daily prompt

Waiting for MacGuffin

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Alfred Hitchcock is credited with coining the term “MacGuffin,” but not the thing itself, which has been around since people started telling stories to each other. In spy movies and thrillers, a MacGuffin is the object that sets the plot of the movie in motion; it’s usually a something people desire that the hero and his nemeses pursue, and that pursuit provides the film’s plot. The specific nature and form of the MacGuffin is usually unimportant to the overall plot. In plot terms, but not theological ones, the apple in Genesis is a MacGuffin.

Neither of the two most famous examples of a MacGuffin in film history appear in a Hitchcock film however, even though he used the device quite frequently in his many movies (he directed more than 50 films from the 1920s through the ’70s).
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Don’t Dream It

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In one dream, a dream encountered once each month or so (last niht!), a password to an email service or the passcode to the office desktop itself can not be remembered. His hands don’t work. Did they ever? Or interruptions prevent him from typing it in within a fifteen-second countdown, and the entire screen is taken up with 1-5, 1-4, 1-3 … .

He has been away from the office for so long—a decade—and he sees the voice mail light flashing on his phone, but he can not remember the four-digit access code. How many messages? he wonders.
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The Curse of the Should-Have-Dones

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I do not know the attractive couple entering the above photo from the left side of the frame, but that is okay, as I did not take the photo, and this is not about them.

If I had a steadier hand with the photo-editing Clone Stamp tool, the two of them would instead be an oddly tall bush of purple flowers or another stack of blue Peroni umbrellas or two more versions of the bicycle that they are walking towards.

My hand is not that steady with the photo-editing tools, so their brief moment together (are they still together?) was spared awkward editing. May the rest of their lives together or the remainder of their lives apart continue to be free of terrible editing decisions or (yikes!) deletion by a heavy-handed photo perfectionist like me.
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