Day: September 9, 2022

Fibbing Friday — Quite the Pair

Fandango7 Comments

Di (aka Pensitivity101) and Melanie (Sparks From a Combustible Mind) alternate as hosts 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. Since Melanie is still temporarily out of commission, Di is back and she is asking us to mix and match people into pairs, dead or alive, real or fictional.

1. William Shakespeare & Francis Bacon
2. Donald Trump & Scrooge McDuck
3. Margaret Thatcher & Hillary Clinton
4. Peter Piper & Pepper Picker
5. Gordon Ramsay & Julia Childs
6. Jessica Rabbit & Bullwinkle Moose
7. Boris Johnson & Bozo the Clown
8. Einstein & Galileo
9. Wolverine & The Big Bad Wolf
10. Worzle Gummidge & Captain Kangaroo

TGIF — Weather and Whether

Fandango12 Comments

Paula Light, at Light Motifs II, is a fellow Californian and, in her TGIF prompt today, she talked about a subject that has recently dominated the conversations of most Californians: the weather. And Paula has invited us to “jabber on about your weather or whatever you feel like.”

It’s 102° where I live as I write this, marking the eighth straight day of triple-digit temperatures. But the good news is that it’s ten degrees cooler here than it was yesterday. The better news is that it’s forecast to be about 20° cooler tomorrow than today. In fact, the ten day forecast calls for high temperatures mostly in the 70s. Yay!

Okay, no more talk about the weather. Instead, let’s talk about the whether. Specifically whether or not I should upgrade to the new iPhone 14 Pro Max.

I received an email today from Apple inviting me to pre-order the iPhone 14 Pro Max. Apple even offered me a $500 credit if I trade in my two-year-old 12 Pro Max. Woo hoo! Trouble is, my iPhone 12 Pro Max is working fine. So why should I upgrade?

According to Apple, there are eight reasons why:

Well, the “amazing all day battery life” sounds good, since my current iPhone’s battery starts to crap out by early evening. But I’m not sure the other seven reasons are compelling enough to motivate me to upgrade.

So I think I’m going to hold off until next year when the iPhone 15 is launched. Whether I need it or not.

Happy TGIF, everyone.

Thursday Inspiration — Face It

Fandango8 Comments

For Jim Adams’ Thursday Inspiration prompt this week, he gave us this photo of a pretty young woman and the word “face,” and invited us to run with it.

Jim’s Thursday Inspiration prompt always has a musical component to it, which I usually ignore. But not this week. This week, his prompt word and the photo he used immediately brought to mind the song, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” by Roberta Flack.

This 1972 breakout hit for Roberta Flack was written by folk singer Ewan MacColl in 1957. He wrote it for his lover, Peggy Seeger, who was in a play and phoned him for suggestions on a song for a romantic scene. MacColl wrote this on the spot in less than an hour, playing it over the phone for her to use in her play.

Roberta Flack was introduced to “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” when her singer friend, Donal Leace, played her the folk duo Joe & Eddie’s 1963 version. Flack, who was teaching at the time, fell in love with the song.

Flack said of the song, “It’s a perfect song. It’s the kind of song that has two unique & distinct qualities: it tells a story, and it has lyrics that mean something. Because of its meaningful lyrics, the song can be interpreted by a lot of people in a lot of different ways: the love of a mother for a child, for example, or that of two lovers. I wish more songs I had chosen had moved me the way that one did. I’ve loved most every song I’ve recorded, but that one was pretty special.”

Roberta Flack’s recording of the song won the Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Billboard ranked it as the number one Hot 100 single of the year for 1972.

Here are the song’s lyrics.

The first time ever I saw your face 
I thought the sun rose in your eyes 
And the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave 
To the dark and the endless skies 

The first time ever I kissed your mouth 
I felt the earth move in my hand 
Like the trembling heart of a captive bird 
That was there at my command my love 

And the first time ever I lay with you 
I felt your heart so close to mine 
And I knew our joy would fill the earth 
And last till the end of time my love 

The first time ever I saw your face 
Your face, your face

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — September 9th

Fandango25 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 9th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on September 9, 2017.

Good Samaritan Gone Bad

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Before I begin, everything you are about to read really happened. It’s the truth. It’s not flash fiction. There are no embellishments, no exaggerations. I’ve taken no literary license. I am relating actual events as they occurred in real life.

With that out of the way….

Did you ever have one of those days where you found yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time? And then, when you thought you were doing the right thing it turned out to be the totally wrong thing to do?

Yesterday morning I was out walking with my dog. On our way back home from the park, I heard what sounded like a woman groaning. I realized that the groaning was coming from a car parked on the street. As my dog and I got closer to the car, the volume and intensity of the groaning grew louder and more urgent.

I sensed that someone may have been in trouble and was possibly in need of some sort of assistance. The groaning continued as I arrived at the car. When I looked inside the vehicle, I saw a middle-aged woman sitting alone in the back seat. Her groaning was even more intense. I tapped on the window to get her attention and to see if there was something I could do to help.

That was when I realized I had made a terrible error in judgment. This middle-aged woman shot me the dirtiest look you could ever imagine. Realizing my mistake, I grabbed my dog’s leash and pulled her away from the car, where she had been busy sniffing the tires.

When my dog and I got home, I told my wife what I had seen.

“You’re kidding me,” she exclaimed. “This woman was masturbating in the back seat of her car, which was parked on that busy street, in broad daylight?”

“Uh huh,” I said, and we both burst out laughing.

FOWC with Fandango — Passive

Fandango18 Comments
FOWC

It’s September 9, 2022. 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 “passive.”

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.