Category: My stories

After months of job hunting, I’ve picked up a lot of good tips for questions to ask during interviews. Not that I get a lot of interviews. A lot of places use AI to filter out applications before a human ever sees them, let alone you have a chance at a face-to-face interview. But one of the good ones is why is this job opportunity open. You can find out if somebody got promoted or if they downsized and are re-hiring. I asked it as an assistant in a magicians knife throwing act. He said early retirement.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the phrase thank you, Mario, but our princess is in another castle. Well it turns out that our princess likes to hang out at the White Castle Thursday nights and sure enough. She’s getting her sliders and Dr Pepper fix tonight. We probably should’ve told you because instead of dodging mushrooms and fireballs and bridges and some giant turtle dude, it’s a lot easier to find a parking space at the White Castle and walk in. Although if you hang around, sometimes she gets her order to go, and she brings back a little extra.

I’ve been a Houston Astros fan for a pretty long time, back when they were good then they got to the World Series somehow, then they really sucked, and then they were good and cheated, and we’re still good until they really started to slide. Now, instead of catching their games on TV or through streaming from the Internet, I watch all the commentators bitch about how much they suck. It’s a lot more entertaining and a hell of a lot less anxiety about watching the actual games. I know they’ll lose, the only mystery is how and how badly.

Papa Joe made Papa Wally, my daddy, promise not to sell the farm.
Daddy kept his promise, but when he gave me the farm, he also gave me overdue property tax bills.
All our neighbors had left with the money developers gave them, and the developers built all these houses.
Those families didn’t want us to sell out to developers, so they bribe me to keep the farm as a kind of nature preserve.
Even more than the cost of the property taxes. And your college bills.
Just keep talking to the developers to scare up their bribes a bit.

Doctors called Jeremy‘s fear of sundials irrational, but he had a perfectly valid reason to fear the diabolical contraptions. His father was found speared through the heart by a sundial in the families front yard. The strange thing was, they didn’t own a sundial. Perhaps that explained how his father wandered into the thing fatally. His fear extended to other yard bound timekeeping devices, such as orreries, Astrolabes, and even more arcane mechanisms. He only had a slight aversion to classic yard decorations, such as ceramic lawn gnomes and plastic pink flamingos. He eventually moved to an urban high-rise.

Dan Hammond was the ham king of the Pacific Northwest. For years, trucks would bring pigs to his factory, and out came refrigerated trucks and rail cars full of pork products. One day, he announced a once in a lifetime opportunity for five kids to get an exclusive tour of his factory and a lifetime supply of pork products. But unlike Willy Wonka, nobody was buying up his bacon and ham and pigs knuckles and mass for the golden tickets. So his business went bankrupt and was bought by ConAgra conglomerate. Hundreds lost their jobs to automation and union busting.

Kaseem counted out the barley for the harvest and prepared a clay tablet in the frame. Poking marks into it with a reed, he noted that there were 17,000 measures of barley in the harvest. he then marked the inventory with the seventh year of the reign of King Marduk. And he signed his own name below it all to mark this inventory as official. He left the tablet out to dry, and the next day he had it sent to the regional Palace for collection, processing, and forwarding on. Marduk would be pleased with this harvest and bless them.

Under a cloak and bandages soiled by his leprosy-torn body, silver mask on his face, King Baldwin lay dying on his bed.
Somehow, he had kept Jerusalem in Christian hands, but who would rally the troops like he had?
His sister’s husband was a insubordinate knight.
Their son was far too young, and his own former regent was far too old and exhausted to rule.
An advisor suggested wrapping someone else in the bandages, cloak, and mask.
“We’d wash them first, obviously,” said the advisor.
The young boy took over, but soon died.
And the foolish knight fell to Saladin.

Blake was a knife-thrower.
He could throw any knife with deadly accuracy.
Not just balanced throwing knives, like other assassins.
Any knife.
Even butter knives thrown by Blake were deadly.
I saw him go through a whole box of plastic knives and take down an entire movie theatre full of people.
“I said shush,” he said, settling back in his seat and picking up his popcorn and soda from the floor.
When a priceless knife collection vanished from the museum, the police blamed Blake.
But it wasn’t Blake. He didn’t need those knives.
Knives need him. To kill people with.

When I was little, I wondered why the moon would fill up and then empty.
And when it was full, what stuff was it full of.
“It’s just how it appears,” said my mother. “The moon is full and solid, it’s just that the shadow of the earth makes it look like parts cut out from it.
Only when I moved South did I realize the angle of the shadow was different in different locations.
At first, it seemed a bit off, but after a while, I got used to it tipped like that.
Unless it was full, of course.