Baby Blues by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott for November 04, 2024

If you need a plot, you can say “Doug dug.”

Take that, Hemingway.

For sale.

Baby shoes.

Never worn.

That might be a bit shorter than the teacher would like!

Fleas. Adam had ’em.

Well it won’t rival “War and Peace” for length.

Heard a story about a grad school philosophy course. Class assembles for the final. Prof passes out blue books and then writes the exam question on the board; define audacity. Collective groan goes up from the class. Within five minutes one guy collects his stuff, turns in his blue book, and leaves. Prof opens the blue book and reads the student’s one-word answer; This.

He beat Fredric Brown’s record of the shortest short story ever.

Doug Funnie?! Tell us more!!

F coming up.

Wow, for Hammie, that is a pretty long attention span.

Shortest story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

My little friend was denied Vacation Bible School because he was 5 days too young. He still wanted to write about it. He carefully printed: "VACATION BIBLE SCHOOL – I didn’t go.

“Doug”? a good laugh first thing in the morning, starts my day

Teacher needs to be more specific with their instructions when Hammie is involved. He’s a master of minimum effort, except when it comes to tormenting Zoe.

If you like really short stories and science fiction, there’s an anthology of short, short science fiction stories compiled by the late Isaac Asimov. I don’t know if it’s still in print. Most of the stories are a printed page or shorter and often end in bad puns. One of my favorites is ’Eripmav" by Damon Knight.

A Minute Treatise Upon the Antiquity of Fleas:

Adam had ’em.

He likely nailed a “Failed” on the assignment.

Seems a little long? “End” would be enough?

Doug? Is this someone I missed?

Next day he gets it back with an F at the top and the words “One word is not a story, do the assignment again and actually try for a change.”

Great story.

Hemingway woulda been proud.

One of the best ones ever!!!!! :-)

Today is “National Candy Day”.

So soon after Halloween??

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…” “Knock”, a complete short story by Fredric Brown, 1948.

It can be an interesting experience to see how short you can make a story that is actually a story. I believe the raining champion is Hemingway’s rather grim “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

I will let RBIN know Hammie now has the record.

I Like it.

2nd shortest horror story: The last person on earth was alone in his room. There was a knock on the door.

Shortest horror story: The last person on earth was alone in his room. There was a lock on the door.

At least it won’t take the teacher long to read and grade it.

Many years ago a friend of mine had an assignment where they were supposed to design a city layout. He put it off til the morning it was due, and he drew out a grid of a bunch of squares, and wrote ‘the advantage of this city lies in its simplicity’. He got a D minus… the teacher couldn’t bring himself to give the kid an F… lol!

Definitely a short story.

How bout a illustrated version of this story kid? You can draws Doug in it.

The world’s shortest story “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, evidence indicates in part it may have existed in other form previously. Supposedly, Hemingway won a ten dollar bet that he could write the world’s shortest tragedy or short story, I’ve heard it both ways. A ten dollar wager was no small amount in those days, when workers assembling the model T got five dollars a day so that they might be wealthy enough to be able to buy a car. The above story won the bet. Now, despite people today finding evidence of similar elements, it’s quite unlikely that Hemingway would have encountered any of them. Nowadays you just hop over to Wikipedia and you’ll find someone disputing the story, but the amount information available to people today is many orders of magnitude to what people had available just a couple of decades ago. In the 80’s we had usenet. If you needed a sample of code you could ask on .c or and maybe overnight but more likely in a week someone MIGHT get back to you with an answer. And that’s only about 40 years ago.

It’ll touch the teacher’s heart like Ms. Shield’s (A Christmas Story character.) heart was. Oh, wait. That whole thing was a dream.

I remember the story about a creative writing class given the assignment to write a story featuring sex, mystery, and religion. One student turned in the one-liner - ‘My God," she exclaimed,"I’m pregnant. I wonder whose it is!"

I, the end

l