A BlogSnax© post
If you lose at this Extreme Jenga game, there’s a lot more than pride at stake.
High Stakes Jenga
Category Archives: photos
Misc photographs of absurd things.
Scenes from a novel…
The following photos capture locales in Boston that serve as settings for my newest novel, “Only Love Can Break Your Leg”.
If you’ve read it, I hope you enjoy the background. If you haven’t, maybe this will pique your interest. Enjoy.
for a fast getaway from South End fiascos.
perfect for a romantic stroll.
Walk those bikes!
an ideal location for a midday tryst.
A desperate cyclist could ride right through it.
Nice setting from which to listen to a concert.
a busy Storrow Drive.
Mangia!
Even more fun “under the lights.”
in Boston’s North End
to celebrate in the North End
What dirty water??
From the Department of Redundancy Dept.
A Blog Snax© post.
Seen on the road…
Mixed Messages
Saw this sign on the side of a building during a recent bike ride:
Okay, I’m good with that. I’m a massive proponent of supporting local businesses.
But wait! Pull back a little and we see the bigger picture:
What am I supposed to do with this cognitive dissonance? Subway spreads like a deadly pandemic across the face of this country. Fine. Let Iowa, Florida, and New Mexico have their nasty, mass-produced, generic sandwiches. But here in the Boston area, home of some of the best local sub shops east or west of Tuscany, Subway is unnecessary at best, a cancer at worst, eating away at our culture like the rot slowly consuming the shack in this photo.
Run away! Run away!!
The Choice
Priming the pump
You ain’t a writer if you don’t write
Much to my embarrassment, the last time I wrote a real blog post for this blog–not a shameless advertisement for one of my books–was January 23 of this year. (My other blog is not much better. Last post: August 16, 2019. And that one was preceded by an eight-month hiatus.)
Mea culpa.
Once I completed The Endless Cycle (a four-book series for middle-grade readers (all installments now available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle versions (I couldn’t resist (sorry)))) I decided to take some time off to regroup, relax, recover, rethink… and do some jigsaw puzzles.
Time’s up. I have to put something out here to prime the pump for my next large-scale project, one as yet to be decided. So here goes: A brain dump of random strange thoughts that have been piling up.
Lessons I’ve learned from my grandchildren, Part I: Any truly good book has stickers at the end.
I don’t think, therefore… am I?
I love Maine. It’s a beautiful state. My favorite spots are Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, or as we say in Boston: Bah Hahbah and Arcadier National Pahk. (Contrary to popular opinion, we don’t discard our “r”s, we recycle them.) I have one problem with the state, however. They need to put a moratorium on the use of the pathetic pun “Mainely” in their advertising and business names. Driving around the state, you’ll encounter “Mainely Lobster”, “Mainely Antiques”, “Mainely Burgers”, “Mainely Brews”, and Mainey more. Enough already.
Speaking of Maine, on my last trip there, I saw this bumper sticker:
I thought it was a souvenir, but then I noticed it was on Donald Trump’s car. Makes perfect sense.
It’s a shame that the common expression is, “sweat like a pig.” Two fun alliterative alternatives exist: “sweat like a swine” and “perspire like a pig.” Just sayin’.
Here’s some word weirdness that makes me say hmmm…
- Overlook and oversee are opposites. As are “look over” and overlook. Yet an overlook (noun) is something you should look over rather than overlook.
- Loosen and unloosen mean the same thing.
- Flammable and inflammable mean the same thing.
- Valuable and invaluable aren’t quite synonyms but they aren’t the opposites one would expect, given the spelling. Invaluable, in fact, means more valuable. Go figure.
- A one-way mirror is the same thing as a two-way mirror. Good thing streets aren’t like that.
The English language was obviously created by committee.
Shots’n’thots
Working on a new book (actually five of them!) so the blog is lower priority. Hence the sparsity of posts lately. Here’s a quickie that’s been on my mind. A few thoughts spread among a few shots.
Try looking up “Funk & Wagnalls” in your Funk & Wagnalls.
Welcome to a new year. In my younger days, I’d be writing the previous year well into March. Now it’s like a tick of the clock. I started writing 2019 on January 1 without missing a beat.
By my observation, people usually say more than they know yet know more than they’ll say. Some of us err on one side more than the other. But we all do it.
Fortunately, we have…
I was in California not too long ago. I saw a truck for a local business called “Leadership Fumigation“. Do you think they’d do a job at the White House?
I can’t prove they didn’t.
Coming in March!!
Watch this space for the announcement of my new book series for middle-grade readers:
The Endless Cycle
Thoughts between the storms of life
Life takes up all my time. Even weekends. That’s why I’m often reduced to dumping collected thoughts into posts just to meet my arbitrary weekly deadlines. Thus, here are some dead lines for this deadline:
Why isn’t postcocious a word, the opposite of precocious? It would apply to those who demonstrate an immaturity beyond (before?) their years. No one I know fits that description… outside of that guy in the mirror.
Whenever I watch a movie on DVD, I have to endure the declaration that “Piracy isn’t a victimless crime”. Tell me about it. I just wasted 10 seconds staring at the message.
I love my library. And I love my librarians. Still, I have to ask, how scientific is “library science”?
How lame is it when the news anchors blame the weather forecaster for bad weather? They don’t blame sportscasters when their teams lose. I hope one day to see the weather guy turn it around. (“Hey, Jim, when are you going to stop this rain and send us some sunshine?” “As soon as you stop all those mass shootings, Mary.”)
There are 2 kinds of people in the world: those who separate people into two groups and those who don’t.
Some say there are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary and those who don’t.
I wish I had a nickel for every empty bottle or can I see thrown on the side of the road. Wait…
Most house fans I’ve owned turn on at the highest speed. Dumb. That’s like a radio with an on/off dial that starts at the highest volume.
Remember when we worried about privacy? We’ve sacrificed it on the altar of social media. As Keith Lowell Jensen wisely observed, “What Orwell failed to predict [in his book “1984”] was that we’d buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching.”
I was at a food truck event not long ago and took this picture:
When I blow that picture up (below) you can barely make out a disturbing sight in the background: 
Yes, that’s a bloodmobile. Evidently, they were expecting vampires at this event.
What’s with all the moving graphics?? Watch news or sports on TV and count the number of moving graphical objects on the screen. My ADD nature causes me to watch them obsessively and miss whatever is going on in the program. One more reason I don’t miss “news” broadcasts.
Silly Pictures with Rick
Did anyone notice I blew off last week’s post? I thought not. Here’s what I’ve been up to these days:
- Finishing up my second novel, to be entitled “A Song in the Storm”.
- Prepping for the annual trivia game to raise money for Haitian entrepreneurs.
- Gearing up for my annual bike ride to raise funds to fight MS.
More on all those in later posts. For now, to save more time…
It’s time for Silly Pictures with Rick, the part of the show where Rick shows some silly pictures. (Apologies to Larry the Cucumber.)
Here’s a deal that only looks good after you’ve had the two drinks.
CPR: The perfect name for an emergency toilet.
Living in the past. Cadillac SUV? Playboy??? Does this guy know it’s 2017? Does he care?
Photo Dump
I’m a word guy, but whenever I see something that evokes the absurd, I pull out my camera. Phone. Or whatever it is. When enough of them back up, it’s time to dump them on my unsuspecting readers. Consider them all to be writing prompts. There’s bound to be a story behind each one.
This week, here are some photos that capture certain facets of the weird world we live in.
This art exhibit gives the attendee the full “class distinction” immersion experience. (Note: This photo is actually from my daughter who also has a keen eye for the bizarre.)
3rd Ave at Second Ave?!? Is this a math or geography fail? Either way, some mail’s gonna get lost.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out who can park here when. There are too many clauses. If you can parse this for me, I’d be forever in your debt. Meanwhile I’ll play it safe and park on the other side of the street.
It’s bad enough that there’s a store selling monsters at a discount, but look who’s selling them…
…a store for kids! We all thought the movie “Monsters, Inc.” explained where the monsters under the bed came from. Now we know different.
Finally! A store that’s selling something we can all really use. Check out the circled sign, lost in a jumble of useless shops.
Sign at a local take-out shop. Risking their own business to do their part to restore some semblance of civility to our technology-obsessed culture.
Power drinks. Neither food nor nourishment, yet they’re in a cooler with that label. Go figure. What else can we expect in a nation where ketchup has been declared a vegetable?
Believe it or not, this photo was taken in the cradle of American liberty, the birthplace of the American Revolution: Concord (MA) green. Yet they’re using the British term for the traffic circle! It’s a rotary, people! A rotary. Lorries don’t go around it, TRUCKS do! Next thing you know, we’ll be driving on the wrong side of the road! Stop the madness! Is this what we fought the revolution for? I say NO! Then again, who cares.
Scribbling in the Sand 