Day: January 27, 2023

WDP — Leisure Time

Fandango32 Comments

What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?

I spent almost 50 years of my life getting up each and every day and going to work. A lot of my work involved writing proposals, presentations, analysis documents. I also interacted with coworkers, clients, prospective clients. I even tried to find some time on weekends to write The Great American Novel, but never got very far.

Then, at the end of 2016, I retired. No more proposals, presentations, coworkers, clients, prospective clients. Just me and my wife (and the kids when they found time in their own busy lives to visit with us). Suddenly I had an abundance of leisure time. An over abundance, actually.

So, what should I do with myself and all of this new found leisure time? I wondered. After a month or so into my retirement, my wife apparently got tired of me just hanging around and always being underfoot. She said to me, “Hey, you like to write. Why don’t you start a blog?” It was actually more of a demand than a question. Then she said, “That will keep you busy and out of my hair. You’re driving me crazy.”

I thought about that for a minute. Hmm, okay, I could express my points of view on the world around me and publish them on the internet, where they would be out there for anyone to stumble upon, virtually speaking. And maybe some people actually would stumble upon my blog posts and enjoy what I wrote. Maybe some would even responded to my posts. Comment on them.

Maybe not just my family and friends, whom I would tell about my new hobby, but total strangers from around the world would read, like, and comment on my posts. Maybe I could actually form connections with a large and vibrant community of other bloggers.

So I started blogging. It felt great to see my thoughts, perspectives, ideas, notions, and opinions “in print” for all the world to see. I discovered flash fiction and realized that, while I was unlikely to ever write the Great American Novel, I was a decent very short story writer and blogging allowed me to hone those skills and get almost immediate feedback from those who read them.

I discovered that there were writing prompts to help bloggers like me come up with something to write about and to post on our blogs. I even started creating prompts of my own to help nudge and inspire other bloggers to come up with ideas for their posts.

So, with all of what I just wrote as background, the short answer to today’s WordPress Daily Prompt is that what I enjoy doing most in my leisure time is blogging. And as the photo at the top of this post suggests, I do almost all of my blogging on my smartphone.

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — January 27th

Fandango11 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 27th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on January 27, 2018.

The Inscrutable Charlie Chan

Whenever I hear the word “inscrutable,” which means not easily understood, mysterious, or unfathomable, it harkens me back to when I was a wee lad. My mother would sit me in front of the TV, turn on a random channel, and let me be entertained while she went about doing whatever motherly chores and deeds she set about doing.

And that was how I was introduced to the Asian detective, Charlie Chan. Charlie Chan was a fictional character created by author Earl Derr Biggers. Chan was loosely based on Honolulu detective Chang Apana. Chan was the hero of six detective novels by Biggers and 47 Hollywood movies between 1926 and 1949.

As a kid, I enjoyed watching Charlie Chan do his thing. I was fascinated at his ability to solve the most difficult of crimes with relative ease and plenty of aplomb. Of course, at the time, I had no idea what the word “aplomb” meant. Nor did I know the word “inscrutable.” But I did end up watching a number of Charlie Chan movies.

It turns out that the Charlie Chan character has been the subject of considerable controversy. Some find the character to be a positive role model, while others argue that Chan is an offensive stereotype.

To many Asian-Americans, Charlie Chan is another sort of Uncle Tom-like character. Chan was pudgy, slant-eyed, and inscrutable, and spoke in singsong, fortune-cookie-like English, saying things (or aphorisms) like, “If befriend donkey, expect to be kicked.” There’s a whole website dedicate to his hundreds of aphorisms.

Of course, the fact that the Charlie Chan character in the movies was played mostly by non-Asian actors may have contributed to the controversy.

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

FOWC with Fandango — Yield

Fandango27 Comments
FOWC

It’s January 27, 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 “yield.”

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.