Who needs canine teeth? Dracula, for one. But not me. Molars are another story, with comical twists and a chance of being helpful if U ever need to consider replacing a molar with a dental implant.
Author: Mellow Curmudgeon
My blog touches on many things, often with humor and/or haiku. I have been a scientist; an engineer; an Alzheimer’s caregiver.
When He Pulls Strings
Dancer’s wooden mask:
leather hinges swing open.
Drum throbs; shaman chants.
~ ~ ~ ~
Hinges swing shut as dance ends:
hidden face; revealed spirit.
Photo © Trustees of the British Museum
~ ~ ~ ~
Khan Academy | Transformation Masks
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– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Ornithocardiac Irony
I want an illustration for a short story that features a heart attack. The image should be like an abstract expressionist painting of the idea of a heart attack, not a stock image. While I don’t paint, I do take (and often edit) photos. Can I edit one of my photos for my story? Yes. It’s a birdbath photo, of course.
Oak Tree Hymn
Acorns spread the faith,
and leaves consecrate the world.
Church window, no wall.
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Show Case #2 (Writer’s Co-op)
What is behind the mask? After it is removed, there may still be more than meets the eye. Much more, as the varied pieces in Writers’ Co-op Show Case #2 reveal. Clicking on [SHOW CASE] in the banner atop any Writers’ Co-op page will reveal a drop-down menu with links to the growing list of episodes.
Click here to see episode 2 of the Writers’ Co-op Show Case curated by Sue Ranscht, which begins as follows:
This Show Case features nine pieces submitted in response to our second Writing Prompt: Behind the mask. We hope they stimulate your mind, spirit, and urge to write. Maybe they will motivate you to submit a piece for our next prompt:
Catharsis
Those submissions are due by the end of Monday, November 1, 2021, and will be published here the following Friday. Please attach yours as a .docx, .doc, or .pdf to an email to stranscht@sbcglobal.net. (Guidelines: any genre, approximately 6 – 1,000 words.)
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October Cloud
Sailing on fall wind,
a flock of droplets migrates.
Each is a small world.
Sailing ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #286
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Show Case on Writer’s Co-op
A new page on Writer’s Co-op is a biweekly show case of short pieces submitted in response to prompts. Submissions from anybody with a serious interest in writing are welcome. I needed only 12 pages to print all seven pieces from Show Case #1 in a large font, and I am glad to have read them.
Two on Mortality in 3-5-3
~ Mortality #1 ~
Emergent
from dancing atoms,
life is short.
Emergent
from dancing atoms,
life is short.
~ Mortality #2 ~
Let’s live life
with defiant joy,
all the way.
Let’s live life
with defiant joy,
all the way.
Carpe Diem Haiku Kai … #1850 dried grass
“Dried grass” in the challenge comes from Basho’s last haiku, written as he was dying. My response imagines him rallying to console his grieving companions.
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Layer Upon Layer
Smooth outer layer.
We see rough inner layer
when the light changes.
~ ~ ~ ~
Layers nest like Russian dolls,
when science shows us atoms.
Layers ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #283
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To Age Gracefully … or Not
While Freud’s quarrelsome trio was speculative and oversimplified, he was onto something: “the” mind may be a loose association of multiple partial minds (I’ll call them “miniminds”) that jostle for conscious attention and sometimes squabble. Here is a comic misadventure due to one of my own miniminds that segues to another minimind’s way to treat toenail fungus. BTW, it’s all true.
The REAL Thin Blue Line
While defending the US Capitol on 2021-01-06, police officer Mike Fanone was dragged down its steps, beaten, zapped with a taser, and nearly killed. Apologists for mob rule (provided the mob is white) were soon rebranding the rioters as tourists who were merely rowdy. Now Fanone is defending the truth at great personal cost.
Summer Compromise
The grass in my lawn is eager to grow into a shaggy mess, so I cannot always postpone mowing until some other plants in the lawn have set seed. But I can do the next best thing and get almost another week from some blooms, plus photos and a 3-5-3 haiku.
Daylily & Chicory & Nat King Cole
Photographing wildflowers in my yard inspired new lyrics for a song about a couple “too young” to be in love. While the original sweet lyrics came true for some couples, I did not marry young. I still like that song’s lovely music and calm questioning of what “they” say, so I am glad to have lyrics that fit my situation. Wish I could sing.
Optimists, Some w/o Neurons
Being rooted makes plants easier to photograph than animals, but plants do twitch with the breeze and ruin careful compositions. Cautiously optimistic, I shoot repeatedly and hope a few images catch the air’s calm moments. This post’s haiku and images suggest that sometimes optimists win.
Henley’s Indomitable Trees
One of the few nineteenth century poems that move me is Invictus by William Ernest Henley. The poem’s spirit of unflinching defiance can be expressed in more contemporary ways. (Henley’s way is still good.) After one very contemporary way inspired by trees, we end with a quick riff on forms and freedom in poetry.
Trust, But Verify
Ronald Reagan’s remark about arms control is not an oxymoron, as I learned while coping with the discovery that my phone-friendly blog was not so friendly after all. Able to handle mobile calls with a simple flip phone (and unable to type with my thumbs), I had seen no reason to have a smartphone and had trusted the WordPress previewer to warn me if a blog post would look bad there. But then I bought a smartphone.
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Until recently, I used a desktop computer for all my online activities. I surrendered to modernity in 2021-05 and bought a smartphone with a stylus that would make hunt-and-peck typing tolerable in short stints. Now I use the new phone about 1% of my time online and have backup for coping with hazards like extended power outages.
Aware that many people do use their phones the way I use my desktop, I am careful to preview my blog posts as they would look on a phone. Previews cannot be perfectly accurate, but I leave some pixels of wiggle room whenever I want everything in a line of text on my desktop to appear as a single line on the narrower screen of a phone. The WP previewer displays a plausible phone rendering, and I change my draft as needed to make posts look OK on both desktop and phone.
Wanting to get used to my new phone w/o accidentally buying junk or installing malware, I installed my usual browser (Firefox) and browsed some familiar sites, including this blog. Oops. The fonts actually used were much larger than what I expected from the WP previews. My posts were awash in weird line breaks and required absurdly much scrolling.
© Evgenii Komissarov | 123RF Stock Photo
I tried the popular Chrome browser and found that it also rendered text much too big. After much thrashing around, I stumbled onto a simple way to make many of my posts look almost the same on my actual phone as they do in the WP phone preview. Many, yes. All, no. Here is a screenshot of part of a recent post as viewed in phone mode on WP from my desktop:
Here is the corresponding screenshot as viewed on the actual phone:
Yuck. After comparing the screenshots, I revised the post to avoid rogue line breaks (and demystify how to access my blog’s widgets) on a phone. Tentatively, I trusted the WP phone preview on my desktop. When the revision seemed ready to go live, I switched to the phone, tweaked the revision (by hunt-and-peck typing) as needed to work on the actual phone, and only then hit the [Update] button. Likewise with the [Publish] button for this post. Trust, but verify.
Is there anybody else who uses a desktop (or tablet) and has been blindsided by a clash between how things should look on a phone and how they do look? Here is the simple partial fix I stumbled upon. Us dinosaurs gotta stick together.
The [Appearance] item appears most of the way down in the menu on the left side of WP site pages. The click sequence
[Appearance]
[Customize]
[Fonts]
gave me a chance to change font sizes used to display posts.
Both [Headings] and [Base Fonts] had defaulted to [Normal] size. I set them to [Small]. While this might make text too small in some browsers on some desktops, I am sure that anybody using a desktop has already gotten used to pressing Ctrl-Plus or Ctrl-Minus as needed.
Mellow Curmudgeon 