It is a Real Thing

A bookworm is any insect in its larval (or adult) forms that will injure books by gnawing away at the binding and piercing through the pages making small holes.  No single species may properly be called the bookworm, because a large number of insects feed upon dry, starchy material or paper and all of these different species may damage books.  There is actually nothing amusing about the damage that bookworms cause.  They tunnel through books, at times all the way from front cover to back, leaving holes on every page, or they carve meandering tracks across pages, obscuring text, weakening bindings, and leaving the paper vulnerable to tearing.  The culprits are not really worms having a long cylindrical tube-like body, no limbs, and no eyes, but other types of minuscule insects or creatures who like to live in, and eat, books, because they are attracted to the leather bindings or the wooden shelves the books are kept on.  This is the reason why many libraries have strict rules against bringing in any food or drinks, which might attract insects and cause future damage to the precious books.

The glue makes a nice meal for the bookworms and the pages become warm places for them to burrow through.  These bookworms can’t get enough of books, but if we can kill their parents before they lay their larva, we can prevent the books from being damaged.  We should also try to keep our books dry and clean, and remove them from the shelf every now and then to prevent a buildup of dust which insects like to nest in.  Once you see “frass” (insect poop) that spells trouble as this is a sure sign that a mother is lurking around.  Once a book worm inhabits a book and begins laying eggs, getting rid of the intruders before they destroy the book can be a challenge, but with some persistence it can be done.  The bookworm only wants the same thing that we do, being close to the warm, safe, environment that is provided by a good story.

Written for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver #318 hosted by Michael where the prompt is bookworm.

Wicked Witch

There was one in the East and one in the West
I never wanted to see either of them undressed
Glinda was from the North and she was a Good Witch
She had taste in her clothes, not wearing anything kitsch
Thus, not all witches are inherently wicked
Glinda was friends with Jiminy Cricket
The Wicked Witch of the West was known for her cackle
She always made sure to steer clear of any tabernacle
It is not all that easy being an old hag with green skin
Having to avoid water, I can sympathize with her chagrin
She knew that she was not pretty or becoming
One look at her and you would be off running
She controlled her Flying Monkeys with fear
They were not cute like Santa’s reindeer
She never joined a coven, but she enjoyed practicing her craft
She rode around on a broom and knew how to catch an updraft
She was good at boiling up a wicked brew
Her violent temper made her a real shrew
All she desired was to own the Ruby Slippers
Even though they didn’t have any zippers
They could not be removed till Dorothy was dead
She hated everything and she would remain unwed
Volts of electricity shocked her when she tried to touch them
Pandemonium always prevailed in her world of bedlam
The glorious, dazzling Ruby Slippers were symbols of hope
She went after Dorothy and her little dog she tried to grope

Written for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver #317 hosted by Michael and the Wicked Witch prompt.

These Shoes Want to Dance

Eric noticed the girl with the red hair and he thought that she would be perfect for the ballet production that he was putting on, the Red Red Shoe.  His last dancer had fallen ill and died from Covid-19 and his show was only two weeks out.  He was not sure if this girl could dance or not, but she did look graceful and he knew that the shoes would take care of the rest.  His last dancer was a clumsy oaf and the shoes did the trick for her.  Once she put them on, she danced all around and in fact, she was unable to stop dancing as long as she was wearing these shoes.  She danced into the night, until her feet bled and Eric was forced to remove them from her.

Eric knew that the red headed girl would be enamored with these red shoes, as they are fit for a princess.  Eric figured that he could get some Arm & Hammer spray to disinfect the shoes before he had the red head try them on, but he hoped that they would not take complete control over her like they did to her predecessor.  Maybe he could take the shoes to a witchdoctor, or pray to God for help, but all he knew was that his backers would want their money back so the show must go on.

Written for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver #316 hosted by Michael – the Red Hair Girl photo prompt.

Let Me Get the Lotion

She thought that my skin felt dry and she insisted on taking care of me, so she pulled a bottle of lotion out from her bedroom drawer.  She said, “Look how your skin is soaking it up, you really needed this.”  I guess I did, and it felt good just having her touch me and then I looked at the lotion that she was applying on me and it read, ‘enhancement for men and women’.  I said, “This smells very nice, but I think you are applying sex lotion on me.”  She said, “Yes, it is and this personal lubricant is supposed to intensify sensations and, in my opinion, the wetter it is the better it feels, now help me to get your pants off, so we can enjoy the main event.  My husband often used this lube on me and it is one of the best bedroom enhancers around, as it always made sex more enjoyable for us.  He has been gone for ten years now, and at the end I was no longer able to arouse him, and that made me feel like less of a woman.”

She smiled at me as she kept rubbing the sex lotion on me and she said, “I am so happy to see that you are responding to my touch and that it wasn’t my fault that my husband couldn’t get excited.  When his desire for sex disappeared, that played a big role in my sex drive and because nothing that we tried ever worked, we both lost interest in trying anything.  I am so happy that I am able to please you this way and I feel like I have finally become a woman again.”  I told her that the lotion felt amazing and I said that she was doing a great job, but wanting a bit more, I said that it would work even better if she were to also get naked.

Written for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver #314 hosted by Michael and the prompt is lotion.

Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game

Wall Street can’t stop talking about Grimster, a pig farm retailer whose stock price is popping far beyond what most people think it’s worth.  The stock price has skyrocketed even though it seems like people aren’t eating any more pigs, and the Covid-19 pandemic is keeping people away from stores that sell pork.  Grimster is the subject of what’s called short selling, in which professional investors borrow shares of stock to sell and then buy back later so they can return them, which lets them pocket the profit if the stock price goes down.  They’re basically bets that the company will fail.  Grimster was one of the most shorted of all publicly traded companies and then it became the source of a short squeeze.  A short squeeze occurs when a stock or other asset jumps sharply higher, forcing traders who had bet that its price would fall, to buy it in order to forestall even greater losses.

Investors normally follow the premise of “buy low, sell high” when it comes to stocks.  Short sellers do the opposite, borrowing and selling a stock when it’s high while betting that it will continue to fall, but if that doesn’t happen and the stock price rises, short sellers are forced to cover their positions or buy more stocks in order to minimize their losses.  Grimster promotes chatter on massive online trading forums, which invigorates interest in buying the stock, pushing up the price, which in turn fuels more interest.  The speculative trading left short sellers with no more shares to buy to cover their positions, creating a short squeeze and leaving them with millions of dollars in stocks they had bought at a high price but which they then had to offload at an even higher price.  These short sellers who have lost their shorts in the stock market are referred to as lanmiters.  These lanmiters expects a stock price to fall, so they borrows shares of that company from another investor for a fee and sells it immediately, hoping that when the price does fall, they can buy the shares back cheaply, return them to the owner and pocket the difference.

Written for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver – #312 hosted by Michael – Making Sense of Nonsense – At the recent Grimster’s Convention it was agreed that lanmiters would no longer be allowed.

Wooing and Wowing Others

Women want a man who has moral integrity, one that is sensitive to their needs, is able to treat them fairly and equitably and one who can provide satisfying intimacy to make sure that the romantic spark keeps burning.  Prince Charming exists between the pages in fairy tales where a happy ever after ending always happens, so he has become the guy in every girl’s dream.  In real life, Prince Charming is a man who’s defined as being too good to be true, since people are cynical, and fairy tales are only an outlet for those naïve people that have only experienced things in their minds, and they have yet to gain any real-world experience.

People are naturally drawn to others who are polite, modest, agreeable, kind, which is basically those people who are charming.  People that you meet can make judgements about you based purely on the way you look and this is mostly dependent on your dependent on your facial expressions, so try to put on a happy face and smile.  If you raise your eyebrows, and make eye contact people will think that you are interested in what they are saying.  If you learn people’s names, they will respect you for that and if you can get others to talk openly about themselves, by showing a sincere interest in what they are saying, then they will jump at the chance to tell you more.  Try to use open-ended questions those that require more than just a one-word answer and that should keep the conversation flowing.  Charming people will ask sincere questions that make it easy for a person to answer in a thoughtful, introspective way.  They make you think, in a good way, about yourself, and in this process, you will feel charming too.

Written for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver #311 hosted by Michael where the prompt is How To Be A prince Charming.

My Dogs Are Barking

The man entered the shoe store complaining that his feet hurt, because they were tired and they needed some tender loving care.  The salesperson said, “Well sir you have come to the right place, as we have something that goes way beyond your basic dress shoes, or cheap sneakers here, as our basset hound Jason would tell you, ‘Quiet your barking dogs in the most comfortable shoe that you will ever wear’.  Prince Phillip of Great Britain chose Hush Puppies to wear on a 1959 visit to the United States and at that same time Warren Beatty was wearing them.  David Bowie wore Hush Puppies and Princess Diana’s had a custom-made pair.  Tom Hanks wore them in Forest Gump and Dennis Rodman, Jim Carrey, Sharon Stone, Patricia Arquette, Ellen DeGeneres, Daryl Hannah, Lenny Kravitz and even ‘Seinfeld’s’ Kramer have worn these shoes.  Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack including Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop wore Hush Puppies and the Beatles wore them on their U.S. tours in the mid-1960s.

They were the first shoes advertised on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, but an ‘electrifying’ boost was given to the brand in 1965 at a Rolling Stones concert in Sacramento, California, when Keith Richards accidentally touched his guitar against an ungrounded microphone and was knocked unconscious.  Medics believed that the crepe-soled Hush Puppies that he was wearing at the time saved his life.  They were embraced by hippies wearing tie-dyed shirts, beads, bell bottom jeans, long sideburns during San Francisco’s “Summer of Love” in 1967.  In 1974, Jimmy Buffett recorded the song ‘Come Monday’ which featured the lyrics ‘I’ve got my Hush Puppies on’, and this song reached #3 on the charts.  By 1990, Hush Puppies became so popular that Mikhail Gorbachev invited the brand to become the first American company to manufacture and sell footwear in the Soviet Union.  Come into the store sir and I am sure that we can do something about your tired feet.”  The man said, “OK I will try on a pair, but I think that Keith Richards could live through anything and after the next nuclear war, he will be this only thing left alive besides the cockroaches.”

Written for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver #310 hosted by Michael where the prompt is

Tired and Run Down.

The Sure Thing

I woke up in 2021 caught in an intimate relationship and I guess that I just got used to having her around.  When we met, she told me that there was no need to romance her, as she was a sure thing.  I became distracted by her beauty which was mesmerizing, but romance was one aspect that I certainly wanted to have in a relationship.  I wanted more and I turned into a basket case because I started ignoring the ignorance of this situation.  I wanted to kiss her and she insisted that wasn’t necessary, so we argued constantly till I got tired.  She looked just like Elizabeth Taylor and I asked her if we could go up on the tin roof with a blanket where we could be like street cats making love.

Written for Sheryl’s Daily Word Prompt – Distracted, for the Daily Spur prompt – Aspect, for FOWC with Fandango – Intimate, for Linda G. Hill’s ‘Life in progress’ JusJoJan January prompt – Caught, for January Writing Prompts – Ignoring the ignorance, for Ragtag Community – Blanket, for Reena’s Exploration Challenge #167 – I woke up in 2021, for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver hosted by Michael prompt – A basket case, for Di’s Three Things Challenge prompt words – Tired Tin More and for Word of the Day Challenge Prompt – Mesmerizing.

The Red Badge of Courage

A wound, or a scar can become a badge of survival, whether it comes from battle, a brutal beating, surgery, or an ugly accident.  The Red Badge of Courage was banned in 1986 because parents complained about what books their children were learning about in English.  People didn’t like the fact that the author Stephen Crane didn’t have any prior experience from the army to write about in his story.  The red badge of courage is a bloody wound that symbolizes bravery and it is comparable to the Purple Heart medal, which has a long history in the military and this award is given to soldiers who are wounded in combat.  When a man is injured, others automatically think he fought bravely.

My dad and his buddy Falvey both broke curfew when he served in WWII and they were both forced to dig a ditch as punishment.  His Sargent drove them out to a field in a jeep and dropped them off with two shovels telling them that he would be back in six hours and that the ditch better be dug when he returned.  My dad and Falvey started digging the ditch, but a Frenchman came out and told them to stop, saying that he would dig the ditch for them, because they were fighting the Germans for him and this was the least that he could do to show his gratitude.  He jumped into the hole that they started and told them to relax.

He ordered his two lovely daughters to get refreshments for my dad and Falvey and my dad felt bad because this Frenchman was doing their punishment, but Falvey started making out with one of the girls and my dad reluctantly went along.  They sat on a fence and although they could not understand a word that the Frenchman or his daughters spoke, they had a really nice time drinking some French wine and kissing these young girls.  The Frenchman was a hard worker, so he wasn’t paying all that much attention to what his daughters were doing and he thought that the ditch had some military significance.  He finished up with time to spare and he went back to his house to get some bread and cheese to go along with the wine.

Just after the French farmer left the Sargent came back with two jeeps and he inspected the hole that they dug.  The Sargent told them to fill in the hole and then take the other jeep back to camp.  When the farmer arrived with the bread and cheese, he took the shovels away from my dad and Falvey and he said that he would fill in the hole.  My dad said that he thought that the farmer figured that they placed a mine in at the bottom of the hole.  They finished the wine, bread and cheese, they kissed both the girls goodbye, but then my dad cut his hand on the shovel loading it back into the jeep.  When my dad arrived back at the base, his Sargent asked him if he would like to be put in for a Purple Heart for his wound, but my dad said that was not necessary.

Written for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver hosted by Michael where the prompt is badges.

Resistance is Futile

Republicans are like cybernetic organisms linked to the hive mind of Donald Trump and they would rather destroy Democracy than go against anything that their beloved leader tells them.  Trump thought he had it in the bag and that he would remain in the White House for another 4 years, but he lost the last election and he is being a spoiled sport about this.  He was confident that he would win, but I am not so sure that he thought it was a sure thing, because before the election took place, he was already discrediting the whole process and now he won’t back down.

Written for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver hosted by Michael where we are asked to consider the saying, “Confident: It was a sure thing.”