The Blue Planet

World Oceans Day is an international day that takes place annually on June 8, which happens to be today.  This special day is hosted by the United Nations, and it is all about spreading awareness and the theme for World Ocean Day 2022 is “Revitalization: Collective Action for the Ocean”.  The ocean is one of our planet’s most important natural resources, but it faces a growing number of threats.  The ocean connects, sustains, and supports us all, but its health has reached a tipping point, and this threatens ecosystems, food security, livelihoods and coastal safety.  The ocean is growing warmer and more acidic, polar ice is melting and global weather patterns are changing, and none of this is any good.  All of us must work together to protect the oceans, but the fishing industry has encumbered our efforts to keep the oceans clean.  Fish are sensitive animals and have no protections for how they are treated or slaughtered.  Plastic ocean pollution injures and kills marine life, spreads toxins and is a major health threat and dumped fishing gear is biggest plastic polluter in ocean.

Earth’s oceans are connected by a vast global conveyor belt of moving water and this network keeps our planet healthy.  Climate change is affecting the flow of our ocean currents, but the good news is that we know how to fix this.  Since colder water sinks deeper and warmer water rises up to the surface of the oceans because of density and the fact that water that has a higher salt content is also denser, we know how temperature and saltiness effect the ocean currents.  The water cycle involves the Sun heating up water until it evaporates from the surface of the earth, rises into the atmosphere, cools and condenses into rain or snow in clouds, and falls again to the surface as precipitation, which is collected in the oceans, rivers, lakes, streams.  As we heat up our world, we are melting ice and many scientists feel that if enough ice is melted this will slow down the conveyor belt of moving water, which will produce a whole list serious consequences, like disrupting weather patterns around the world, causing more severe droughts and higher sea levels.

Written for FOWC with Fandango – List, for Ragtag Community – Encumbered, and for Word of the Day Challenge Prompt – Flow.

Just Wondering

Would it be disrespectful to dig up the tomb of the unknown soldier and perform some DNA testing to try and determine who this person is?  If we did learn about this soldier’s identity, then maybe we could locate some of their family.  If we knew more about this person, would that stimulate or incite us into taking action, galvanizing us in a common cause?  I always wondered if the pillow is buried with the casket, but I guess it is a way for the dead to rest in peace.

Written for FOWC with Fandango – Locate, for Ragtag Community – Pillow, and for Word of the Day Challenge Prompt – Galvanizing.

She Has a Nice Personality

This is how you are supposed to describe a person that is ugly, but unattractive girls are said to be better in bed, because they are willing to try harder.  They will do things to please their lover, like eating him up as if he’s the last piece of chocolate cake left in the entire universe, and they are absolutely starving to death.  Every night the beautiful people are able to find each other, as attraction comes natural to them, like a powerful wave that is seemingly unstoppable, however for the less fortunate, they are forced to look for others who are on their level of attractiveness.  It is entirely possible that an ugly person could find love by meeting a non-judgmental person, who likes them for their internal beauty and understands the difference between love and physical attraction, but that is not likely.  There are certain people who prefer a mate that has a little more cushion for the pushing, but many of these chubby chasers are ashamed to let anyone know about their preferences.

Unobtainable beauty ideals have many people questioning their self-worth, based solely on their appearance.  The truth is that if you are called ugly enough times, you will start to believe it and since ugly is as ugly does, by believing this, you will inadvertently make yourself ugly.  A person is what they are and not what they look like, and if you tell yourself that you are ugly, your thoughts could become reality.  Ugly can spread like a super virus, consuming everything in its path.  We all seem to judge books by their covers and choose the ones with the covers that make us feel good, so it is not much fun being ugly.  Everybody gets a laugh at ugly jokes, so when the kid asked their mom if they were ugly, the mom replied, “I told you not to call me mom in public.”  Even models are not totally satisfied with the way that they look, and their pictures are often photoshopped to get rid of what they consider to be flaws.  Everyone will experience some criticism and rejection as there are only a handful of winners and the rest of us will need to struggle to get by.

Having a nice personality is considered to be an external factor, but it will make the sex better.  You could hook up with a person that is not hot looking and does not have a great body, well let’s just say the word ugly, but sometimes you just connect to a person.  I have been desperate at times after being tantalized and teased by legions of girls that were way out of my league.  I admit to having scraped the bottom of the barrel, because I knew it was going to be a sure thing.  From the beginning, I just closed my eyes and decided to go with it.  I was satisfied, as it wasn’t what I would call a negative experience, because once we made it, there were those mouthwatering oooh’s and ahhh’s that oozed out of both of us.  I never hooked up with the young urban maid again, even though she was a real fox in the sack, and I am thinking about taking a sabbatical from having any type of relationship.

Written for Sheryl’s Daily Word Prompt – Urban, for the Daily Spur prompt – Satisfied, for EM’s Random Word Prompt Legion, for FOWC with Fandango – Negative, for Ragtag Community – Fox, for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Saturday Mix – Double Take hosted by weejars aka Sarah where she asks us to use the homophones Made and Maid and Oooh and Ooze, for SueW and GC Weekly Prompts Challenge – Beginning, for Di’s Three Things Challenge prompt words – Mouthwatering, Tantalize, Tease and for Word of the Day Challenge Prompt – Sabbatical.

Cicadas

These insects don’t do much besides providing nutrition for other animals and because they are so defenseless to their predators, they are considered manna from heaven.  Their sheer numbers help them to survive as a species, as eventually everything gets tired of eating them.  Thus, no matter how many cicadas get eaten, there will still be millions left to reproduce.  Some cicadas appear each summer, and then there are the ‘periodical cicadas’ which emerge on a regular schedule every 13 or 17 years, depending on the species.  Male cicadas make a hypnotic buzzing sound, which is their love song used to attract females for mating.  Cicadas can be annoying to some people, but this is one of the most amazing phenomena that occurs on our planet and it doesn’t last long, so people should enjoy it while they can.

Periodical cicadas spend almost their whole lives being only a foot or two underground, living on sap from tree roots.  When the mature cicada nymphs emerge, they mate and then die, and their newly hatched offspring drop to the ground and burrow in for the next 13 or 17 years.  The periodical cicadas emerge nearly simultaneously in great densities numbered in the trillions to spend a few weeks of life in the open air where they molt, buzzing males call for a mate to copulate with and after they have mated diligent females will deposit their fertilized eggs in nests.  The periodical cicadas begin life above ground as nymphs once they hatch.  These rice-grain sized nymphs immediately fall to the ground, where they burrow their way into what will be their home for the foreseeable future.  The years that follow are spent feeding on the juices of plant roots and slowly maturing in preparation for the upcoming emergence.

Evidence suggests that they don’t feel pain the way other creatures do, so if you are brave enough to try and eat these critters, you can celebrate a victory for being able to do something that makes others cringe, while you are enjoying a feast on these bugs.  There are plenty of cicada recipes that you can try like dry roasted or air fried, but I think the best way is to prepare them to be crispy and crunchy, but you may have to eat them with your eyes closed, otherwise you may have trouble swallowing them.

Groups of cicadas that share the same emergence years are known as broods.  This spring, bugs belonging to one of the biggest broods of 17-year cicadas, called Brood X or the Great Eastern Brood, are making their appearance.  So, love is in the air this spring in the eastern United States, where billions of cicadas are appearing in the biggest emergence event since 2004.  The Brood X cicadas will stretch from Tennessee to New York.  Bob Dylan was given an honorary degree by Princeton University in 1970, which was a year that the Brood X cicadas emerged.  He was moved by the experience to write the song ‘Day of the Locusts’, which was included on his eleventh studio album New Morning.

Written for FOWC with Fandango – Diligent, for June Monthly prompts – Crispy and crunchy and for Word of the Day – Victory.

Pull My Finger

Something of a foul nature is approaching in this post, but as long as you hear noise, that means that your system is working.  People often joke about flatulence and passing wind, but we all do this and the average person passes wind or farts about 15 times a day.  Instead of stomach noises being used for humor, let’s try to learn more about our bodies, as a normal digestive system is going to let some gas escape from time to time, thus bowel noises are part of life.  Intestinal gas, or air in the digestive tract, is usually not noticed until we burp or pass it rectally (flatulence).  Everyone passes gas several times daily, and occasional burping or belching is normal.  The entire digestive tract, from the stomach to the rectum, contains intestinal gas as the natural consequence of swallowing food and air and digesting food.  Borborygmi (audible rumblings) is a normal phenomenon that anyone can experience.  It is associated with hunger, slow or incomplete digestion, or the consumption of certain foods.

The gastrointestinal (GI) tract is part of the digestive system, which processes nutrients in foods that are eaten and helps pass waste material out of the body.  Chewing your food helps to break it down, and when it is lubricated with saliva, it forms a cohesive mass known as the food bolus.  Food moves from the throat to the stomach through a hollow, muscular tube called the esophagus.  Muscular contractions in your stomach walls help to mix food and digestive secretions turn this into chyme.  Chyme is a waste product derived from the pulpy acidic fluid which passes from the stomach to the small intestine, consisting of gastric juices and partly digested food.  After leaving the stomach, partly-digested food passes into the small intestine and then into the large intestine.  The colon (large bowel) is the first part of the large intestine.  The large intestine is connected to the sigmoid colon, which is the last section of the bowel and its job is to hold feces until you’re ready to defecate or expel feces by controlling your sphincter muscle to push the stool out.  I don’t think that it is necessary to dig too deep into the anal canal and describe the squamocolumnar junction or the anal verge, but basically the anal canal ends at the anus (the opening of the large intestine to the outside of the body), although I do need to mention peristalsis.

Peristalsis is a series of wave-like muscle contractions that move food through the digestive tract, and this involuntary constriction and relaxation of the intestine or another canal muscles pushes wastes out of your body.  This movement begins in the pharynx which is connected to the esophagus, once a food bolus (a semi-solid mass of food) is formed, and it ends in the anus.  If your stomach starts gurgling, and grumbling, this is most likely a sign that you are hungry, but borborygmi can also occur when you are not hungry and this noise is caused by an excessive gas moving back and forth in the intestine.  Intestinal gas comes from either swallowed air or the fermentation by bacteria of poorly digested carbohydrates in the colon.  Anytime you swallow food, you are also taking air in with it and this may be why your mother told you to chew your food with your mouth shut.  Having excess air in your gut causes your food to be improperly absorbed and if these gases remain trapped in your digestive system, it will produce bloating and abdominal distention.

Abdominal sounds (bowel sounds) are made by the movement of the intestines as they push food through.  The intestines are hollow, so bowel sounds echo through the abdomen much like the sounds heard from water pipes.  Most bowel sounds are normal and they indicate that the gastrointestinal tract is working.  If you hear your stomach making noise, most of this is caused by gas and intestinal contractions of the muscles that mix and propel contents in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract.  Even when you’re not eating, your gut is moving.  If you have food in your intestine, it should muffle the sound, but if you have air in there, and that’s all you’re moving, that is what you’ll hear.  If your stomach produces more than one gurgling sound, then that makes borborygmus plural and you have borborygmi.

Written for Word of the Day Challenge Prompt – Borborygmus.

Remove That Smile From Your Face!

Joe said, “Stop smiling, as that smirk of yours is irritating and you don’t have any good reason to be so pleased with yourself.  Nobody likes a smiker!  It is so freaking hot, this intense sun is scorching my skin and I am sweating like a pig.”  Eddie said, “What in the hell is a smiker?  Joe said, “Dude, did you not study English in High School, as a smiker is one who smirks.  When you go around smirking, people think that you are laughing at them, or taking some type of sarcastic pleasure at someone else’s unhappiness or misfortune.”

Eddie started singing, “Smirk, smirk, smirk, they call me the smiker.  If I want to be happy, I don’t need your permission and I have an awful lot of really good reasons to be happy.  I have two loving parents and my dog loves me also.  I have a date tonight with Cindy and we are going to see that new Jason Statham film Wrath of Man.  I was not smirking, as that is just the way my smile looks and if you want to know why I am smiling, it is because I was just thinking about ice cream and then that ice cream truck started coming up the street.  What do you say, how about me buying each of us an ice cream so we can cool off, OK bro?”  Joe said, “Sure buddy, as that sounds much better than splitting wood and honking geese.”  Eddie said, “Pass that joint over here, as you have already had too much.”

Written for FOWC with Fandango – Remove, for May Monthly Writing Prompts – Splitting wood and honking geese, and for Word of the Day Challenge Prompt – Smiker.

The Loo

This is a slang term for toilet, and it was supposedly derived from the practice of the French yelling out the warning, “Gardez l’eau!” (pronounced gardy loo – meaning “mind the water”), before emptying the chamber pot from an upper level onto the street below.  Following the devastation of the Bubonic Plague, some areas of Europe attempted to improve sanitation by outlawing the practice of discarding waste on public streets.  When privacy slowly emerged as an issue, sanitation improved.

During the Middle Ages, flush toilets and indoor plumbing did not exist.  There were several ways in which people ‘did their business’.  A popular way was using the garderobe, which means ‘to guard the robes’.  This was a private room, a bed-chamber area that was also referred to as a privy.  It got this name because people kept their clothes in them, and they believed that the foul odor in these chambers repelled moths, which would otherwise eat the fabric.  It is from ‘garderobe’ that the modern word ‘wardrobe’ is derived.  Basically, these were seats (either made of stone or wood) attached to a shaft leading to a pit.  These toilets were installed in castles and manor houses, so they were available only to the rich and powerful.

Less privileged people had to settle for more communal facilities, such as cesspits, which was simply a hole in the ground similar to an outhouse.  Excrement would stay stagnant in the hole, so these cesspits needed to be emptied every once in a while, as excrement sank to the bottom and liquids flowed out between the spaces in the brick lining.  In 1183, Frederick I Barbarossa (1122–1190) Holy Roman Emperor and Duke of Swabia held a Diet (legislative assembly) in the Great Hall of Germany’s Erfurt Castle, when suddenly the floor of the main hall collapsed, and the Emperor his knights and many of the dinner guests fell thirty-nine feet into the cesspool below and drowned.  Emperor Frederick pulled through as he was able to grab on to the iron grates of a window, whereat he hung by the hands till he was rescued, but it was a while before any of his guests accepted another dinner invitation at the castle.

Written for Word of the Day Challenge Prompt – Gardyloo.

Peace and Tranquility

Harold Ray Ragsdale better known as Ray Stevens is an American family-friendly entertainer, a country and pop singer-songwriter and comedian who has won several Grammys for comedic hits such as ‘Gitarzan’ and ‘The Streak’ as well as ‘Misty’, and this one ‘Everything Is Beautiful’.  He wrote the uplifting song as the theme for the 1970 TV variety show called The Ray Stevens Show.  He wanted to write a very special song, so he went down into his basement for about three days, and there were crumpled up papers all over the place, but eventually he got the idea for this song he wrote it in about 45 minutes.  This was released in 1970 on his Everything Is Beautiful album and the single reached #1 in the US and it charted #6 in the UK.  Stevens is probably better known for his novelty recordings, like ‘Ahab, The Arab’, and ‘Harry The Hairy Ape’ and he may hold the record for writing a song with the longest title ever, ‘Jeremiah Peabody’s Poly Unsaturated Quick Dissolving Fast Acting Pleasant Tasting Green and Purple Pills’.

Beauty is a relative notion that involves a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, but this especially relates to sight and we use this term to measure things against each other.  Something that gives intense pleasure or leaves you deeply satisfied and is thought of as being enjoyable, would be considered to be beautiful.  In the fashion industry, the idea of beauty is always shifting, as what looks good today maybe passé tomorrow.  Beauty is said to reside in the eye of the beholder, because it cannot be judged objectively so you may see something that you feel is beautiful, and this same thing may not appeal to another, thus beauty is actually created by observers.

This song gives the listeners an affirmative way of looking at all the aspects of life to create harmony, peace, tranquility and bring back those halcyon days to restore the human spirit.  It talks about God and heaven and it contains a Biblical quote based on Jeremiah 5:21, “There is none so blind as he who will not see”, which basically states that people will ignore facts even when they are staring them right in the face.  It is a song of hope that can get you through dark times, letting you believe that the “world’s gonna find a way.”

Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world
Red and yellow, black and white
They are precious in his sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world

Everything is beautiful in it’s own way
Like a starry summer night
On a snow covered winter’s day
And everybody’s beautiful in their own way
Under God’s Heaven
The world’s gonna find the way

There is none so blind
As He who will not see
We must not close up minds
We must let our thoughts be free

For every hour that passes by
You know the world gets a little bit older
It’s time to realize that people lies
In the eyes of the beholder

And everything is beautiful in its own way
Like a starry summer night
On a snow covered winter’s day, ah, sing it children
Everybody’s beautiful in their own way
Under God’s Heaven
The world’s gonna find a way

We shouldn’t care about the length of His hair
Of the color of His skin
Don’t worry about what shows from without
But the love that lives within

And we’re gonna get old again now
Everything is gonna work out fine
Just take a little time to the look on the good side my friend
And spittle in out in your mind

And everything is beautiful in it’s own way
Like a starry summer night
On a snow covered winter’s day, ah, sing it children
Everybody’s beautiful in their own way
Under God’s Heaven
The world’s gonna find a way, one more time

Everything is beautiful in its own way
Like a starry summer night
On a snow covered winter’s day

Written for Word of the Day Challenge Prompt – Halcyon.

Winklepicker Stilettos

I have a fetish for long pointy shoes, or as I like to call them bedroom fuck me high heels and this might be a result of watching too many strippers dancing at clubs in their hooker heels.  If I can get a woman to wear them for my special private enjoyment and excitement then she is a keeper.  If she can get naked, but keep the heels on while we are in bed, that is even better, because that always keeps me aroused.  When a lady decides to parade around in this type of shoe, this becomes a real boner starter for me, because I know that this type of woman is more concerned in turning on a man then she is interested in her own comfort and she is secretively saying, “Do me”.  I have experimented with femdom play from time to time, where I let my mistress command me to lick her toes, and kiss or caress them.  I enjoy being able to remove them from her feet and then re-fitting them on her, as she flaunts her control over my manhood.  I am not interested in wearing a collar, or any type of bondage, whips or handcuffs, but some gentle play without pain or humiliation is right up my alley.

My preference is black or high gloss cherry red and if they wear a matching leather outfit that partially exposes their breasts, that always seems to work for me.  When a girl walks around in winklepicker stilettos, I know that her intentions to attract a man are deliberate and these shoes should be confined to the bedroom, as wearing them out in public, is like putting a sticker on yourself that says, “I want it”, and people will think that you should be standing on a street corner.  This type of shoe takes it up a notch, as even my grandmother would look good in these, well maybe not so much.  They tend to expose the maximum amount of foot flesh and this cannot be over done or exaggerated.  A shoe that features a long, sharp toe, one that is teamed up with a stiletto heel (or spike heel), can become a formidable weapon and it deserves respect.

Written for Word of the Day Challenge Prompt – Winklepicker.

Hippie Cousin to the Camel

Lilly named her llama Pauciloquent because she thought that was a cute name for such a fluffy animal.  It made some groaning noises, it hummed and it made these adorable gargling sounds when it became sexually aroused from time to time, but it mostly stayed silent.  Lilly enjoyed riding on Pauciloquent and she thought it was better than being on a camel with humps, but she did not weigh that much.  Lilly loved taking selfies while riding on her pet, which she would hashtag, Instagram, and facebook all over the net, and this increased her bonding with this fuzzball creature. 

Lilly had owned an alpaca before, but she found out that are more distant to affection like cats usually are, while llamas are more like dogs once you earn their trust.  Lilly was having a lot of fun hanging out with Pauciloquent and although she was warned that llamas might try to spit in her face, but as she got to know Pauciloquent, she realized that he would never do such a nasty thing.

Lilly became the president of the Life is Better with a Llama Society and she was now sending out over 150 newsletters every month.  She included a section on llama humor, which everybody seemed to enjoy.  Some of her favorite jokes were: What do you get when you cross a turtle and a llama?, where the answer is a turtleneck sweater.  What do llamas call the end of time?, answer Llamageddon.   Did you hear about the woman who broke up with her boyfriend and moved to Peru?, she became a real llama queen.  What’s a llama’s favorite song?, Llama Chameleon.  Her llama never laughed ay any of the jokes that she told him, but he was never big on words anyways.

Written for Word of the Day Challenge Prompt – Pauciloquent.