nonamedufus

Captains Smug and Vainglorious sat comfortably in the pilot seats of their Martian spacecraft. A successful lift off had propelled them thousands of light years close to earth.  As they neared the great planet Smug declared smugly "Time to take the ship off auto-pilot" to which Vainglorious replied somewhat vaingloriously "I thought you'd never do that." They each regarded the other with arched eyebrows which both had come to accept as code for 'nuff said'. As the exit door opened they both strode toward the gangplank but found they could not disembark side by side. Smug and Vainglorious had not run into this problem with other space captains such as Captain Humble, Captain Unsure or Captain Modest. Although shifts with Captain Pompous and Captain Stuck Up had proven challenging. So arching their eyebrows at one another they decided to dismount the ship sideways, face-to-face. It's not that Smug and Vainglorious didn't like each other it...

It was a Friday night and after months of unsuccessful attempts at the dating site scene Billy Goodbar  decided to visit a bar or two. He went out alone as he really had no friends to accompany him - a fact Bill had failed to consider in his failed attempts to make friends with the opposite sex on eHarmony, Match.com and Desperate and Lonely. So where some might leave in a huff, Bill chose a cab to take him downtown to the busy bar district. Bill walked up the sidewalk of one side of the street and down the other, not unlike a tourist on  brightly lit Bourbon Street New Orleans. A shy, lonely fellow with no friends Bill was in the third season of  binge-watching TREME and he felt like a character in the show as the soundtrack flooded round his head over and over Bill decided he could not wait any more and as he looked up at the fancy lit signs chose Alphonse's Bar - Live Music. He suspected the Dead had been through town last week. Bill tripped over the doorsill as...

Bob and Ray were out for a leisurely stroll on a back country road. The sky was blue. The sun was high in a cloudless sky. The birds were chirping merrily. The crickets were happily rubbing their legs together. Now I know what image that last statement conjures up but get your mind out of the gutter and back on the road. Bob and Ray joined in with the sounds of nature and hummed an old folk tune My Shoe's Got A Hole In It And My Foot Hurts Like Shit. Bob and Ray were a couple of religious fellows which is why the hummed the song and didn't sing the lyrics. Just when the two friends thought nothing could interrupt this idyllic interlude the sound of approaching horses did just that. Clop, clop, clop...the horses drew nearer and a wonderful whistle could be heard, at odds with the boys' humming. The two stepped to the side of the road, not quite so far as some of you strayed earlier, to let the horses and the wagon they were leading to pass. But instead, the whistler...

I'm 64 and hate to admit that I've been a lapsed Catholic for a good many years. I think my decision to leave the Church was like the straw that broke the camel's back when, as a teenager, my parish priest singled me out during mass to tell me what page we were on in the hymnal. A teenager, I had better things to do to follow along in the hymnal. Like check out the girls in the pews around me. At least I wasn't sneaking out for a smoke with my buddies. So at my age my memory's a little hazy but I can recall my days as an altar boy in my early teens. These were the days before they turned the altars around where the pedophiles had to face the congregation while saying mass.  (Did I just say that out loud?) Funny, being an altar boy to me back then was like going to Cubs or playing baseball. It was just another one of those past-times. It was a little inconvenient to be an altar boy. We had to rise early because we served mass Monday through Saturday at 7am eac...

Having binge-watched three seasons of The Sopranos I have to confess I didn't get much reading done in April. Finding a series you really get into and watching episode after episode is a considerable addiction. The bed goes unmade. The dishes pile up in the sink. All else stops while life goes on on what used to be referred to as the small screen and today I guess would be referred to as the flat screen. So if The Sopranos wasn't enough I also undertook what's been referred to as the Jo Nesbo Three Book Bundle. I found this on iBooks and it seemed like a cheap way to buy three Harry Hole detective novels. The three in question are The Snowman, Phantom, The Leopard. You have to love Harry Hole to read three stories in a row. And I do. Nesbo's portrayal of, in these books, the now retired police detective's failings as an anti-hero, anti-authoritarian alcoholic and workaholic endear him not only to his police colleagues but also to the reader. So I''m...