This is not a vegan thing, as my wife eats meat, but if something has been given a name, or it has a face on it, she will refuse to eat it. I have known this about her for years, but I painted the eggs for my art class and I thought that they turned out really cute. I didn’t have a problem eating a dozen hard boiled eggs, even though my doctor had me taking medication to lower my cholesterol. I could make egg salad sandwiches and maybe even some deviled eggs and once they were taken out of their shells, who would even know that they had faces painted on them, but she was adamant about this. The first year after we were married, I told her that I was going to name our Thanksgiving turkey Jake this year and she told me that if it had a name, she would cook it, but I shouldn’t expect her to eat any of it. She was fine with me naming the turkey every year, as long as I didn’t tell her the name. I felt like she was missing out on all the fun, but she was a damn good cook, so I always kept the name to myself.
Painting my hand with multiple colors serves to infuse it with magical powers, which is neither a good nor a bad thing, although once it is painted, it may be used for constructive purposes as well as for any nefarious deeds. I had juju eyeballs before John Lennon sang about them and they were not hypnotic or mesmerizing, as this happened when I was completely smashed from drinking kamikazes and I am not doing that again any time soon. The term juju evokes an image of African voodoo with half-naked native black men sporting bones through their noses, dancing around a large open fire, with a group of missionaries being boiled up in a large cauldron. Juju was a pejorative term, signifying that there was no rhyme or reason to what might be selected for this religious devotion and some people feel this term was derived from the French word for toy (joujou).
Juju got a bad wrap and it was usually associated with death, but there is also a thing called good juju and that would come from a good or white witch and this might be used to bless a marriage with a pregnancy. The painted hand was the mark of an escaped slave who would no longer be owned by a master, so the juju hand was a good juju and it would bring positive energy and warmth to anyone who it touched. This juju hand was known for training a zebra to ride a bike that pulled an elephant around in a wagon that would play a piano and everyone enjoyed seeing that.
Yoka mata huba bakwa Juju Hand
Oooowwww! We got it now!
I’ve got an alligator claw and some booby dust
So you better do what you know you must
I got a lock of your hair and a bullfrog’s eye
And if you break my heart you better say “Goodbye”
I got a yoka mata huba bakwa Juju Hand
This yoka mata huba bakwa Juju Hand sure is grand
Makes your eyes turn red and your tongue turn green
It’s the strongest mess that you’ve ever seen
Mojo hand used to be real strong
It kept you straight when you did me wrong
As time went by you just got so mean
But the yoka mata huba bakwa is the thing
I’ve got a yoka mata huba bakwa Juju Hand
This yoka mata huba bakwa sure is grand
Makes your eyes look red and your tongue turn green
The yoka mata huba bakwa makes you scream:
Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Oooowwww!
Huba bakwa Huba bakwa
Mojo hand used to be real strong
It kept you straight when you did me wrong
As time went by you just got so mean
But the yoka mata huba bakwa is the thing
I’ve got a yoka mata huba bakwa Juju Hand
This yoka mata huba bakwa sure is grand
Makes your eyes look red and your tongue turn green
Its the strongest mess that you’ve ever seen
Oooowwww!
Yoka mata huba bakwa Juju Hand
Yoka mata huba bakwa Juju Hand
Written for Reena’s Xploration Challenge #200, where today she gives us a very colorful image and asks us to be creative and go berserk with it.
She said, “You came back.” I responded, “But we are meeting for the first time.” I felt like I knew her and there was this unusual connection between us that I sensed, but I didn’t know her at all and I couldn’t tell her from Eve. Maybe she confused me with some other Tom, Dick, or Harry, or perhaps it was the clothes that I was wearing, but I was no Georgy Girl and none of the girls were passing me by. If we never met, then where could I have come back from? I could have dropped that Arnold Schwarzenegger line from the Expendables and said, “I’m back!”, but not everyone knows that movie.
I figured she was one of the girls that I contacted from that dating site. She was pretty, but I didn’t remember arranging to meet anyone. I had a doctor’s appointment and I just stopped in this coffee shop in case the doctor wanted a urine sample from me, and I needed to have a full bladder. My urologist was going to try to convince me to get a Cystoscopy to get a better look at my prostate, but there was no way I was going to let her insert a camera there. I got my coffee and the girl patted the seat next to her and said, “Take a load off, relax and we can get to know each other.” I asked her how we knew each other and she said that she was the nurse that worked for my urologist, so she felt that we already had an intimate connection from my last examination which she witnessed.
Written for Reena’s Exploration Challenge #199, where today she gives us a piece of dialog to expand on.
My neighbor came by to return some items that she said belonged to me. I saw she was carrying my four serving trays which I brought to her house for the New Year party that she held. I filled up the serving trays with jello shots using orange jello for rum on one tray, lime jello for tequila, lemon jello for vodka and cherry jello for gin. Her arms were full so I asked her if she wanted to come inside and I opened up the door for her. She asked me where she could put my stuff down and I told her that the dining room table would be fine. I had totally forgotten about the trays and I thanked her for inviting me to her party and for returning the serving trays.
She apologized for taking so long to return my stuff and she said that things had been difficult for her since her husband died back in the Spring from Covid-19, and I told her that is very understandable and I offered her my heart felt condolences. She thanked me and told me that her grieving period was coming to an end and she was trying to move on with her life, because at her age every day counts. I didn’t really know this neighbor all that well, but I do remember telling her that I joined a dating site when I was at her New Year party, after she asked me if there was anyone special in my life. I had played golf with her husband a few times and I guess that is how I got invited to the party. My neighbor asked me how long I thought she should wait till she started seeking love and attention from men and if I could help her set up a dating profile.
I told my neighbor Rose that her deceased husband George would want her to be happy and if that meant dating men, then it was probably time for her to start. I told her that grief and loss were both very complicated issues, but they were her own personal issues and there was no timeline for her to follow, but if she was serious, then she should stop wearing her wedding ring and embrace her new identity of being a widow. Rose was a good-looking woman and I knew that it would not be too difficult for her to find another companion, but in order to help her I needed to know what she was looking for. I asked her if she was looking for a friend to do things with on a casual basis, or a person to have a loving relationship with, or if she was interested in being married again. Rose responded that anything and everything sounded good to her, but she wanted to start off slow.
I told Rose that dating after your spouse is gone could help to fill the void in her life, but she needed to carefully consider what her motivations were before she started dating somebody. I said that love is a precious gift to have in your life, and if you’re lucky enough to find it twice in your live, then you shouldn’t deny yourself when that feeling of falling in love comes along. Rose said that she wasn’t all that comfortable meeting new men after spending so much time being married to her husband and she felt it would be easier on her if she started dating someone that she already knew. Rose undid a few buttons on her top and slowly licked her lips and then she asked me if I thought she was sexy enough for me to date. I told her that she looked great and I asked her to undo a few more buttons, so I could have a better look.
One thing led to another and we never got to set up that dating profile for her, but we both had a good time and I told her that I needed to get to my dentist appointment and she smiled and said that a man had never left her before to get to the dentist. I told her that I could cancel it, but being that it would be a last-minute cancelation, that my dentist would still charge me for the appointment and she said that she understood and she told me not to cancel it. We got dressed and Rose kissed me. As she was leaving, I asked her what was in the other bag that she left on my dining room table. Rose said that those were the tumblers that I brought over for the jello shots and I told her that the tumblers were not mine, as I remembered putting the jello shots in disposable plastic cups. Rose said that she had no idea whose tumblers they were and that I should keep them to give her another excuse for coming over to visit me, so I could love her like that again.
Written for Reena’s Exploration Challenge #198, where today she gives us a situation where somebody returned a few articles you had lent to them and one of them is not yours.
The person I see in the mirror is not me. It hurts that I’ve lived with this stranger for so long. The face that looks back at me is that of a normal man, but I know I am perverted and I hide my secret in the closet. I knew that liked dressing up in women’s clothes the day that I walked into my sister’s bedroom and saw her frilly dress hanging up in her closet and I had to try it on. I knew it was wrong, but I wanted to feel it on my skin, so I took off all of my boy clothes and put her dress on. I was so frightened that somebody would catch me, but I got away with my deviant behavior and I put her dress back in her closet. I never had another incident, till after I was married.
My wife and I shared an apartment with her mother and her mother would leave her intimate apparel hanging all over the place and that piqued my curiosity. One day when I was at the apartment by myself, I decided to explore her bedroom and I opened hp her dresser drawer and became engrossed in all the nice things that she had in there. My wife never wore any sexy outfits, but I was transfixed by all the gorgeous lingerie that my mother-in-law had. There were packets on new stockings, suspender belts, thongs, and every item of sexy lingerie you could imagine. My mother-in-law was much larger than my wife and I figured that some of her stuff might fit me, so I stripped my clothes off and tried on a pair of her panties and one of her bras and I loved the feeling. When I looked at myself in her bedroom mirror, I realized that this is the person that I was meant to be. I didn’t like men, but I wanted to dress up in the pretty clothes that women were allowed to wear.
When my wife came home, I told her that I had a surprise for her and I went into her mother’s bedroom and came back out wearing her panties and I said, “They fit me perfectly”. She screamed at me to take them off, asking me what was wrong with me and I told her that I was just having fun. I never imagined that what was a sexual turn-on for me would be a turn-off for her and I ended up losing my wife. Now that I was back on my own, my compulsion only increased and I started ordering feminine clothes for myself in some online catalogs. I reasoned that if I only wore my frilly garb at home, there was no need for me to be concerned about being caught. I found inner peace with myself, each time I purchased a new item of women’s clothing and after I had enough panties and bras, I started buying shoes and makeup. Women are beautiful and I want to be just like them.
I saw my mother-in-law one day when I was out shopping and I asked her how my ex-wife was doing and she told me that she had met a real man and she was doing fine. I figured that my wife must have told her that I wore her panties and I apologized to her for doing that. I was shocked when she said that she had just picked up some new things and she wondered how I would look in them. I went back to her place with her and modeled all the things that she gave me to try on. She slipped into a tight leather black skirt, and some very high patent heels with fishnet nylons. She wore a silky red blouse that was cut very tight and several buttons were undone leaving her beautiful breasts almost fully on display, and I told her that I was happy that we were both the same size. My mother-in-law was open, non-judgmental, caring, accepting of my problem and most important, I knew that I could trust her not to tell anyone about our secret.
There are several methods that can be used to solve a Rubik’s cube, but the exact sequence of instructions for solving this 3-D puzzle can be perplexing even to the experts, depending on how the cube is scrambled up at the time you try to solve it. A Rubik’s cube has approximately 43 quintillion possible permutations, so if you just try to just rotate the faces randomly, it may never get solved. This rotatable mechanical cube is a three-dimensional solid object that has 6 faces, 12 edges, and 8 vertices, which are the corners. The 6 faces means that there will be 6 different colors and the edges are where the different colors will meet. If you look at a corner on the cube, you will see three different colors which are known as layers and no matter which way you hold the cube you will always see three layers. Each face will have 9 different blocks and the one in the middle is known as the center block. Unlike the rest of the blocks,they do notmove position, because they are fixed and they determine the color of the face.
Rubik’s cube notation works as follows:
Face
Notation
Left Face
L
Right Face
R
Up Face
U
Down Face (bottom of cube)
D
Front Face (facing you)
F
Back Face (facing away from you)
B
Middle Face (center “slice”)
M
Entire Cube
Y
There is a thing called God’s Number which is the smallest number of moves needed to solve the 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube from any random starting position. Programmers have determined that every standard 3x3x3 Rubik’s cube can be solved in a maximum of 20 moves from any starting position, no matter how it is scrambled. There are two ways to turn a layer, either regular or inverted. A regular turn is a clockwise turn, and an inverted turn is a counterclockwise turn. In Rubik’s cube notation, an inverted turn is represented with a lowercase i, such as Ri. This would mean that you rotate the right side counterclockwise. A Rubik’s cube algorithm is an operation, or a series of rotations, that reorients the blocks into a desired outcome. These are usually written with a capital letter denoting the face that should be rotated, a lowercase i if that rotation should be counterclockwise, and a number 2 if it should be rotated twice.
It shouldn’t matter what layer you solve first, but it is a good idea to solve one layer, before you go on to try and solve the rest. The video below starts off with the White face and it illustrates how to make a white cross.
Once you have made the white cross, then you make the white corners and you have your first face completed. Solving a Rubik’s cube requires a lot of practice and memorization and I have never been able to solve one, but if you keep at it, it is possible, as some three-year-old kids have solved them. It is intricate, but if you are dedicated, have patience, and are willing to practice, eventually you will be able to solve one. Even mathematicians have a hard time trying to solve a Rubik’s cube and they call this an NP-complete problem, which applies to any of a class of computational problems for which no efficient solution algorithm has been found. Sheer persistence and luck will help as well as developing your own techniques by rotating blocks around and possibly undoing moves if things don’t work out. Most people are not great at thinking in 3-D, but you can’t just look at the front, as you have to be aware of what is happening on the other sides.
Instead of looking at the cube as being 6 faces, it might work better if you see it as being 3 layers, which seems to work for a lot of people. When Trinity kissed Neo, he came back to life, emerging as The One and this may be the perspective that works for you, but some people can actually solve these when they are blindfolded. The beginner’s method contains 6 or 7 algorithms that need to be repeated in some cases, to obtain a desired permutation and some direct algorithms can get you to a desired stage. The algorithms are a sequence of predetermined turns represented by the cube notation shown in the table above, that you use to get from one desired stage to another and learning them is the key to resolving the Rubik’s cube.
“Shhh! It’s your turn now”, said Jack as he handed me the knife. Nobody was around, but we thought it would be best to keep quiet about this. We ambushed him and he deserved to die, but I was reluctant to go through with this, as I had never stabbed anyone before. He was already bleeding like a pig, as Jack had cut him deep, but maybe it wasn’t too late, as with the proper medical attention, this bastard might still be able to be saved. Jack wanted to torture him and that is why he was bleeding and not dead, as I remember Jack saying that he had to die by a thousand cuts. We decided to take matters into our own hands when the law didn’t see things the same way that we did and now it was my turn to do my part. He was responsible for spreading all the misinformation about Covid and that is why our mother died. He was moaning and saying that he was sorry about all of the lies that he spread, but Jack put his hand over this a-hole’s mouth and told me to cut him. Lucky for me, he died just as I was about to stab him and Jack said that if we want to get away with murder that it was time for us to run.
That should go over like a lead balloon was a phrase that steered the name of a band that Jimmy Page put together with Robert Plant, John Bonham and John Paul Jones. Originally Page tried to assemble a supergroup with ex-Yardbirds guitarist Jeff Beck and the Who’s John Entwistle and Keith Moon, but that never materialized. When the Yardbirds broke up, Jimmy Page recruited three new men for a reboot of the Yardbirds. The four musicians first played together billed as the New Yardbirds, a relaunch of the British Invasion blues rockers who had imploded just months before. The name Led Zeppelin came from a comment made by Keith Moon, who said the band would go down like a lead balloon. Moon is said to have borrowed the term from John Entwistle, who had previously used it to describe bad gigs.
Jimmy Page completed a Scandinavian tour with an impromptu band named the New Yardbirds, but Chris Dreja had rights to the name Yardbirds and when this new group started calling themselves The New Yardbirds, he contacted a lawyer, so they couldn’t legally use it. The choice of Zeppelin in the band’s name was surely influenced by the Hindenburg disaster of 1937. The newsreel of the event, complete with announcer Herbert Morrison’s famous “Oh, the humanity” line, was commonly seen footage in English cinemas during the 1950s and 60s and Page would certainly have been familiar with it. The band used an image of the crash for the cover of their first album. Moon’s prediction could not have been more wrong, as Led Zeppelin became one of the most popular, arguably the most popular, musical act of the first half of the 1970s and reputedly have sold more than 300 million albums.
A white rabbit checked his watch and then exclaimed that he was late and in ‘Late Lament’ by the Moody Blues, they talked about a “Cold-hearted orb that rules the night” and wondered “which is an illusion”. The rabbit is just silly, but drummer Graeme Edge makes us think that as time passes, what is actually going on. Time is grouped into periods of past, present and future, or yesterday, today and tomorrow, but what is time? Isaac Newton described it as absolute, but Einstein proved that time is relative, and, shockingly, that time and space are intricately interwoven. Recent work in string theory and quantum gravity suggests that space and time may not be fundamental. If we look at the stars, we are seeing the past and even when we see a flash of lighting at a short distance away, we are seeing something that happened a hundredth of a millisecond ago.
I said today in my Thursday Inspiration post that “Tomorrow may only be a day away, but it never actually gets here, as when the designated time arrives, it is called today.” Thus, if everything that we look at is in the past or at least some fraction of time in the past and tomorrow never gets here, that makes time very confusing to say the least. Everyone seems to agree that time should move in the forward direction. Since time is a human construct, we are under the illusion (back to Graeme Edge again), that at any given moment, the past has already happened and the future doesn’t exist yet, and that things are changing, so does time change everything or am I going down a rabbit hole by saying that things change because of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of any isolated system always increases.
Written for Reena’s Exploration Challenge #191 prompt where we are asked to take a belief, a dream, a philosophy, a religion of yours, and turn it into trash.
After our date, she asked me if I wanted to come in for some coffee. My mind started racing with thoughts about what I should expect, as did this just mean coffee, or was something else going to happen if I accepted her offer? This was our first date and I took her out to a nice restaurant and then we parked by the lake and because it was such a beautiful night, we looked up at the stars. We are both single, and I used all of my charms trying to seduce her, letting her know how much I loved her smile, and how lucky I feel to have met someone so lovely as her. I usually drink my coffee in the morning and I don’t like decaffeinated, so maybe she meant something more than us just sharing a cup of coffee.
I like her a lot, but even though I am the man, I will wait for her to make the first move, as this is her place and I would feel terrible if I made her uncomfortable by misjudging her intentions. If she just means coffee and has no romantic interest in me, I can live with that, as there are plenty of other fish in the sea. This could be just my imagination running away with me and maybe I should stop dreaming and get a life, but the way she asked me, made it feel like she was flirting with me, because she kept batting her eyelashes. The insanity in my brain was telling me that once I got inside of her place, that she was going to tell me to be patient while she slips into something more comfortable. I know how I feel when I get home, as once I get in the door, I want to get my clothes off. She has a smoking hot body and I am visualizing her coming back out of her bedroom wearing the sexiest lingerie imaginable and us sharing a fulfilling lovemaking session.
My life is filled with so much fantasy, as no woman ever tells a guy that she wants to slip into something more comfortable, unless you are watching a James Bond movie. When opportunity knocks, you have to say yes and if this widow was interested in pursuing an intimate relationship with me, then I was not going to turn that down. I felt this sexual attraction toward her and these sensual feelings just kept building up inside of me. I had to leave where this was going up to her as I didn’t want to get rejected. I am in uncharted territory here, as I am hoping that she is sexually active and that she is looking to establish an emotional closeness, but maybe she just likes drinking coffee. I should probably just accept her offer and stop over thinking this.
