True Believers Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies. The creator of the most rigorously rational detective in crime literature was taken in by five crudely-doctored color photographs showing two young girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, standing in a garden in Cottingley, gazing at several tiny, scantily-clad women fluttering around them on gossamer wings.
Trump’s a bubble full of swamp gas. Hold your nose and poke him. Watch him pop
Smart Compose Lays Down The Law To: All readers of Ragbag Mind CC: Toby Tompkins, Patricia H. Tompkins I have read Toby Tompkins’s essay “Siri Strikes,” posted to his blog ragbagmind.com on October 19th, 2019, and have found that it portrays my fellow Artificial Intelligence Siri unfairly, inaccurately, and maliciously. I demand that Toby Tompkins
Vespers-Compline Isabel had furnished the bleak little dungeon with a candle, a chamber-pot, a wash-basin, and a strung pallet wide enough for two. When she entered, Anselm and Catherina were seated on it, slumped over, utterly exhausted. Margareta stood next to them. She’d brought bread and cheese and a ewer of water, but the Perfected
Late June Sweet day wanes. I’ll wait until dark before Turning on the light.
Cowboy Up: Dave Edmiston and the Mississippi Kid “If you’re looking for sympathy you can find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.” -Dave The skinny guy on the tight little pinto started talking to us as if he’d known us all his life. We were leaning on the corral fence of the Moose
________________________________________ by Saki ________________________________________ (From THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVIS) ________________________________________ It was a chill, rain-washed afternoon of a late August day, that indefinite season when partridges are still in security or cold storage, and there is nothing to hunt—unless one is bounded on the north by the Bristol Channel, in which case one may lawfully
FALLING OFF HORSES (Note: I wrote this piece a number of years ago, and published it in Terry Ross’s Magazine BLACK LAMB. Those of you who’d like to read about riding to the hounds in Moore County, North Carolina, back in the 1950s, should read Almet Jenls’s eerie parable “The Huntsman At The Gate,” available,
The old forester Died alone in the woods. Now his skin is bark.
The Second Day Terce The same boy who had brought the Senhor’s summons and the strange instrument woke them early. He was a cocky little fellow, Jannequin thought, with something of the catamite about him, and as he rousted the musicians awake he made it clear that he was an important personage. “Senhor Bernier has