lyrics and the melody bring about a peaceful, easy feeling (which was a song from The Eagles that I almost used for this prompt).

See the curtains hangin' in the window
In the evenin' on a Friday night
A little light a-shinin' through the window
Lets me know everything's alright

Summer breeze, makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind
Summer breeze, makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind

See the paper layin' on the sidewalk
A little music from the house next door
So I walked on up to the doorstep
Through the screen and across the floor

Summer breeze, makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind
Summer breeze, makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind

Sweet days of summer, the jasmine's in bloom
July is dressed up and playing her tune
And I come home from a hard day's work
And you're waiting there, not a care in the world

See the smile a-waitin' in the kitchen
Food cookin' and the plates for two
Feel the arms that reach out to hold me
In the evening when the day is through

Summer breeze, makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind
Summer breeze, makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind

Bonus:

WDP — Tattoos

What tattoo do you want and where would you put it?

I have chosen to not have any tattoos (or piercings) on my body, so to answer today’s questions, I don’t want a tattoo. Thus, where I would put it is moot.

As to my decision to not have a tattoo, I have no regrets. Or maybe I should say I have no regerts.