Whiplash: An injury to the neck caused by an abrupt jerking motion of the head, either backward or forward; And in the case of writing or speaking, can be caused by a rapid change of topic without prior notice.
Whiplash! – “D”s topics keep coming.
The Darwin Awards: Named in honor of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, the Darwin Awards commemorate those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.
It is amazing how stupid some people can be. Hence the creation and collection of Darwin award recipients each year. Here are 2 winners and 1 honorary mention (meaning they’re still stupid but they didn’t die) from last year’s crop:
MARCH 2018, BIRMINGHAM ENGLAND || Man suffers a fatal heart attack after getting his head stuck beneath an electric footrest at the cinema while retrieving his cellphone from the floor. DISCLAIMER: The perp died six days later, in the hospital.
APRIL 2018, GERMANY || A 71-year-old woman smoking outside a hospital died from third-degree burns after her oxygen ventilator ignited, setting fire to the plastic upholstery of her wheelchair.
MARCH 2018, ROMANIA || A 50-year-old man was hospitalized Saturday after taking home a projectile he found on the field outside his village, and pounding it with a hammer, causing an explosion.
When I’m out driving in my car, I see countless people on the road that potentially are setting themselves up for the award. I just hope I’m not nearby when they actually create the event that enshrines them in the Darwin Award Hall of Fame.
Whiplash!
I try not to think about how much data about me is out there in the world nowadays. Moreso, how readily available that data is for other people to find out about me. When I was growing up nothing about me was available, at least that’s what I believe. If you were trying to find anything about my family you would have to know my father’s name and then look it up in the telephone book. Everyone’s phone number and address were in there. But it wouldn’t tell you whether my father was married or not; when he was born; if he had a family; where he worked…
Now if you look me up in a telephone book (the real White pages, not the digital ones) I’m not there since I don’t have a landline. My house phone is a VOIP one through my cable TV company and cellphones are not listed. However, if you do go on the web to find me, you pretty much can find out everything about me. Some things I found out are even a bit perturbing. I even located some information about me when I was a kid.
Then again, without being able to find me, I never would have found and connected to my older half-brother from France 6 years ago (http://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=320) or my 3rd cousin, who also happens to live in France. They both found me through my storytelling videos, but that’s another story.
Whiplash!
It is amazing how many useful ideas I get from my dreams. I might wake up in the middle of the night from a dream with a tune going through my head. I will get up and use a digital recorder to hum the tune, for I know in the morning when I wake up, I will forget what the tune was. Those tunes, sometimes, are the basis for songs that I write. That usually happens when I dream of some of the lyrics that go with them.
When I write stories, some are based on events that happen in my dreams. I might be working on a particular story and then the dream I have fills in some of th
e plot. Unfortunately for these types of writing dreams, I don’t write down what happened, so if I don’t act upon them right away they tend to get lost.
This is not to say that all of my dreams lead to creative thought. A lot of them are just bizarre scenarios that have no connection to my real life, and lead my wife and son to think that I am rather weird. But they should already know that.
Whiplash!
What about you? Do you have any nominations for Darwin Awards? How much data about yourself, have you been able to find, that you didn’t know was out there? And do any of your dreams lead you to creative actions?
See you next time…Reading these should get “E”sier to take.
