Del Stone Jr. / Chat GPT
I have amazing news for you homeowners who may not be up on your pest lore. This amazing information comes to us from the Allentown Morning Call, which is a newspaper with a strange name, almost as strange as Playground…. READ MORE
I want to relate to you diet-conscious consumers an important health tip about shopping in supermarkets. To put it bluntly, if you value your health, you will stop snooping in my cart to see what kind of food I buy…. READ MORE
Signature: 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
Everybody experiences them: moments when you commit acts so unspeakably embarrassing that you wish you could drop from the face of the planet. Here are some of mine: 1. It is the night of the newspaper’s customer appreciation party. A… READ MORE
ChatGPT
This is the scenario: If I am not at work in 10 minutes I will no longer have a need for banks, which is where I happen to be right now, cruising in my car across the parking lot at… READ MORE
ChatGPT
This is the story of a woman, a river, and a concussion. The woman’s name is Debbie; the river has many names, none of them printable here; and the concussion … I guess it was my fault. I told Debbie… READ MORE
Google AI.
Here is everything you need to know about the contemporary music scene: (Important note to readers who are about to stop reading and write me nasty letters calling me a tone-deaf burrowing parasite for ridiculing contemporary music: This is not… READ MORE
Photo courtesy of the Australian Institute of Marine Science
My ex-best friends Jim Shrine and Joann Schumann, who work here at the newspaper, recently returned from a vacation in Mexico. They didn’t invite me, of course. But that’s OK. I don’t mind. Really. Just because those two drain clogs… READ MORE
The women in the backshop are standing there putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and I want this madness to stop right now because they’ve almost got it finished and I could never get past unwrapping the box.
You’d have to be nuts to sit there for hours trying to fit little hacked-up pieces of cardboard to form a picture of Elvis, when you can go down to a roadside stand and BUY a perfectly good picture of Elvis on purple and black velvet, and it’s already put together.
Jigsaw puzzles are things mothers once used to get the kids out of their hair until television was invented. The problem was that kids couldn’t go more than a few seconds before puzzle-building gave way to hair-pulling, then the pieces would get scattered all over the house and you’d be finding them in the refrigerator or in the bedsheets for months afterwards.
What was worse, children had this terrible habit of asking their parents for help. The standard reply was, “No, dear. Mommy can’t help because that would spoil all the fun for you,” which really meant, “Mommy doesn’t want to put together some dumb jigsaw puzzle of Bambi and Thumper discussing the nature of reality, and why don’t you kids work on it for several years until I get a healthy layer of scar tissue over these ulcers?”
But then Mommy would be passing by and see a piece that fit into a hole, and pretty soon Mommy would be on the floor searching for more pieces that fit and occasionally shrieking “I FOUND ONE!” while the kids are off pulling each other’s hair or testing the cat’s reaction to having its tale inserted into the garbage disposal.
A big problem with jigsaw puzzles is that a piece is always missing. Space aliens from the galactic center of the universe could land in Washington, D.C., and deliver a solid gold jigsaw puzzle as a gift to all mankind, and piece would be missing.
Another thing you have to consider is the personality of a person who enjoys working jigsaw puzzles. Basically, these people sick. Why else would anyone spend a significant portion of his lifetime connecting pieces of cardboard to form pictures of things he would never allow to soil his walls, when he could be doing constructive things such as developing new uses for that stuff that collects in drains, or solving the mounting national deficit?
Which leads me to the mounting crisis of the national deficit. I have hit upon the solution to the deficit problem, which is to have Oliver North shred it into 20 or 30 jillion skillion pieces and mail envelopes of the pieces to all the taxpayers, then throw a national jigsaw puzzle party and invite the entire nation to put the deficit back together.
While everybody is doing this, the government can jack taxes through the roof and nobody will notice because they’ll be busy covering North America with the Mounting Crisis of National Deficit Puzzle, and by the time it’s put together nobody will be around to worry about the deficit.
This column was originally published in the Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone's stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra's Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone's comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled "December" for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman's Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone's novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild's award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida's best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn't look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
The women in the backshop are standing there putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and I want this madness to stop right now because they’ve almost got it finished and I could never get past unwrapping the box. You’d have to… READ MORE
I recently had an opportunity to take a midwinter vacation, and because I didn’t want to spend a lot of money traveling somewhere, I decided to spend this week right here in Florida, the tourist capital of the United States,
So … what does one do when vacationing in Florida? He goes to the beach, naturally, and that’s what I did. But early February isn’t exactly a boom season for beach-lounging.
I picked up garbage.
At this point you must be thinking, “He’s finally done something to earn one of those jackets with no sleeves and permanent residency in a padded cell.” Picking up garbage might not constitute a vacation you write home about, but if nothing else, it was an education for me.
A few years ago I took another midwinter vacation, and I spent that week exploring nearby places I had never seen. One stretch of beach particularly impressed me with its unspoiled beauty. It must have looked that way for hundreds of years. Except for the garbage.
The garbage had been left there by boaters and explorers like myself who were less appreciative of the natural wonder about them. It made me angry, and this time I decided to do something about it.
I spent only four days picking up garbage. It rained three days and I took off a day because I hurt my back with all that bending over and lifting. But in those four days I hauled 30 bags of garbage from a stretch of land I’d estimate to be 200 yards in length.
In a way it was fun, because you wouldn’t believe some of the junk I found. Empty flare cartridges. Light bulbs – who takes light bulbs to the beach? Disposable diapers (yech!). Shot cups from shotgun shells. Broken toys. Shoes. Socks. Photos that apparently had fallen from somebody’s wallet. Somebody’s boat registration (It was sealed in a plastic bag, and the owner’s address was printed on the front, So I returned it to him. Water had gotten inside the bag, but I think he could dry it in the oven).
But 90 percent of the garbage consisted of bottles and plastic, and I am now convinced this state needs a bottle deposit law. You simply would not believe the number of bottles I found. Some had been broken in horrifying ways. It was commonplace to find huge, jagged pieces of glass protruding from the sand. If someone had stepped on the glass, he would have needed a trip to the hospital.
And the plastic! Bags and pieces of rope and plastic containers were scattered everywhere. They were ensnarled in tree roots; they littered the dunes and thatches of beach scrub.
Seeing this kind of thing can give you an unhealthy disrespect for your fellow man.
You read stories and you watch television programs about the environment and how mankind’s disregard for the world around him is laying nature to waste. You never see those stories about this area, though. Everything is supposed to be generally OK in these parts.
Well, if this is OK, I’d hate to see the really bad places. Because nothing must live there, not even people.
This column was originally published in the March 3, 1988 edition of the Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone's stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra's Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone's comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled "December" for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman's Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone's novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild's award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida's best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn't look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
I recently had an opportunity to take a midwinter vacation, and because I didn’t want to spend a lot of money traveling somewhere, I decided to spend this week right here in Florida, the tourist capital of the United States,… READ MORE
Image courtesy of Quinn Dombrowski by way of a Creative Commons license. https://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/
As a homeowner, I have had my eyes opened to a range of marvelous new experiences, many of them requiring the absence of money. One such experience is a clogged drain. In the halcyon days of my youth, a clogged… READ MORE