| The library | BookBub | Amazon Prime |
| The last book I purchased was White Fragility in 2020. I borrow most of the books I read each year from the Wake County Public Library. I’ve added a field to my list of books that I’ve read in 2025 to indicate where I got the book and its format. | BookBub is a service that alerts you to cheap or free downloads of ebooks on amazon.com. I only get one that sounds interesting if it’s free — or once I got a $1.99 one for free with a balance on an amazon.com gift card I’d earned participating in a focus group. | I get free book downloads from two services available as an Amazon Prime member. At the beginning of each month First Reads presents 9 or so free books to choose one — and sometimes two — from, and Prime Reading lets you borrow up to 10 ebooks or audiobooks at a time. |
weekend bonus
Three 50-word stories about “the nosy neighbor.”
| The trope | An instance | A good fit |
| The “nosy neighbor” is a well-known, and some would argue, timeworn trope in entertainment. Some say it’s time to jettison the archetype altogether. Others argue they represent real-life people and should stay — but “be ‘relatable’ and ‘3D’ while serving their purpose.” Lamentably, it’s women most often portraying this character type. | Arguably, Gladys Kravitz from Bewitched, is the most famous “nosy neighbor.” One present-day meme describes her as “The Original Doorbell Camera.” She was a grotesquely stereotyped shrewish gossip — always on the lookout for delicious secrets and rumors by peering suspiciously around her living-room window curtains at least once an episode. | Crime fiction is a genre in which nosy neighbors thrive — busybodies, gossips, sleuths. They’re the busybody who, over their morning coffee, witnesses a murder while spying on the house next door, and the town gossip who realizes there’s something not right about the family down the block and relentlessly snoops. |
Sources:
- Craig, E. S. (2009, November 23). Nosy Neighbors and other stock characters. Elizabeth Spann Craig.
- Tropedia, C. T. (n.d.). Nosy neighbor. Tropedia.
- The nosy neighbor in crime fiction: busybodies, gossips, and internet sleuths. (2022, February 1). CrimeReads.
Three 50-word stories about Bob’s morning routine—all done before I even get up.
| “Solitary” | Connections | Crosswords |
| “I won my Solitary game on the first try today,” he says as I’m pouring my coffee. “It was one of those games where the cards just all fall into place, and you’re done.” He’s referring to the card game solitaire — the only game in town according to The Carpenters. | Typically, I do Connections just after midnight when the new one comes out. I show my results to him when I get to the breakfast table. He gets out his worksheet, and we compare our journeys to the answers. “I got blue, green, purple, then yellow,” he says comparing them. | “I gave myself a B+ today,” he reports. He is referring to the L.A. Times crossword puzzle that I printed and left at his place at the kitchen table to complete his morning routine. His grading rubric is loosely based on how many answers involve having to look up something. |
Three 50-word stories about ejaculations comprising “gravy.”
| Good gravy! | Ohmygravy! | Gravy for God |
| I was on the phone recently with an insurance company’s customer service rep, when she made a mistake twice in a row entering something into her computer and exclaimed, “Good gravy!” It struck me, because she sounded like a young person from whom I’d more expect something like a “WTF?!?” | Within just hours of that “Good gravy!” incident, a friend solved the NYT’s Wordle puzzle on the first try and shared those results on her Facebook timeline with the exclamation, “Ohmygravy!” I immediately wondered if more people say that than I think or if I was experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. | Curious, of course, I did some research. According to one source, the history of saying “Good gravy“ is that it was said by those who didn’t want to utter “Good God!” and take the name of the Lord in vain, thus expressing surprise or anger without a hint of profanity. |
Sources: “Good Gravy” by Lisa Adams
Three 50-word stories about milestone anniversaries of mine coming up in 2025.
| 10 years | 25 years | 50years |
| This year on November 28th, Bob and I will celebrate 10 years of being legally married. I asked him to marry me on June 26, 2015, the day the Supreme Court ruled that we could. We married 5 months later in our beautiful backyard on that sunny 72-degree fall day. | At an IBM-sponsored event, on February 1, 2000, I walked up to a young, straight, then-American-Express financial advisor and said, “I’m gay, and if that’s gonna be a problem, we can’t work together.” 25 years later, our mutually beneficial long-term relationship has helped get my net worth into 7 digits. | “We are sexy; we’re alive. We’re the class of ’75.” On May 25, 1975, amidst the jarring juxtaposition of Pomp and Circumstance and our class song, Stairway to Heaven, we moved our tassels from right to left, graduating us from Lejeune High School aboard the Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune. |
© 2025, John Martin, JM50WordStories. All rights reserved.
Three 50-word stories about the urinal we have in our house.
| Plumbing proclivities | Water works | Wondering women |
| After wiping our urinal with a piece of toilet paper recently, I wondered if I could just toss it in and flush it. A quick Google search says, “Urinals were never engineered to handle toilet paper — their drainage connections were solely designed to manage the flow of water and urine.” | We’d never thought about there not being a shutoff faucet or valve on our urinal — like you see on commodes. However, once when the water in our urinal wouldn’t quit running, our plumber talked us through removing the cap on the supply flange to find the urinal’s shutoff valve underneath. | Often at parties, upon finding a urinal in our guest restroom, a woman will say, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to use one of those!” We usually respond, “Please do!” and then try not to imagine the actual execution of that endeavor, thinking perhaps she keeps a SheWee in her purse. |
© 2025, John Martin, JM50WordStories. All rights reserved.
Three 50-word stories featuring sleep-related words.
| Somnambulism | Somniloquy | Somnifacient |
| Somnambulists, people who walk while they’re asleep, have been known to walk to the bathroom, consume food, clean house, and even do hazardous things like cook and drive a car! “La Sonnambula” is a Bellini opera whose plot centers on a woman who sleepwalks into the bedroom of a stranger. | The medical word for talking in your sleep, it can range from mumbling to loud shouts or long speeches. Although typically harmless, it can wake others and cause them consternation, especially when they assign potentially erroneous meaning to what’s being said. IMDB lists 47 movies under “sleep-talking (sorted by popularity).” | Somnifacients — also known as sedatives or sleeping pills — is medicine that induces sleep. According to research, they only benefit transient or short-term insomnia, not chronic insomnia. Relatively recently, sleep gummies have become a ubiquitous form of somnifacients. A search of “sleep gummies” on Amazon.com returns: “1-48 of over 1000 results.” |
© 2025, John Martin, JM50WordStories. All rights reserved.