Overheard at Table 1: Idea for Series - The Imagined History of Floridaman

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230528-the-overseas-highway-the-us-floating-highway?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Since this railroad cum highway brought poor islands to the mainland and forever changed Florida, it would be interesting to have some sort of multigenerational series on "The Evolution of Floridaman"

He didn't necessarily come out of the swamps ... he was hanging out in the Keys.

Until the day that the gaps between the islands were bridged, and Floridaman came to the peninsula!

Do you think I can sell the idea to Carl Hiaasen?

 

 

 

 

 

Overheard at Booth 3: Rochefoucauld and Wilde Talk about the Sun and Death

In Booth 3, Francois de la Rochefoucauld opines, "Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye."

Oscar Wilde retorts, "Watching the flight of Icarus, thus, must be doubly vertiginous."

Overheard at Booth 3: Sunglasses Make You Go Blind

... my wife keeps sending me all these Instagram reels with this one Australian woman talking about natural health and how everything is bad for you, and this last reel the woman was saying that root canal will give you cancer because microbes will get into the dead root and multiply.

So then I tried to find her name and I couldn't, but I was going through all the clips of her and in one she was talking about the dangers of sunglasses for everyone who isn't skiing, that the lenses don't let your eyes "learn how to adjust to the light" which will make your eyes, over time, go blind.

Didn't really catch it, but I think her point was that eyes need the sunlight to stay healthy.

 

Overheard at Table 3: Poems as a Means of Monetary Exchange

So a friend and I were talking about using poetry as a means of monetary exchange, and I recall having written a draft proposal for that a few years ago.  After rummaging around the half-crumpled pages in my scattered brain, and finding nothing, I've decided to re-write it again, here:

Proposal for Use of Poetic Forms as a Means of Monetary Exchange!

A Couplet for a loaf of bread or a cup of coffee

A Haiku for a few bags of groceries

A Limerick for a utility bill

A Villanelle for a medical procedure

A Sonnet to buy a car

An Epic in lieu of a mortgage

Overheard at Booth 4: "Tiny Tales" by Jana Jenkins

In short (as the stories are short) this IS a good read.  

Flash Fiction, to be truly effective, depends on the twist, the turn, and the economy of word usage actually makes that more challenging than it may seem, and this writer has a fantastic hold on the form.   Her stories have dark twists, thought-provoking twists, romantic twists.  And each one leaves the reader with a smile, or a tiny shock, or simply saying, "whoaaaa!"

It is obvious that these stories were originally posted on Twitter.  The hashtags have also been left in, which, for a reader unfamiliar with Twitter (if there are any) will find the hashtag a bit confusing, which detracts from the story.  What would make this a five-star book would be a reworking of the stories for a book format: allow the writer to re-write the stories (as needed) beyond the Tweet character limit, reformat the pages, possibly even add titles, so that the eye doesn't run the stories together (one's brain may try to read them as a long thread instead of individual stories)

Again, these stories are delightful, and yes, they need to be read by many more people.  This reader looks forward to a future edition of this tome where these wonderful tales are allowed a little more room to breathe, stretch, and become the best versions of themselves.

Overheard at Table 3: Mother's Day

I am giving my wife the thing she most wants for Mother's Day.

What's that?

My absence.

Overheard at Booth 4: The Guilty

The Guilty (2021)

This was a pleasant surprise.  

Also, I shouldn't read Rotten Tomatoes reviews, because this one time, I saw that the audience either loved this movie or hated it - no middle ground.  And the disparity lies wholly in the setting: the setting of the entire movie is a 911 call center and most every camera angle is focused on Jake Gyllenhall's face.  

So, as you may surmise, the people who didn't like it call it "boring! Fake! hates the police!" when really what they want to see is Speed, Rush, Ambulance, Fast and Furious 154, or John Wick 75.

But this is NOT "My Dinner with Andre" 

This is indeed an action flick.  The action simply takes place in the voices and the words and the inscrutability of Jake Gyllenhall's expression.

In short: Gyllenhall is a beat cop who, for some unknown reason, is stationed at a 911 call center and this is definitely NOT his forté.  People skills - ZERO.  Empathy and this character have never seemingly been in the same vicinity.plo

Then, he gets a call from a woman claiming to be abducted and is in a truck.  Then there are increasingly intense twists and turns that eventually turn the story on its head.

No this is not a visual movie.  Nothing is handed to you, as it is in, say, a Transformers movie.  You do have to put part of yourself into the action to visualize what is going on ... on that level, this movie almost has a feel of what pre-TV Radio programs must have felt like, and when  you can visualize the action through the voices and the dialogue, what plays out in your mind is most likely more more intimate and intense than anything they could have shown you onscreen.