Um, No

Linda, Mistress of the Impossible, set me up for a Humpty-like fall this week, with the following:

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “no.”  Try to think of a specific number, as “no.” is often used as an abbreviation for “number,” and write about it. Or, use it as a word. Have fun!

I saw the word “No” and I was excited. No, is something I can speak extemporaneously (how’s that for a big word in a lead-off paragraph?) on. ‘On’, by the way, is ‘no’ spelled backwards. Of course, as soon as I wrote that, I was reminded that ‘Racecar’ spelled backwards, is still racecar. I love that palindrome. Do I get points for words with 10 or more letters? No? Damn, ‘cuz I’m onna roll here with those puppies. The racecar thing was a closing comment on the old, perhaps very old, “RaceDay” with Pat Patterson. I’m not actually sure that the Racing Guy Pat Patterson is the same guy I used to watch on The Nashville Network, which used to have better racing coverage than ESPN, but I figure it’s a good guess. I mean, how many Mr. and Mrs. Patterson’s in the world would name the son Patrick?

Of course, now I recall that heavyweight boxer George Foreman named all five of his sons ‘George’ and one of his daughters ‘Georgetta’

See, this is the problem with the SoCS prompt. As I understand the rules, you’re supposed to read the prompt and then let the voices in your head have their way in directing your fingers on the keyboard. Since I have a day-job in an In – Sure – Ance company, those voices are pretty repressed, suppressed, depressed and usually, since the other parts of my brain are doing the writing, mostly unimpressed. When they saw the “no” part of the prompt today, they started going all:

“No-no, no, no, no-no-no, no, no-no, no, no-no
Na-no, no, na-no, no-no, na-no, no-no, no, no-no, no
Nobody can do the (Shing-a-ling) like I do
Nobody can do the (Skate) like I do
Nobody can do (Boogaloo) like I do
Nobody can do (Philly) like I do…”

“Cuz, you know, those voices have been trapped in my head since before that song by the The Isley Brothers was a hit in 1963, which was waaaaaayyyyy before The Human Beinz covered it in 2012, although their version, the Human Beinz, that is, is pretty good and definitely gets to the “no-no, no…” part faster.

While the voices were already getting into the “whaaaaaaaaaaaa” parts of the song, the insurance side of my brain was reading the rest of the rules prompt and beginning to realize that Linda wanted numbers. Yeah, yeah, I know that “No. 1” is sometimes used to represent Number 1 or #1, and, for that matter “No.” is sometimes used as an abbreviation for North. I always made a joke about it when we would take the shortcut to Rt-5 in East Windsor, because we turned off CT-140 onto No. Water St. “Uh oh, no water on this street.” Yeah, it wasn’t all that funny when I said it in the truck, either.

The voices protested: “No, no-no, she didn’t capitalize the ‘n’ in ‘no’ so we figured it was the word, not the abbreviation. We’re singing, you can’t take that away from us. You know, it’s like the way you wear your hat and stuff. The voices remember Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, too, so by the time I was pointing out that Linda wanted numbers, they were thinking about “dancing ‘til three”.

Finally, the insurance neurons were able to process the wimps-way-out portion of Linda’s prompt and realized that we could write about the word “no” as in “no-no, no, no…” etc.

Phew.

The voices want to add that “No-no, no, no, no-no-no, no, no-no, no, no-no” kinda-sorta looks like one of those month-long writing prompts for people who are working on books. They think that “Nobody But Me” – The Isley Brothers’ version, should be the theme song for that writing challenge in November that everybody starts and two or three people out of 50, finish. That way, if you got bored, or need to procrastinate, or needed to get amped-up to get over a case of writer’s block, which SoCS Master John Howell doesn’t believe in, you could just play that song.

Consider it a public service from my voices to yours.

OK, done writing, no editing allowed, it’s time to go gather some photos. I think Linda said once, a while back, that adding photos doesn’t count as editing. Besides, she always says: “have fun” and how can we have fun without photos?

Racecar

These are some seriously fast cars.

Model Shelby, made for me by David Pennington.

This was take at the Charles River Regatta.

The Racer is a side-by-side roller coaster at Kennywood Park near Pittsburgh

Tim Wilkerson working under his car.

Tim Wilkerson’s race car, circa 2008

This guys is moving about 300 MPH at this point.

I thought this sign said “No Honking” but it;s one of my favorite of Faith’s photos. https://flic.kr/p/4bsMSz

The Racing Pirogis at PNC Park

NHRA racing in Englishtown, NJ

Racecar