Monthly Archives: April 2025

WINGSPREAD Ezine for April, 2025

Spreading wings in a perplexing world
April, 2025 James P. Hurd


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Contents


 Writer’s Corner
 Blessed Unbeliever
 This month’s story: Pitch Perfect
 This month’s puzzler
 WINGSPREAD Ezine subscription information
 Wisdom

Writer’s Corner

Writer’s tip: Unreliable narrator: use a narrator for your story that does not always remember correctly, does not always tell the truth.


Word of the month: DEEPFAKING: Manipulating an image, video or audio of people doing or saying things they never did or said. Easy to do with A.I. Be careful!


Task for you: Write a paragraph spoken by a five-year-old narrator.


Book of the month: An Axe for the Frozen Sea: Conversations with poets about what matters most. Ben Palpant. 2024. Rabbit Room Press. Palpant interviews eighteen poets about their writing craft, family life, grief and the imagination. “May these words reminds us that words matter, that poetry matters, and that we matter.”


BLESSED UNBELIEVER novel

I confess I sometimes more enjoy talking to atheists than to Christians. Since I am a doubter, I find much in common with my atheist friends who seem honest about their doubts. Although my own doubts have been addressed, they have not been quenched. I believe we are all on a spiritual quest and I wish to know the quest of each person I encounter. Blessed Unbeliever (below) is the story of one such quest. Much is autobiographical (I won’t tell you which parts!). But the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

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: Pitch Perfect


It’s a normal smoggy day at Chino airport. I’ve just taken off with my student, Stan, in his two-seater, fabric-covered Taylorcraft. The takeoff goes normally but after we level off and pick up speed, Stan can’t keep the plane’s nose down.
“Trim forward, Stan.”
“I am.”
“Trim down more.”
“I am!”
The plane is still pitching up violently, threatening to stall. I see Stan straining to push the control wheel forward, but it isn’t helping. What’s wrong?
I’m studying anthropology at Cal State Fullerton and need a little extra cash so when Hank Bradford lures me over to Chino with the promise, “I’ll give you a twin-engine checkout in the Aero Commander” (a larger twin-engine plane), I jump at the chance to work for United California Aviation—the outsize name for Hank’s dubious fixed-base operation. UCA consists of an office, a small workroom with a picture of a naked woman hanging on the wall and a few hundred square feet carved out of the vast and empty adjoining hangar. . . .

To read more, click here: https://tinyurl.com/4s6edsju
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This month’s puzzler (courtesy of “Car-Talk Archives”)


This one is kind of automotive. Well, it is, and it’s not. You’ll see.
Here we go.
In what famous old black and white movie were a Ferrari and a Renault both featured?
I might add that these weren’t just passing scenes. I mean, these were featured roles in this movie. Very prominent.
Almost every scene in the movie has one or the other in it. So that is how featured they are. What movie has both a Ferrari and a Renault?
Good luck.

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

Answer to last month’s puzzler:
So, how did the guy at the auction know that the sled, signed and dated “September 10, 1752 G. Washington,” was a fake?
Here is the answer.
There was no September 10th in the year 1752!
So, the sled must have been a fake.
In the year 1752 in the British Empire (including the American colonies), the dates of September 3rd through September 12th were eliminated
These dates were eliminated in order to switch from the old-style Julian calendar to the newer Gregorian calendar. Skipping these 11 days allowed the calendar to line up with the rest of Europe.
So, the date carved on the sled could not be valid, because in the year 1752 that date did not exist.
Good one!

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Wisdom


• Due to my time alone, I finished three books yesterday. And believe me, that’s a lot of coloring.
• What did our parents do to kill boredom before the internet? I asked my 26 brothers and sisters and they didn’t know either.
• I tried donating blood today… NEVER AGAIN! Too many stupid questions:
Who’s blood is it? Where did you get it from? Why is it in a bucket?
• There’s nothing scarier than that split second when you lose your balance in the shower and you think, “They are going to find me naked.”
• Today, I melted an ice cube with my mind just by staring at it. It took a lot longer than I thought it would.
• Struggling to get your wife’s attention? Just sit down and look comfortable.
• Just sold my homing pigeon on eBay for the 22nd time.
• I grew up with Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash and Bob Hope. Now there’s no jobs, no cash, and no hope. Please don’t let anything happen to Kevin Bacon.
• Shout-out to everyone who can still remember their childhood phone number but can’t remember the password they created yesterday. You are my people.
• One minute you’re young and fun. And next, you’re turning down the stereo in your car to see better.
• Think you’re old and you will be old. Think you are young, and you will be delusional.
• When I offer to wash your back in the shower, all you have to say is ‘yes’ or ‘no.’
Not all this “Who are you and how did you get in here?” nonsense.
• Not in jail, not in a mental hospital, not in a grave—I’d say I’m having a good day.

Van Goh’s Starry Night
The whole sky’s aspangle with light.

Our souls long for a quiet harbor. It is there we shall rest from all our labors.


Fun with puns:

  1. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
  2. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other: ‘You stay here; I’ll go on a head.’
  3. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.
  4. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: ‘Keep off the Grass.’
  5. The midget fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.
  6. The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.
  7. A backward poet writes inverse.
  8. In a democracy it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism it’s your count that votes.
  9. When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.
  10. If you jumped off the bridge in Paris, you’d be in Seine.
  11. A vulture carrying two dead raccoons boards an airplane. The stewardess looks at him and says, I’m sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger.’
  12. Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns to the other and says , ‘Dam!’
  13. Two campers sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can’t have your kayak and heat it too.
  14. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, ‘I’ve lost my electron.’ The other says, ‘Are you sure?’ The first replies, ‘Yes, I’m positive.’
  15. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root-canal? His goal: transcend dental medication.
  16. There was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.

Pitch Perfect

It’s a normal smoggy day at Chino airport. I’ve just taken off with my student, Stan, whom I’m checking out in his two-seater, fabric-covered Taylorcraft. The takeoff goes normally but after we level off and pick up speed, Stan can’t keep the plane’s nose down.

“Trim forward, Stan.”

“I am.”

“Trim down more.”

“I am!”

The plane is still pitching up violently, threatening to stall. I see Stan straining to push the control wheel forward, but it isn’t helping. What’s wrong?

I’m studying anthropology at Cal State Fullerton and need a little extra cash so when Hank Bradford lures me over to Chino with the promise, “I’ll give you a twin-engine checkout in the Aero Commander” (a larger twin-engine plane), I jump at the chance to work for United California Aviation—the outsize name for Hank’s dubious fixed-base operation. UCA consists of an office, a small workroom with a picture of a naked woman hanging on the wall and a few hundred square feet claimed from the vast and empty adjoining hangar. Hank has opened a small café and offers hamburgers to a few army personnel temporarily stationed here. He acts as a maître d, circulating through the room chatting up the troops as he follows a waitress around, pretending to grab her hips.

I never see the promised Aero Commander. Rather, I end up doing routine maintenance on random aircraft that show up. No tools available—I bring my own. But one day I arrive at work about noon on a Thursday and Hank says, “Wanna’ take the Apache and fly some fishermen down to Baja for the weekend?” Immediately I say yes, even though I’ll miss a day of my classes and even though I have little time to prepare for the flight. But you never turn down a chance to fly a multiengine plane. A fun weekend.

Now today I’m still trying to figure out why Stan can’t control his airplane. “Stan! Give me the wheel.” I grab the dual control wheel and it just about hits me in the face! The airplane is still trying mightily to pitch up. If the nose rises a bit more, the airplane will stall and plummet us to the ground. I barely keep it level, forcing the control wheel forward. “Stan, we have to turn back to the airport; something’s wrong. I’ll land the plane because I don’t know how it’ll react if we slow up.” I hold forward pressure on the wheel all the way through the landing.

I walk around the plane, suspecting something’s wrong with the elevator control system, those “flippers” at the tail that pitch the airplane up or down but they seem to be operating normally.

Then I notice the small trim tab hinged at the rear of one of the elevator surfaces. This tiny deflector moves the larger elevators up or down. So I yell to Stan who is still in the cockpit, “Stan; turn the trim tab crank counterclockwise.” As Stan turns the crank to lower the nose, I see the trim tab moving downward. In flight, this would force the elevator up, which would pitch the nose up­—the opposite of how it’s supposed to work. The mechanic (probably my boss, Hank) had hooked up the trim tab control cable backwards! “Stan; we’re done flying until I get this control fixed!”

This flight could have been a disaster—I hate to think what would have happened if Stan had been flying without an instructor. In the future I determine that after maintenance is done on an airplane I need to perform a more thorough preflight check—including the trim tab.