Sometimes I’m late learning a very useful word. This time the word is

Paraprosdokian

— a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising, frequently humorous. It’s said that Sir Winston Churchill was a big fan.

Here’s one I like especially, since it describes me pretty well.

To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.

More often than not, this is my decision making process. No planning, just responses to what comes my way.

In the writing/publishing life, this is called being a pantser (writing by the seat of one’s pants), not a plotter (outlining the story).

It’s my theory, that in the general population, people fall into one category or the other. For example, how do you approach a dinner party at your home:

            a) write out a menu, check off what you have in stock vs what you need to buy, assemble menus, and so on.

            b) check out your freezer and fridge an hour or so before, and work with it.

How do you approach a project/hobby? (see above choices)

And so on.

Does your process work for you – whether you’re writing a book or learning a new skill?

That’s all that matters. The target will take care of itself.

Last week’s post, a quote from Carl Sagan, earned me nearly 100 SPAM comments over the course of a couple of days. Was it Sagan who drew them? The quote itself? I have no idea.

I eventually deleted the post and all the spam, but what a nuisance.

This is a test—a simple photo a friend of mine took of the NYPL from her hotel room across the street, to see if the spammers will follow me here.

Yours, Camille/Margaret/Ada/Jean, and now Elizabeth!

A guest blog today from my Shelter-in-Place partner, taking us down a bit of music history through technology.

Had enough time within your house to notice what’s in the nooks and crannies behind your everyday life? My last 30 years of music listening has produced hundreds of recorded media devices; LP records, “45” records, reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes, and CD’s. They took and take up a large volume of space. Recently, I converted all of the music on these devices to digital files using computers. I made many discs with these files and stored the files on them, in addition to having them stored on my computer. These discs needed 4 computer paper boxes to contain them.

Most, but not all, of this music was performed by various artists. Some of the music was from special concerts that were broadcast and others came from satellite transmissions. A typical special was the Farm Aid concert. A typical partial content of one of these boxes is shown below.

The entire digital contents of this 30 years of musical content is about 136 Gigabytes. It can be stored on this 256 GB Flash Drive, with another 120 GB worth of other digital content, like 10’s of thousands of digital photos from a Smart phone.

Do you wonder what’s next?

I’m reading Susie Steiner’s MISSING, PRESUMED, an excellent British police procedural.

This evening I came across the word toerag, used by one of the detectives to describe a colleague. I figured out from the context what was meant, but decided to check it out. Was this an invention of the author or a widely used word in the UK?

My search produced no fewer than 72 synonyms, but here’s the best definition.

I might need to use the word in the near future.

Enjoy!