daily prompt

From To-Do to Tah-Dah!

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The perfect to-do list: The one where the act of putting a task on the to-do list completes the task. It doesn’t exist.

There are websites for one to use to make to-do lists, apps for shopping lists (I own a not-very-smart phone, so I am an outsider to the world of apps), websites on which you can compile top 10 lists with friends. After one creates an account and logs in, not a single one of these websites offers “get a notepad or a scrap of paper and a pen and start writing your list” as the first item listed, so I guess they are indeed serious.
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Superb Moon

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

For those aware that there is a thing called the sky, tonight will present those of us located on the continental United States with a “supermoon,” as newspaper headline writers love to call it.

The Moon’s orbit around the Earth is not a perfect circle; it varies from 221,000 miles away to just over 252,000 miles away. Tonight, it will be at perigee, or its closest point in its orbit, and that will coincide with the full moon. Thus, tonight’s full moon will appear enormous: 14% larger than the average full moon and many times brighter than average. And then the Earth’s shadow took it away in an eclipse, because that’s what the Earth does.
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It Can’t Happen Here, Can It?

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Certain though Doremus had been of Windrip’s election, the event was like the long-dreaded passing of a friend. “All right. Hell with this country, if it’s like that.”—Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here

The title begs the question: what is the “It” that can’t happen here? The free, democratic election of a fascist (lowercase F, even though any difference in degree or style of fascism is truly no difference at all)? Or any movement to resist it after it takes power?

Sinclair Lewis gives one succinct answer at the end of the second chapter of his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here: “The hell it can’t.” In the chapter, several of the leading lights of life in fictional Fort Beulah, Vermont, are conversing and considering the campaign promises of U.S. Senator Buzz Windrip, who is considering a run for the Democratic Party nomination against President Franklin Roosevelt.
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