Day: September 7, 2020

Barbecue Phone

Fandango13 Comments

“If you don’t put that mobile phone down,” Bobby’s mother said to her 17-year-old son, “I’m going to throw it away. You’re spending far too much time online doing who knows what.”

“Oh yeah, bitch, “Bobby yelled angrily at his mother. “Well you’re gonna have to pry it from my cold, dead hands if you want to take it away from me.”

“Don’t you dare talk with me that way,” she said, and in one swift move she grabbed the cellphone from Bobby’s hand and tossed it into the waste basket.

“Hey, what the fuck?” Bobby yelled as he ran toward the waste basket.

But before he could get there, Bobby’s father, who had heard the whole argument, reached into the waste basket, pulled the phone out, held it up, and said, “Is this what you’re looking for. I know just what to do with this, hearing the words that came out of your mouth. This pattern of behavior has to stop now. Bobby’s father headed out to the backyard and tossed the cellphone onto the hot charcoals of the barbecue that he was getting ready to grill steaks on.Neither Bobby nor his father were expecting the big explosion after the cellphone caught fire. Fortunately, his mother was quick to bring out a fire extinguisher from the kitchen to quell the fire, but by then Bobby’s cell phone was burned to a crisp.

Written for these daily prompts: The Daily Spur (mobile and basket), Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (online), Your Daily Word Prompt (pry), Word of the Day Challenge (pattern), and Ragtag Daily Prompt (charcoal).

A Must Read Post from Judy Dykstra-Brown

Fandango11 Comments

For some reason, I’m unable to reblog this post of Judy’s (thank you, WordPress), so I’m just going to cut and past her post below. Please go visit her post and tell her how great it is.

Naked Truth

His truths are vile graffiti scrawled in charcoal on a wall,
your belief in them, immobile—not budgeable at all.
You spout online rhetoric not based on any fact,
using a selfish tyrant to pattern how you act.

I simply cannot understand people of your kind.
Will any foul deed propagated pry open your mind?
Fire, tempest, pestilence—what further natural curse
will finally persuade you that it’s only getting worse?

Divide and conquer is his game, and he’ll use any means
for engineering chaos and creating scenes
matching brother against brother till our nation rips apart.
Destroying all it stood for. Ripping out its heart.

What quality does he display that moves you all to court him?
What single act for common men leads you to support him?
Children kenneled up like animals? Men shot because they’re black?
One-by-one his sane advisers all given the sack?

Our emperor has no clothes on, please take the time to see.
Look at all the devastation—what our country’s come to be.
We are a global laughing stock. If you’d expand your view
beyond Fox News, perhaps this truth would be clear to even you!

Dear WordPress

Fandango86 Comments

I just sent this screed below to the “too bad, so sad” response I got from the Happiness Engineers at WordPress. I know it won’t do any good, and that I’m shouting into deaf ears, but I had to get it off my chest. If you’re a fan of the block editor, if you don’t use or don’t care about the hassle that the block editor is causing for those of us who blog using our smartphones, or if you are just sick and tired of  bloggers like me whining about being forced to use it, feel free to skip this post. I won’t be offended.

Dear WordPress,

I’m having trouble wrapping my head around WordPress’ strategy. You say that the classic editor available on the plugin in the Business Plan is the same one that is available at the wp-admin site. And you say that it was “built with the assistance from members of [your] own team and made available to all WordPress sites at no extra charge.” My question is why, then, did you dump the classic editor that was on the wordpress.com site (the regular one, not the wp-admin site) but keep the one at the wp-admin site?

I blog on an iPhone. It gives me a tremendous amount of flexibility as to where and when I blog. The block editor that you have tried to shove down our throats is virtually unusable on a small smartphone screen. And, the classic editor in the wp-admin site, while better than the block editor on the iPhone, is certainly not optimized for use on a mobile device. Conversely, the classic editor version on wordpress.com that was available (until you dumped it) on an iPhone via the Safari or Chrome browsers, was very easy to use on a small screen. So why not continue to support that version of the classic editor for those of us who prefer to use WordPress from our smartphones?

I know you’ve recommended to those of us who user iPhones for blogging, that we use the editors in the WordPress iOS app. I’ve tried using both the classic editor and the block editor on the iOS app and they are both what I’d call “lite” versions of the comparable editors you see on a laptop. These “lite” versions are missing some functionality that I would like to have, and often used, on the standard classic editor version that was available at wordpress.com. So even when I start using the classic editor in the iOS app, I often have to then go to wp-admin and finish my post using that version of the classic editor in order to get to be publishable.

Since you’ve stopped making the classic editor version on wordpress.com available to us, blogging, for me, anyway, has become more of a burden than a pleasure. I feel like I have to jump through hoops to create and publish my posts. It’s more onerous than enjoyable to use and it requires many more steps and takes much longer to publish my posts. There are a lot of bloggers who have gone mobile and are using their smartphones for their blogs, and most of us are not happy with the block editor. Based upon what I’m hearing from other bloggers I follow, a lot of them are also unhappy (even angry) at losing the classic editor — even those who use their laptops or desktops as their devices of choice.

So in the interest of keeping us on WordPress, which I believe is the best blog hosting site available, please bring back the classic editor version that you no longer make available on wordpress.com. Give us back the choice of using that or of embracing the block editor. Otherwise, I’m going to have to leave WordPress and I know of a lot of other long-time WordPress bloggers who are considering doing the same.

Reinstate the classic editor that you no longer offer. Please give us, your end-users, a choice of editing options, especially editing options that are mobile device friendly. Otherwise, as much as I will miss blogging here and all of the relationships I’ve established with other WordPress bloggers, I’m going to have to say sayonara to WordPress.

Share Your World — Wizards and Muggles

Fandango8 Comments

Share Your WorldOnce again, Melanie is sharing her Share Your World prompt this week with Roger Shipp. Roger clearly has an unhealthy obsession with Harry Potter and he has asked four Harry Potter-related questions. Then Melanie, who does not possess that same unhealthy obsession with Harry Potter (but may have a few of her own unhealthy obsessions), has asked her non-Harry Potter-related (aka “Muggle”) questions.

So let’s get right to Roger’s Magical, Mystical Questions:

What happened to cause you to discover ‘bullies” were real?

I was in elementary (or some call it “grammar”) school and there were two bullies. I’ll call them Frank and David (because those were their names). They didn’t particularly like one another, as they were competing with each other about who could be the biggest, meanest bully. The only survival technique I could come up with was to ingratiate myself with each of them as best I could, so as to avoid falling victim to their bulliness. It worked, and I managed to get through elementary school relatively unscathed.

Eavesdropping — When given the chance, how often do you eavesdrop?

I try not to eavesdrop. Frankly, I don’t give a damn what other people are talking/gossiping about it. Unless it’s about me, of course.

Escalators, at one time, were the ‘next big thing.’ When was the last time you rode an escalator?

It was probably when I went to my last doctor’s appointment back in February. His office is on the third floor of a hospital and you can get there by stairs, escalator, or elevator. I didn’t have the patience to wait for the damn elevator and I didn’t feel like taking the stairs. So….

Have you ever ‘let’ someone win in a sports competition or a board game? How did it turn out?

I may have let my kids win some board games or when playing badminton or tennis when they were little. You know, just to build up their confidence. Now that I’m a dotting old fart, they are the ones who occasionally let me win.

Melanie’s Muggle Questions:

Melanie admits that she was very short on time yesterday when she scheduled her post, so she’s borrowed her questions from Rory and Sandmanjazz to fill the questions today:

Do our fears start with our DNA?  (Credit to Rory)

Yes, I’m deathly afraid of DNA. By the way, is DNA a disease or is it a federal spy agency like the NSA?

If you could have your hair any color for 24 hours, what color would you choose?  (Credit to Sandmanjazz)

Hell, I’d choose to have hair of any damn color on my head, since right now I don’t have any hair at all on my head.

When do you think a person gets old?  (Credit to Rory)

When they can’t remember how old they are.

The Monday Peeve — The Heat

Fandango27 Comments

Every Monday Paula Light gives us an opportunity to blow off a little steam with her The Monday Peeve prompt. I’m going to take advantage of this opportunity by blowing off some steam about the weather.

Okay, I know that I’m beginning to sound like a broken record with all my complaining and whining about two things: the WordPress block editor and the weather. But today I’m even more pissed of about the weather than I am about the block editor.

For the past decade-plus we lived in the city of San Francisco. My home did not have air conditioning. Just a few strategically placed ceiling fans. That’s because, living so close to the Pacific Ocean, it rarely got into the 80s in the section of the city that I lived in. Even more rarely, the high temperature would hit 90. So air conditioning was not a necessity.

But in February we moved to the East Bay, about 35 miles east of our place in San Francisco, to be closer to our son, his then pregnant wife, and our future grandchild. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

But what we didn’t count on was triple digit temperatures. Yesterday it hit 111. And at around 4:40 pm yesterday afternoon we lost power for about four hours. Loss of power meant loss of air conditioning and it didn’t take long before our house became uncomfortably hot.

So what is my peeve about today? Well, here’s today’s forecast.And the power company is talking about more rolling blackouts to accommodate the demand. On top of that, the National Weather Service has also issued a Red Flag Warning.That is a warning issued for weather events which may result in extreme fire behavior that will occur within 24 hours. Meanwhile, the air quality is already hazardous due to the existing wildfires.

So yeah, I think I’ve got good reason to be a bit peeved today.