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National Walnut Day 2023
In celebration of National Walnut Day, I found you an awesome blast from the past. If you’re already a Dick Van Dyke fan, you know exactly what I’m talking about. 👇🏼
🔥 Eat Fat To Burn Fat 🔥
Try to eat more fat but choose polyunsaturated fatty acids as they help the body to burn fat so that’s salmon, halibut, sardines, albacore, trout, herring, walnut and flaxseed oil. ~Dorian Yates
All the aforementioned work for me. I’m not big on strong, fishy fish, but they are good for you.
I get to check my A1C next week. Not sure it will have leveled out or gone down. I’ll be in for some more specialists if it doesn’t.
I was hoping I’d be getting out more to burn off the carbs I’m desperately trying not to eat, but it hasn’t worked out that way for me.
We’ll see if I can get better at this. I really need to get up off my couch periodically and stretch my legs a bit.
That’s easier said than done. I really don’t like going outside. Not even a little.
It’s room to grow, I suppose…
🛸 Hey, Where’d Your Thumbs Go? 😨
The Dick Van Dyke Show – Season 2, Episode 20 – It May Look Like a Walnut – Full Episode
Danny Thomas plays a sinister alien invader from Twilo in this episode. What a hoot!
The Dick Van Dyke show is such a classic. The episodes are still funny today because it’s basic sitcom humor.
You’ve got normal people doing normal stuff and still getting wrapped up in silly shenanigans. Sometimes it leans on goofy tropes like hypnotism. Other times, it’s just about farcical misunderstandings. It’s good clean humor.
What’s not to like?
♻️ Recycling At Its Finest ♻️
I collect old rusty hand tools and sharpen and polish them, then use them to build things out of walnut and cherry that I harvest from fallen trees in the woods. ~John Grogan
Taking things from other people verbatim is plagiarism, but taking ideas from people is storytelling.
Beowulf as we know it is a recycled version of an older proto-Germanic poem called Bear’s Son.
Chaucer recycled Troilus and Criseyde from Homer. Shakespeare recycled Troilus and Cressida from Chaucer. Gosh knows who Homer cribbed it from.
The Lion King is Hamlet with zoo animals. Nothing, but nothing, is original.
STOP trying to WRITE an ORIGINAL STORY!
So, now that we have that out of the way, the originality is not in the idea but in the presentation. Actually, that’s where we wish it would go.
I don’t know about you, but I am completely sick of retcons, reboots, remakes and redesign for a modern audience.
I want to see something new.
Granted, it won’t be new at its core, but the new characters with new reactions in new settings seeking new goals will be satisfyingly “original”.
I’ll admit that I enjoy the various iterations of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and other classic characters.
Take Sherlock Holmes, for instance. Basil Rathbone, Erich Shellow, Jeremy Brett, Johnny Lee Miller, Benedict Cumberbatch and even Robert Downey Jr. have brought their own spin to this iconic character. Some of them are loosely based on Doyle’s original works, while others use the characters as jumping off points for completely original mysteries to be solved with Holmes’ unique deductive reasoning.
They’re quite original while being completely derivative of both the Doyle source material and of all prior performances. Funny olde world, right?
So, don’t get hung up on trying to do something brand new. There’s nothing new under the sun. There are only new combinations of existing storylines, tropes, genres and the like.
For instance, you could still use Sherlock Holmes as a jumping off point but change one or two features. Instead of being a hyper-observant genius with a trusted sidekick who chronicles his adventures, you could make him astoundingly inept and the sidekick could be the actual genius who allows the detective to be the front man in order to spare his prodigious ego. Oh, wait, that’s Hong Kong Phooey.
As you can see, a few simple changes and you have endless possibilities for “original” stories with new characters.
That’s it for this walnutty Hump 🐪 Day. I hope you’re having a productive week.