Extra Strength
How much extra? What
is normal? What percentage greater is
it?
Heavy Duty
How much heaver duty
is it? What is normal duty? How does it compare to Super Duty?
Fast Acting
Compared to what? How fast is normal acting and what is the
cost difference between the two? What am I actually paying for?
Flavor Town Corporation resulted from the coffee pod craze. Nelson and Brian, two brothers began testing their products in small control groups across the country and were receiving very favorable results. The moment they brought investors onboard; their idea quickly took off.
The idea behind Flavor Town is all about the flavor. People enjoy eating because the food tastes good, so not only did pods now contain coffee, but they also included steak, bacon, mashed potatoes with butter. Everything you could think of was being put into pods.
The Food and Drug Administration kept a close eye on their process, as well as their ingredients. Having everything contained in pods meant controlling times and temperatures was easy. Dates produced and Best-by dates were clearly stamped on each pod.
The same coffee pot used to heat coffee was now also being used to heat Dinner-in-a-Pod. Once heated to the proper temperature, the lid of the pod was peeled back and the dinner fell onto the dinner plate and slowly expanded to normal size. Nobody could tell the difference between a traditional meal and Dinner-in-a-Pod. It was simply a vast improvement on the TV dinners of the 1950’s.
Supermarkets soon
shrunk to the size of convenience stores.
No longer were there long, wide aisles, lined with shelves of different
size products. Everything became large
bins full of pods, and shopping carts were replaced with hand-carried
baskets. Well-marked bins, including
barcodes that registered your total the moment the pod entered your
basket. Your total bill was
automatically deducted from your previously established account. No longer were there registers to deal with
before you left the store. You simply
walked out with your dinner pods, leaving your basket on the conveyor belt that
automatically ran it through a sanitizing process, leaving a clean, germ-free
basket ready for the next person to enter the store.
First seen by the James Webb telescope in June of 2028, was a giant ripple traveling at high speed through space, destined to strike Earth at precisely 6 pm.
Scientists and astronomers, so far, had not speculated on what caused the ripple, but only that it wasn’t showing any signs of slowing down, and none of them could identify what impact it would have on our planet.
There were some speculations that it was a shockwave, resulting from the collision of two black holes, while the more radical predictions suggested it was anti-matter and it would disrupt, possibly destroy everything on Earth.
There was mass panic throughout every city. Nothing the government did was calming anyone. Churches were overflowing. People were crying and praying. Fights broke out in the streets, and many people barricaded themselves in their homes. Family pets were exhibiting very odd behavior. There were even reports that ocean tides might possibly rise and cover the land masses.
One particularly devastating
report suggested it was a sound wave and that all hearing would be lost once
the ripple passed over the planet. There
would be nothing but a deadly silent Earth rotating as it always had but left
without a sound to be heard. Television
and radio would be useless. The silent
film era would make a comeback. There would still be traffic noise, but no one
would hear it. Tornado sirens would be replaced with giant strobe lights.
One newspaper headline
said, A tree fell in the woods. Trust
me.
zc
Seeing eye to eye is not always a good thing. Especially if the eyes looking back at you belong to a mouse. OK, I’ll start from the beginning. I’m at Chuck’s house and so far, the visit is going fine. He is telling me about a concert he attended two days ago, when his phone rang. He looks at his phone and then at me.
“I need to answer this, but it should only take a minute. Get us some chips out of the pantry, won’t you?”
He answers his phone, while I head to the kitchen to look for his pantry. I see it is a double door pantry, so I pull open the right-hand side door to look for chips. There, at nose level, is a mouse looking back at me.
Not all that sure what to do next, but I can hear Chuck talking to someone, so I can’t really yell out for him to come to the kitchen, and I don’t want to lose track of the mouse, so I can’t really close the door.
I’ve never known
Chuck to have a cleanliness problem, or any infestation issue, yet here I am,
nose to nose with Mickey. I’m hoping
Chuck will end his conversation so I can call him in here but so far, he is
just droning on about something, and I’m not real sure how much longer this rat
is going to stay put. There are a lot of
boxes and canned-goods he could quickly scurry behind if he wanted to.
What happened next might surprise you...
On a shelf in my garage sits an old can of paint. In prying off the lid, I discovered, although there remains a great deal of paint in the can, because of its age, it is no longer useable. No amount of stirring can revive it.
That caused me to
consider the time when I, although still full of words, have become too old to
stir them into cohesive sentences. I
hope to never write beyond the final bell.
That may require one of you to let me know when to say when. I won’t take it personally, just say,
Zobostic – hang up your pen, un-plug your computer and put your feet up. It’s Miller time.
The shadow of the grandfather clock does not seem to move at the same pace as the hour-hand, neither does it follow the same circular path. I expect it travels at its own pace and answers no one.
The skilled hands and artful tools of the watchmaker can make no adjustments. The grandfather feels as if he is several steps beyond tired. He has tracked time across many lives and would like nothing more than to slip off to dream in the shadows.
Built long ago for the town square, there is now a strained effort in
the sound of his ticks and a noticeable weariness to his pendulum. Age has caught up to the second hand, which
makes it a little poetic that the grandfather retire to a second-hand shop, which is where I found him, motionless, hopefully just napping.
