Day: September 23, 2022

TGIF — Dog Identity

Fandango6 Comments

Paula Light, at Light Motifs II, has this prompt she calls TGIF. This week , Paula says, “Please share a post with your weekend plans or your favorite David Bowie song or any other TGIF thing you like ~ and feel free to use the awesome logo Fandango found!”

For my TGIF post, I’m not going to talk about my weekend plans or my favorite David Bowie song, but I am going to use the logo and to talk about my conversation with the girl at the pet store yesterday.

Me: I need some non-rawhide chews for my dog.

Girl: we don’t carry any rawhide products. Their bad for dogs; hard for them to digest.

Me: I know. That’s why I’m interested in non-rawhide chews.

Girl: We have these No-Hide chews. Dogs love them

Me: Great, I’ll take a bunch. What other safe things have you got. Our dog has jaws of steel and she loves to chew and gnaw on things.

Girl: We have bones filled with stuff, knuckle and knee bones, and, of course, frozen raw bones.

Me: I’ll take a few of all those, too.

We went to the checkout counter where she started ringing me up.

Girl: What kind of dog do you have?

Me: I had a DNA test and she’s mostly an American Staffordshire Terrier.

Girl: So a Pitbull.

Me: Yeah. At the shelter where we adopted her they said she was a…

Girl interrupting me: Labrador retriever.

Me: How did you know?

Girl: Because everyone loves Labs and wants to adopt them. Pitbulls, not so much.

Happy TGIF, everyone.

MLMM Friday Faithfuls — Multiple Prompts

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Jim Adams posed an interesting question in his Friday Faithfuls prompt. He wrote about multiple prompts and offered his thoughts about combining multiple prompt words into a single post. His bottom line was expressed when he wrote:

The whole purpose of a writing prompt is to inspire bloggers to write and be original and resourceful, and using their imagination and I feel that a well written story should not bounce around being driven just to satisfy the prompts. I feel it would it be better if your story made gradual progress rather pushing it through all the prompts and losing consistency in the process.

With that said, Jim wants to know…

If you write posts where you respond to multiple prompts, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

I host a daily word prompt, FOWC with Fandango, and there are six other daily word prompts that I often participate in:

  • Word of the Day Challenge
  • Ragtag Daily Prompt
  • Your Daily Word Prompt
  • The Daily Spur
  • E.M.’s Random Word Prompt
  • My Vivid Blog

I don’t respond to these one word prompts every day, but I probably do more often than not. And when I do, I attempt to include all seven words in my response if I can. But sometimes one or more of these one-word prompters gives us an unusual word that I would never in a million years use in everyday life. And when that happens I refuse to jump through hoops trying to fit such words into my posts.

Why do I respond to these multiple word prompts? It’s because each day I’m presented with seven randomly selected words and am challenged to come with a cohesive, engaging response that incorporates all (or most) of those words. I really enjoy that challenge. And, at the risk of sounding immodest, I think I’m pretty good at it.

However, I don’t typically do multiple word prompts such as the two that Jim mentioned: Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Wordle challenge and The Sunday Whirl. Each of these challenges uses 12 prompt words. I can only respond to so many prompts and I don’t think I can handle those 12-word challenges in addition to the other prompts I regularly respond to.

Any questions?

Fibbing Friday — Jim Wants To Know

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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 hosting, and this week she turned to Jim Adams for some interesting questions.

1. Why did all the dinosaurs die?

Old age.

2. Why are there so many stories about the great flood?

Because it was so great!

3. What happened at Hadrian’s wall?

Humpty Dumpty sat on it and fell.

4. How long was the hundred years war?

Fifteen years because its duration was measured in dog years.

5. Why was it all quiet on the western front?

Because that’s where the library was.

6. What was the Boxer Rebellion all about?

It was about how the dogs at the puppy mill, many of them boxers, rioted because of the way they were treated.

7. What caused the Titanic to sink?

It was hit by a torpedo shot from a German U-boat.

8. Why do they want us to remember the Main?

Because the main circuit box controls the power to the house and it’s good to remember where it is so you can reset the circuits and restore power in case of an outage.

9. What happened to Amelia Earhart?

She flew the coop.

10. Who was involved in the Iran Contra scandal?

The so-called scandal occurred when I ran in a half marathon race the wrong way, contrary to the designated route.

MLMM Photo Challenge — The Horse Soldiers

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“Gramps, why is there a statue of a soldier riding a horse?” Jimmy asked.

“He was one of the Australian horse soldiers who fought along side British soldiers in the Boer War in Southern Africa,” Jimmy’s grandfather, William, said.

“I remember reading about that, Gramps,” Jimmy said. “The British came to Southern Africa for the gold and they exploited the people who lived there, sent Boer women and children to concentration camps where thousands perished, and raped the land that rightfully was Boer land.”

“Well, that’s one version of what happened, but it was more than 100 years ago and times were different back then. Society was different. The rules were different,” William said.

“So are you saying, Gramps, that, because it was more than 100 years ago, genocide in order to accumulate wealth for the British Crown was justified?” Jimmy asked. “Is that’s why it’s okay to have a statue honoring a horse soldier who participated in such atrocities prominently displayed in a public park?”

“This horse soldier, Jimmy, was doing his duty as a servant of the Crown. He was just following orders, as every soldier must.”

“Seriously, Gramps, isn’t ‘just following orders’ what every soldier who committed war crimes says?” Jimmy asked. “So why do we erect a statue honoring someone who was just following orders?”

“It’s a memorial, Jimmy,” William said. “Just so we can remember and not forget what happened. Sometime we need to be reminded of the bad and even the shameful things that occurred in the past.”

Written for the Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Photo Challenge. Photo credit: Sarah Whiley.

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — September 23rd

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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 23rd) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on September 23, 2017.

Relevance is Relative

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“One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.”

“One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

What one person finds relevant, another finds irrelevant. In other words, relevance is not absolute. Relevance is relative.

Let’s take Donald Trump as an example. Donald Trump is a liar. That is an absolute, indisputable truth. Yet to many people — to too many people — the fact that he is a liar is irrelevant. It’s not that they don’t know that he’s a liar. They do. It’s just that they don’t really care. They are not bothered by his lying. To his supporters, his being a liar is irrelevant.

To others, me included, Donald Trump’s lying is highly relevant. It means that you can’t trust anything that he says (or tweets) to be the truth. And he’s the President of the United States.

Some people claim that all politicians lie, so the fact that Trump lies is irrelevant. They point to Obama’s promise that “if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor” as the illustration of a lying president. Yet most people under Obamacare were able to keep their doctors. I was.

But everyone knows that Mexico is not going to pay for “the wall.” Most people, even Donald Trump, know that Russia interfered in last year’s presidential election. Most people don’t think that climate change is a hoax.

But to Trump supporters, it just doesn’t matter. To them, it’s irrelevant. Because relevance is relative.

Written for today’s one-word prompt, “irrelevant.”