Jim Flanigan Looks at the World
Turning the Mundane into Fundane Since 2015
It’s nice that our neighbors behind us decided to install an airport landing strip in their backyard this holiday season.
I do need some trees trimmed in the back, so I’m not objecting to a small plane or two trying to land.
It’s not like we don’t have some of our own interesting decorations in our trees out front. Take a look …
Continue reading “Holiday Decorations in my Neighborhood”
I had to go and open my big mouth at the last Zoom meeting of the St. Charles Township Democrats and ask about whether we were fielding candidates for any St. Charles Township positions in the Spring election. Before I could say “the election is rigged,” I was drafted as a candidate. I figured that there was no way I would actually run since I couldn’t imagine getting the 240 signatures needed to qualify for the ballot. First, global pandemic. Nobody wants to answer their door. Next, it’s cold out. Finally, I’m lazy. As it was, I got about a third. The rest were gotten for me. Gulp. Looks like I’ll be a candidate for St. Charles Township Trustee on April 6, 2021.
I was a bit nervous about revealing my “professional” alias on my Statement of Candidacy below …
Continue reading “Vote for … Me?”
Gee, that kid in this blog’s feature image is homely. Anyway, I’m trying out new enhanced blog capabilities once again, this time embedding Twitter videos. Winter is finally hitting Chicago this weekend, so now seemed to be a good time to unleash some Twitter winter weather videos with a COVID theme, all from @RexChapman.
For now, my 2 youngest daughters are remote learning and my wife is remote teaching from home. We have “schools” in our dining room, kitchen, and family room. Thankfully, none of them look like this …
It’s just as well that we are all home and not having to battle icy conditions like this lady with a backpack.
Continue reading “Twitter Welcomes a COVID Winter”
It’s not often I get excited for a movie coming out. I was “very excite” for the Borat sequel.
We were rewarded with a better movie than the original Borat flick, in my opinion.
Now, in just a matter of days, here comes A Recipe for Seduction starring Mario Lopez of Saved by the Bell fame as … Colonel Sanders. Don’t be chicken. Take a look at this trailer and set your DVR to record.
Continue reading “Finger Lickin’ Good Entertainment”
Well, it took a while, but my book of short stories is finally finished. You can actually read it. It comes complete with real words, full sentences, paragraphs, grammar, quotation marks, hyphens, and mostly coherent stories. And not just a handful of stories, but SIXTEEN of them. You are guaranteed to enjoy some of them. I’ll detail each of the stories in future posts, but suffice to say that they are written to elicit some laughter and contemplative thought concerning our ultimate destination.
How much? How about under a buck at $0.99. That’s less than 7 cents a story, or under 6 cents per story if I include the preface. Why would I include the preface? Well, it’s pretty funny, but I also class it up by quoting Shakespeare. That’s right, THE Bill Shakespeare. Not Jack Shakespeare, my neighbor down the block. Here’s how it starts …
“William Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.”
That’s just one of hundreds of Shakespeare’s quotes that I don’t understand. I’m not sure I even have a mortal coil. I think the surgeon removed my mortal coil during my emergency appendectomy.”
I’m sure the first 2 paragraphs of the preface have convinced you to buy this book. Click this Published Works link to purchase. Go ahead, do it. Not later. Now. Go on. I’ll wait. There, doesn’t that feel better. Now you have hours of chuckle-filled reading entertainment ahead.
And so ends the first of endless posts shamelessly promoting this book. Get ready for more.
The last time I updated you on my efforts to reach my weight loss goal of 20 pounds (for those of you still living in medieval times, that comes out to 1.43 stones), I had fallen short in September. I was stuck at 17 pounds at the end of September after really working out hard that month. With cooler weather coming, I faced the prospect of no more swimming workouts in the convenience of our backyard pool. I am simply not up for a nice winter swim as some are.
Canadians, eh? And I cannot handle this exercise below freezing …
Continue reading “Weighting Out Winter”There is a conspiracy theory circulating that the COVID-19 vaccine will contain a tracking chip. I know that’s a bunch of rubbish, but I’m all for it! As I get older and my memory gets sketchier, I think it might be handy to be able to track myself in case I forget where I am or where I am going.
You’ve all enjoyed suckling at the teat of this blog for free for 5 years now. But let’s be honest … most of this is crap. Free was the right price. Almost 200 weekly Mite Be Funny cartoons? Cartoons about mulch? What’s going to happen to this blog when I won’t have Trump to complain about anymore? You’ll be presented with seemingly endless angry screeds about pointless minutiae in my life like too much lint in my pants pocket. Oh, that galls me. I hate it when it makes little lint balls. See? See where this blog may be headed? And don’t even get me started about socks that don’t stay up and slide down and bunch up in your shoes. That’s the worst.
Or, we could make it interesting. It’s time to put your money where my mouth is and make a tasty deposit. I’m having new business cards made: Jim Flanigan – Word Whore. That’s right, I plan to sell myself. Well, not myself as in my body. That ship has sailed. But I will sell my writings. Check out the Published Works page on this blog. There you can buy my published short story without buying the book, my political potboiler novella from earlier this year, and my new book of short stories about the afterlife (Coming Soon!).
So, take a look at the Published Works page and pony up some of your loose change from between your couch seat cushions to make me a successful Word Whore, Paragraph Prostitute, Story Strumpet, Chronicle Courtesan, or whatever you want to call me. But please do check me out. My words are now available for a cheap roll in the literary hay.
It was an odd Thanksgiving Day yesterday with 3 of our 5 kids staying remote due to COVID concerns. We did a Zoom meeting with the remote kids, which seemed more normal than I expected. But before that, I took a walk with Lola the dog to the neighborhood creek.
She loved it. I liked it. I would have loved it had she not pooped 3 times on the walk. How is that even possible? It’s not like she was eating along the way. Well, we had a mostly enjoyable walk, minus the ubiquitous pooping, and I was bemused seeing these trees along the way to the creek …
Continue reading “Take a Walk”
The weather has still been good here, so my wife decided to get our Christmas lights up today. She wasn’t taking any chances that I screw up the tree lights like I did last year …
Very exciting … or perhaps overexcited. I decided to tone things down this year by purchasing these festive holiday lights …
Continue reading “Giving Christmas the Shaft”
Well, it turns out I do have skin cancer … again. But it’s the least dangerous type, and my dermatologist thinks she scooped most of it out when she took the biopsies. So I get to use this nasty cream for 6 weeks to kill any remaining cancer.
As COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths soar in the USA, rumors fly about another shutdown looming. People are flocking to the stores to stock-up on necessities. My wife was one of them this past weekend, and she came home with this.
I know what you’re thinking – ew, right? Although that’s a real pic according to snopes.com, I’m just joking about my wife buying them. We much prefer the bone-in pork rectums. And inverted? Gross. We only use … outverted … extroverted … verted? I’m not sure, but certainly not inverted.
We’re not panicking. I may head to the store to grab a couple more things, but I plan to be very chill about it, like this very good boy.
Thanksgiving is a weird holiday in the USA. We commemorate breaking bread with Native Americans before we slaughtered and subjagated them. We normally celebrate Thanksgiving by gathering with family and friends to overeat, as if we in the US need a reason to overeat. Happy Thanksgiving?
It turns out that Donald Trump was almost correct about Thanksgiving. He claimed that if we elected Joe Biden that there would be no more Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and other holidays. Sounds crazy, but it almost came true about Thanksgiving. Did you miss this?
Continue reading “Good-bye, Thanksgiving”
There are some changes coming to this website, including ways to spend your money. So, we will use this specific post to test this blog’s new ecommerce ability while offering you a useful product that I myself heartily endorse and just so happen to sell.
With talk of a COVID-19 vaccine coming soon, the USA has thrown all caution out the window and COVID cases continue to reach all-time highs almost daily. We’re #1? My family and I are still taking precautions. One of those precautions includes disinfecting our daily mail and groceries. I know, the odds are unlikely of catching COVID from a postcard or a banana. But I like keeping the odds low, so we continue to wipe down our groceries. But we can’t wipe down our mail or each individual grape. So, we use this thingamajig called the Purify O3 that is actually a CPAP sanitizer.
It generates ozone. Ozone is a marvelous disinfectant. I call it an ozonerator, which is not a word. I explain that is disinfects through ozonification, also not a word. The important thing to remember is that ozone is very effective in killing coronaviruses. So, this is what I do with the mail …
Continue reading “Testing … 1 … 2 … 3”
Although the title of this blog post sounds close to the old saying, I’m not sure this heron wearing a necktie would agree.
Wait a second, that’s not a necktie. Could a necktie do this?
Continue reading “Eels Well That Ends Well”
Jim Flanigan Looks at the World 