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TToT -the Wakefield Doctrine-

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

Not the bridge in Grat #7. Someone else’s bridge, entirely

This is the Wakefield Doctrine’s traditional contribution to the Ten Things of Thankful (TToT) bloghop.

Readers? ‘This is a Grat bloghop’*. (A little football humor there.) Speaking of football, our founderess, Lizzi is reportedly exploring financing options in her quest to buy the Manchester Mandrakes. Of course, the game referred to as ‘football’ played in parts of the world  is not quite as formal as that which the source of our opening (and purely gratuitous**) quote.

Be that as it may, such an ambition is minuscule tubers when embraced by the woman who, when starting this blog, back in 1984, premiered with Fifty Things of Thankful. The collective ‘aiiyeee!’ from Blogville could be heard around the world). Fortunately for us, she relented and allowed us a break with a 20 percent reduction in list size. (No, our gift for math will not appear on the list today.)

The Doctrine offers the following list of people, places and things that have resulted in our experiencing gratitude-like subjective states.

1) Phyllis

Phyllis and Una in the (then) new treehouse.

2) Una

3) the Wakefield Doctrine

4) the Six Sentence Story bloghop  This week’s pic of the sic: ‘A Long Ache‘ by Miskey

5) the Unicorn Challenge bloghop  This week’s Best-of-the-‘corn: Margaret‘s ‘Beach holiday

6) our co-writ, Serial Six, ‘…of Heroes and the MisUnderstood’  (Tom being the writer of the cool Co-Ordination of Supervillains)

7) in the 10k dept

8) something, something

9) weather approaching ideal (ideal defined as: warm enough to sweat from minor exertion (without a coat) but cool enough not to wake certain, multi-legged creatures.)

10) Secret Rule 1.3

 

*Vince Lombardi

** that is how you play the Grat-blog game! booyah! (lol)

 

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Frides of Arch -the Wakefield Doctrine-

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clark, scotts and rogers)

Detail of the painting “God reprimanding Adam and Eve”, by F. Zampieri (1625)

 

Yeah, you are correct. You have scene the image above before. In one of our Unicorn Challenge posts. Superstition is the religion of the desperately unimaginative.

That being said, you do know what Friday means: ‘the Unicorn Challenge‘., do you not?  It is the day-of-the-week when jenne and ceayr go all ‘June and Ward Cleaver’ on the blogosphere and invite a small group of talented writers to get al TAT on the photo below.

Anyway. Two Hundred fifty words is what they allow us to write a story keying off the photo below.

Yeah? Well, no matter what that old saying, choice is curse of the Garden.

The man stood on the rock. The wind was calm, the sea was flat. The sky was a uniform, overcast grey; so much so, there was no horizon. Anywhere. In any direction, except landwards. The man had zero interest in that direction.

When there is no horizon, only gravity can provide direction. Taking the hint from this most fundamental of forces, the man looked down. Without a bright sun overhead, jealously casting reflections on anything it felt threatened by, he could see to the bottom. Like most of his world this particular morning, it consisted of unexceptional variations on the shade of grey. The exception to this almost blankscape were three red stars.

A phrase from a proverb, long favored by nuns charged with instilling the moral guilt demanded by Mother Church of it’s youngest, came, quite unbidden, “Well I made a difference to that one’.

The man laughed and nearly lost his balance. He noticed his rock pedestal was smaller. Time and Tide, he mused, time and tide.

Feeling his resolve recede, he glanced over the increasing gap between his stand and dry land. Let go, he thought.

On the shore, a boy’s voice met his thought, “Let go! I’ll throw” Childish laughter and wagging tail wrote a couplet of love and innocence as young human and ageless canine played on the beach.

He stepped into the ocean betting that solid land would welcome him.

*

 

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Six Sentence Story -the Wakefield Doctrine- [a Café Six]

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise with one thing on her mind: sentence count (Hint: rhymes with Six)

Prompt word:

REMOTE

“Hello?”

If one wanted a specific, though not overly-comprehensive, insight into how the tall, thin man related himself to the world around him, the interrogative appendage to his query, stepping from the darkening hallway at the far-end of the bar, would’ve spoken volumes.

“I’d swear this place was crowded with Proprietors and guests,” Lips pressed into a non-committal expression, (another classic tell), he walked past the small stage to a round wooden table upon which was a laptop, a remote control and a high-quality embossed white card, “Press Me” in simple but elegant script.

Looking around the empty Café, the thought, ‘Better safe than sorry’ intruded, serving double duty as both a cautionary admonition and a suitable, if not regrettable, inscription on, say, an anniversary watch or, perhaps, in thrall to a fit of congenital irony, the transom of a sailboat; the Proprietor pushed the red button on the remote.

A live video feed lit the display screen, a title scrolling up “Live and Remote… as opposed to Remote and Alive… the Travels of the Four Proprietae: Chris and Mimi,  jenne and… Denise…” music from the seventies began to play.

Somewhere on the far side of the globe, the Raconteuse sat at a wrought iron table on the edge of a formal garden in the gathering dusk, smiled, waved and said, ” JenneDenise and Mimi, just left, they should be home soon. Don’t leave the kitchen a mess now.”

 

 

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Six Sentence Story “…of Heroes and the MisUnderstood” [Part 1.5]

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise with one thing on her mind: sentence count (Hint: rhymes with Six)

If you’re a new Reader (or a regular Reader who might want to refresh their memory) here’s an opportunity to read the story Tom and I are writing from the beginning. The link to ‘…of Heroes and the MisUnderstood‘.

Prompt word:

REMOTE

I came to on my back, covered in girl and had a flashback to a dormitory-morning from my road-less-travelled college phase when a girl from my Intro-Anthro class walked in with two coffees, one donut and a small pipe of hashish; at the present moment, unlike the morning in a distant dorm, all I had to go on were a bunch of 8×10 still-shots of memory:  riding in the back of a speeding van, excessively bright lights, and, finally, the vehicle tipping over and sliding to a stop.

My eyes opened, (only the one time, as opposed to the continuous, seamlessly-repeating-sequence that some drugs think you’ll love), and I took stock of the interior of the old van that most recently served as our getaway car: above me, a girl-shaped pile of arms and legs and breasts and such, to my left, Rue hanging upside-down from the empty space where her door used to be and the ‘…and Friends’ limey who was kinda playing the concierge to our misadventures this third night in London.

Before I could say,  ‘What the bloody hell’, (I took a certain professional pride in my ability to blend in with the locals, even when they had glowing arms and a total crush on the woman I was assigned to protect), I heard my boss, Lou Caesare, putting a footnote to my instructions to make certain no harm comes to Rue DeNite, ‘Assess and attack, the best defense is a dead opponent’.

As time returned to one-second-equals-one-sixtieth-of-a-minute, I heard: Rue laughing as she jumped to the street, that Moonshadow guy asking her about something I couldn’t see, a really strange sound approaching the van and, from my prisoner-ette a surprisingly lucid, “My name is Isla Sora, implant remote number 314159…”

At that moment, the back door of the van disappeared, so I unlocked my prisoner’s ankle ‘cuffs and pulling her along, got out and stood on reasonably-solid pavement where the English guy was pointing towards the back-passenger door of a fairly nice SUV; the source of the strange noise turned out to be a fricken rocket launcher and overhead we were treated to a midnight sun that made a noise like a big-assed ceiling fan.

I felt two things as I moved towards our newest getaway car, my Glock pressing against my back instead of it’s holster and disappointment that I let my prisoner get the drop on me while still in handcuffs… total déjà vu from that college morning so long ago.

 

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Six Sentence Story “…of Heroes and the MisUnderstood” [Part 1]

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise with one thing on her mind: sentence count (Hint: rhymes with Six)

If you’re a new Reader (or a regular Reader who might want to refresh their memory) here’s an opportunity to read the story Tom and I are writing from the beginning. The link to ‘…of Heroes and the MisUnderstood‘.

Prompt word:

REMOTE

[GCHQ London Branch]

The city of London, with an estimated 627,707 cctv cameras, remote microphones and drones nesting in the clouds, could be thought of as, ‘the city that never sleeps’ but that characterization would not be fair, (or accurate), to either it’s citizenry or it’s surveillance system; in the case of the former, one’s sanity requires the personal privacy of sleep, while the latter thrives on constant awareness, albeit digital and thoroughly un-human.

“Yes, Leftenant Custos, something the AI can’t explain, I assume,” The LMN (Live Monitor Nexus) was a subterranean hectare of monitors and operators; the Watch Supervisor, Colonel Villicus, had sedgway’d down and across the ruler-straight aisles of the heart of the GCHQ until he stood behind the young man.

“The oddest thing, sir, a common speeder at first, but when I ran it’s path backwards, multiple gunshots, originating here,” the image on his monitor was a single family house and a very expensive car with four flat tires in the driveway; anticipating his supervisor’s question, “Yes those are two dead bodies on the opposite side of the street, but that’s not the oddest thing,” running the tape forward showed a van pulling out of the driveway, both men cringed as it sideswiped a parked car without slowing, racing out of the neighborhood until it was in a commercial area when, seemingly for no reason, tipped over and, sliding along on it’s side, came to rest in the middle of an empty intersection.

“Now, watch this,” pulling back on a joystick control, the perspective zoomed up and away sufficiently to bring two additional vehicles, a motorized rocket launcher and a helicopter into view; Lt Custos wisely decided not to comment on the rarity of such equipment on a London village street on a weeknight.

Colonel Villicus’s fingers flew over the keypad Velcro’d on his right wrist, activating an array of additional filters, including infrared, and the immediate result was the addition of the green-on-green silhouettes of four people, all moving towards a vehicle which, after a moment of hesitancy, sped in the opposite direction from the military-grade equipment.

A tone sounded from somewhere on, (or in), the person of the Supervisor, prompting a passable mime of a dog hearing an unexpected sound; resting his hand on the younger man’s shoulder he whispered, “Notify the locals, tell them this is a classified SAS training drill and all they need do is divert traffic until we give the all clear.”

 

 

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