Spreading your wings in a perplexing world
October, 2024                                                    James P. Hurd

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Contents

• Writer’s Corner
• Blessed Unbeliever 
• This month’s story
• This month’s puzzler
• WINGSPREAD Ezine subscription information
• Wisdom

Writer’s Corner

Tip for writers: Never use a metaphor you’ve heard before. If possible, invent your own.

Task for you: When you are reading, select a paragraph you love very much. Then write your own paragraph for your own purposes copying the ideas and structures in your model paragraph. In this way you benefit from the skills of other writers.

Book of the month: Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night. Originally published in 1936, this novel imagines a women’s college at Oxford University immersed in sinister doings. Harriet Vane, an alumna, is pressed into service to solve the crime. Sayers conducts us on a marvelous tour of Oxford and of the inner workings of the female mind, both student and professor. One of Sayers’ best. Other of her novels: The Nine Tailors, Whose Body?, Murder Must Advertise and Clouds of Witness.

BLESSED UNBELIEVER novel

Sean McIntosh left his Fundamentalist childhood and walked the road toward becoming an atheist—while attending Torrey Bible Institute. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work out very well. Blessed Unbeliever (paper or Kindle version) can be found at Wipf and Stock Publishers, Amazon https://a.co/d/9su5F3o or wherever good books are sold.

New story: The Annual Physical

Doc: Now, let’s test your memory of elementary school. How do you spell Mississippi?

Me: The state or the river?

Doc: (pause) Never mind . . . Look, I want you to look at this clock face and I’ll tell you a time to draw on it. Could you draw the hands to indicate 10 minutes after 11?

Me: Would that be daylight time or standard time?

Doc: Well, it doesn’t really make any difference.

Me: AM or PM?

Doc: (pause) Either one.

Me: (I write the numbers: 11:10).

Doc: That’s correct, but I actually wanted you to draw the clock hands.

Me: But I only use a digital watch. . . .

To read more, click here:  https://jimhurd.com/2024/10/25/the-annual-physical/

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This month’s puzzler (thanks to Car Talk archives)

Imagine, if you will…

There is a yacht tied to a dock in a harbor at dead low tide. 

So, the tide begins to come in at two thirds of a foot per hour. It is a steady rate.  So if you were in the harbor and you were measuring the rate of the tide, after a half hour, it would have come in a third of a foot.

The porthole on the side of the yacht is nine feet above the surface of the water.

How many minutes will it be before that distance is reduced from nine feet to seven and a half feet?

Good luck.
 

(Answer will appear in next month’s WINGSPREAD newsletter.)

Answer to last month’s puzzler: 

You remember the boy who wanted to carry his fishing pole aboard the bus, but was rejected because it was more than the allowable four feet long. How did the boy legally get on the bus with the five-foot fishing rod without breaking it or altering it and how did he do it legally?

Here is the answer. 

He had a brilliant idea. He went back into the store and he asked them for an empty box that was 3 feet by 4 feet. And then, he put the fishing rod in the diagonal of the 3 by 4 foot box, which is exactly 5 feet. 

So he was able to get on the bus with his 5 foot fishing rod, set in the diagonal of the 3 by 4 foot box!

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Wisdom

Social Media acronyms

• ICYMI  (in case you missed it)
• IMHO (in my humble opinion)
• LOL, LMAO, LMFAO (variants of laughing, including
  crude ones)
• ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing)
• IJBOL (I just burst out laughing)
• FOMO (fear of missing out)
• GOAT (greatest of all time)
• YOLO (you only live once)
• GIF (a short video format)
• JPG (a picture format)

Social media-speak (How many do you know?)

• Sycophant
• Doomscrolling
• Catfishing
• Hacking
• Clickbait
• Frenemies
• Ghosting
• Phishing
• Troll
• Blogosphere
• Meme
• Crowdsourcing
• Viral post
• Mash-up
• Avatar
• Argot