Day: February 5, 2021

The Interrogation Room

Fandango9 Comments

“Are you going to sit there in silence and say nothing?” asked Detective Fred Morrisey, pointing a finger at the suspect sitting at the interrogation room table.

Morrisey’s partner, Detective Ron Hayden, tapped Morrisey on the shoulder. “We can’t continue to question him, given that he’s insistent on waiting until his lawyer arrives,” Hayden whispered.

Morrisey waved Hayden away. “Where were you on the night of February 2nd, Mr. Barrett?” Morrisey asked.

“Lawyer,” was all Barrett said.

“Fine,” Morrisey said, “but you may want to tell your lawyer when he gets here about that piece of mail we found in that locked drawer of your desk, Barrett.”

“Someone’s trying to frame me,” Barrett blurted out, perspiration starting to bead up on his forehead. “I don’t know anything about those forged stock certificates.”

A sardonic grin graced Morrisey’s face. He looked over at Hayden and said, “That’s interesting, Barrett. I never mentioned stock certificates. Did you, Detective Hayden?”

Hayden smiled and shook his head. “No I did not.”

“Open and shut case, Barrett,” Morrisey said. “When your lawyer gets here you might want to advise him to kiss your sorry ass goodbye.”

Written for these daily prompts: Ragtag Daily Prompt (silence), Your Daily Word Prompt (insistent), MMA Storytime (February), Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (tell), The Daily Spur (mail), and for the Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Music Challenge, where the theme is “kiss.” Sorry for the lack of a musical response, Jim.

A Month of Love #5

Fandango3 Comments

Paula Light says, “Let’s celebrate the month of lurve (aka love) by posting one thing we love every day throughout February.

Now the truth is that I’m not really a romantic guy, so I might be hard pressed to come up with 28 objects of love, but I think I should be able to come up with 28 things I like a lot.

I used to subscribe to a lot of magazines. Time, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, PC Magazine, InfoWorld, Sports Illustrated, People, and, yes, I admit that, way back when, I had a subscription to Playboy.

I also have had home delivery of the local daily newspaper for as long as I can remember. I’ve always enjoyed starting my day reading the paper while sipping my first cup of coffee before starting whatever activities and adventures awaited me as the day unfolded.

But that was the way it used to be. Today, I get most of my news on my iPhone’s newsfeed or on cable news shows. Yes, I still get the morning newspaper, primarily for the sports and business sections for me and the crossword and Sudoku puzzles for my wife. But I no longer subscribe to any magazine except for one: The Week.As its tagline suggest, The Week provides “All you need to know about everything that matters.” And it does so concisely. The current issue has only 38 pages and can be fully digested in a single day!

The Week is also nonpartisan. It generally provides all sides of the news in an objective way. So Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, there’s something for everyone. I love this magazine and I recommend it to everyone.

Fibbing Friday — Been There, Done That

Fandango10 Comments

Frank (aka PCGuy) and Di (aka Pensitivity101) alternate as host for Fibbing Friday, a silly little exercise where we are to write a post with our answers to the ten questions below. But as the title suggests, truth is not an option. The idea is to fib a little, a lot, tell whoppers, be inventive, silly, or even outrageous, in our responses. Today is Frank’s turn to host and here are his questions.

1. What is Groundhog Day all about?

It’s a day of remembrance for all of the jerks that hogged too much space on the blanket whenever you went on a picnic.

2. What is déjà vu?

It’s the name of an album from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

3. What is meant by the phrase, “Hindsight is always 20/20”?

It’s the perspective people get when they put their heads up their asses.

4. What are reruns?

It’s when you’re a runner in a race and there’s a false start after the gun and you have to go back to the starting blocks and re-run the race.

5. What does it mean to be redundant?

I don’t know, I don’t know, I just don’t know.

6. What word describes unnecessary repetition?

Shutthefuckup.

7. What is the name given to TV shows when they are shown again after their original air date?

Repeats.

8. What phrase is used when you you can look back at a situation and clearly see what should have been done?

Do over.

9. What is the feeling that you have been somewhere or done something before called?

Been there, done that.

10. What day supposedly determines how long winter will last based on a particular animal seeing or not seeing its shadow?

Shadowday.

Three Line Tales — The Eye of the Hurricane

Fandango9 Comments

When Gwen packed her bags, threw them into the trunk of her car, and started heading out of town, she was sure that she was going to be driving herself to a fresh start, leaving behind the torn and tattered remnants of the total mess she had made of her life.

But as she pulled her car out onto the highway and saw the low, dark, threatening clouds ahead, punctuated by brilliant flashes of lightning, she had a realization that what she was seeing was but a glimpse of what would lie ahead for her no matter her destination.

She understood that she could never drive fast enough or travel far enough to outrun the devastation of the swirling, churning storms, because the storms were of her own making and she was the eye of the hurricane.

Written for Sonya’s Three Line Tales prompt. Photo credit: Raychel Sanner via Unsplash

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — February 5

Fandango40 Comments

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 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 5th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on my old blog on February 5, 2011.

Diet Soda: A Stroke of Genius or Just a Stroke

I drink diet cola. I’ve done so for years — most of my adult life, in fact. Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, it doesn’t really matter. They both pretty much taste the same to me. In fact, I generally have several tall glasses a day. I also put Splenda, rather than sugar, in my coffee to sweeten it up.

For what it’s worth, I don’t drink diet sodas or use artificial sweeteners as way to lose or control my weight. I actually like the taste of diet drinks better than those of the regular, sugar-sweetened versions of such beverages. To me, the non-diet versions taste too sweet, almost sickeningly sweet.

So why am I making this diet cola obsession confession? It’s because I saw a blurb in The USA Today about a link between the consumption of diet drinks and strokes and heart attacks. I Googled “diet soda and stroke” and was directed to an article recently published on the US News website. According to that article, Hanna Gardener, an epidemiologist at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, presented a paper before the International Stroke Conference this year in Los Angeles. Seriously, who knew there was such a thing as an International Stroke Conference?

But I digress. “In our study,” said Dr. Gardener, “we saw a significant increased risk [of stroke or heart attack] among those who drank diet soda daily and not regular soda.” Yes, according to the study, daily diet soda drinkers, like me, have a 61% higher risk of stroke or heart attack than people who drink no soda of any kind.

Egads! (I’ve always hoped for an excuse to use that word in a blog post. “Yikes” is so yesterday.)

I found it interesting that the average age of the 2,564 people in the nine year study was 69, so relatively speaking, I’m a youngster. The survey was based upon people who completed food questionnaires about the type of soda they drank and how often they drank it. And we all know how honest people are about divulging their vices when completing questionnaires. Not that drinking diet soda is a vice, of course. Plus, if you follow a group of elderly people over a long period of time, you’re bound to find a fairly significant incidence of stroke and heart disease, regardless of what kind of soda they do or don’t drink.

The truth is that Dr. Gardener could find no chemical or biological explanation for her findings. In fact, Dr. Patrick Lyden, chief of neurology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the research, reviewed the findings and said, “My first thought was that the correlation has to be accidental.” Aha!

Perhaps regularly ingesting large quantities of artificial sweeteners in soft drinks (or coffee) actually has little bearing on the higher incidence of stroke and heart attack among the elderly. There are all kinds of factors that might contribute to the incidence of stroke and heart disease. I mean this was a survey of New Yorkers, for crissake. You know that living in New York City, in and of itself, is stress inducing and is hazardous to one’s health.

Did you think about that, Hannah Gardener? Some epidemiologist you are, bee-atch!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go grab myself a nice, refreshing glass of Diet Coke.

A note from Fandango: Ten years have gone by since I wrote this post. I still drink diet soda, although I prefer caffeine free Diet Coke these days. I also still put Splenda in my coffee. And I have neither had a heart attack nor a stroke.