Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
It’s Friday, April 28, 2023. If you had a goal to complete something by April’s end, you have until Sunday. Then April yields to May.
The sun isn’t yielding. It’s signed a contract extension for heat and shine. It’s 62 F in my Ashlandia, with focus set on taking temps into summer ranges of low 90s to high 80s. 6:10 AM signaled the sun’s rise into the blue and 8:06 PM will be seen before its last.
Spoke with a CASA volunteer yesterday. She said they used to have brown-bag lunches. That expression is no longer approved. Something about people’s skin color being compared to brown bags. Again, surprise was my result, but again, change is inevitable and we don’t always foresee how and why matters change. It is fascinating, though. In time, people will read about a brown-bag lunch in a novel and asked another, “What does that mean?” It’s going the way of using a dime to make a phone call at a telephone booth, the rotary dial on a telephone, the hands on a clock, padded shoulders, or the meaning of literally.
No news on sis to speak of. She’s always been very private and secretive. Won’t say what she was sick with but thanked me for the wishes that she’s feeling better.
Another health front had a friend telling us his wife had stage IV breast cancer and had a double mastectomy the night before. Another friend then mentioned she’s a two-time survivor of breast cancer and that her sister has survived stage IV cancer for four years. Involved discussions about her treatment and what she endured ensued.
You up for a little stadium rock? Today’s theme music was brought on by another’s comment. The Neurons heard someone mentioned they were taking a trip, nothing special, just to break the tedium because they’d been enduring the same ol’ same. A 1988 song, “Nothin’ but A Good Time” by Poison.
Stay positive and slay your dragons or at least tame them a bit. Here’s the coffee, here’s the music, and there’s the end.
Cheers
Thursday, April 27, 2023, was on the radar yesterday. It arrived in Ashlandia without fanfare, slipping in under night’s protection at midnight. The day and date has little baggage and comes well-stocked with sunshine and spring warmth. It’s already 58 F with intentions of plying the mid-80s, the weather heads tell me. Sunrise was between six and six fifteen. The butt end of the daylight hours will be seen after eight, if you’re looking.
So I have “The Heat Is On” in the morning mental music stream. We spoke about the song at our beer gathering last night. Some thought it was done by Foreigner. Others believed it was Don Henley. I and another were certain it was Glenn Frey. Getting home last night, I queried the net for confirmation. I like the song and employed it as theme music twice but I never researched it. I was surprised. Frey didn’t write it; didn’t play the music. He was selected as the vocalist after trying out by invitation. The Neurons said, “What?”
Here’s a Songfact excerpt:
“The Heat Is On” was written for the film by Harold Faltermeyer and Keith Forsey, and they needed a popular artist to sing it. The Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack album was on MCA Records, which Glenn Frey recently signed with. MCA asked several of their male rock singers to audition for the lead vocal for the song. At first Frey thought this wasn’t something “rock stars” did, but he decided to go along, just for fun, never thinking they’d pick him. Harold Faltermeyer was impressed by Frey’s vocal (the instrumental tracks were already recorded) and shocked Frey by using his version. It was Frey’s biggest solo hit, reaching #2 in the US…”
In other things learned, I’ve been told that young people don’t use the word straight as we used to normally use it. For example, they do not say, “Drive straight.” That, to them, I was told, is about sexual orientation and can be construed as a slight to others. It’s astonishing to me but, it’s another emerging culture, I guess. Words and their meanings and impacts change year by year by generation, geography, and society. Instead of driving ‘straight’, they say, drive forward. Not the same meaning to me but…
For today’s theme music, I’m going with a crazy theme and “I’ve Always Been Crazy”, a 1978 song by Waylon Jennings also rotating in the morning mental music stream. I have a history of being contrarian with friends and family, and this seems like an appropriate song for me and the day.
Stay pos. Hope your weather is treating you well. As we used to say, ‘have a nice day’. That’s looked down upon now as meaningless, trite, and superficial. Some even respond, “Don’t tell me how to feel.” Here’s the music. I’m off to the coffee machine. Cheers
He and his wife were talking. She used the idiom, ‘like nobody’s business.’
“Why do we use that?” he asked. “I mean, I know what it means in this context but how did it come to be used in this context to begin?”
She didn’t know. He did research but didn’t find much that satisfied his need.
It was bugging him like nobody’s business.
Search engines had become very annoying. For example, whenever he put in a query like, “new novels 2023”, they returned lists of books.
Books and novels: not the same thing. All books are not fiction. Novels are.
He read in a paper, “…they were laying down on their stomach.” He frequently reads sentences like that and wonders, is down necessary? Could they be laying up or in another way? It seems redundant.
Like that phrase so constantly heard, “I was thinking in my head.” Like, where else do you think? Explain.
He eavesdropped on two young women. They were seated about five feet from him. He guessed they were twenty years old and probably SOU students.
One woman asked the other, “Are you asexual?”
“Yes,” the other answered. “And bisexual.”
“You can be both?”
“Oh, yeah, you can be both.”
Can you, he wondered to himself. He thought that asexual meant that they either lacked sexual organs, or weren’t interested in sex and didn’t engage in sex.
Continuing his activities, he thought, it’s just another way in which words and their meanings are changing. He still couldn’t reconcile being asexual and bisexual, though.
Ponder and wonder were different by only one letter. So were wander and pander. He wondered and pondered about the wonder of that as his thoughts wandered, pandering to his laziness and procrastination.
Michael Seidel, writer 