From the Clickbait Archives: The Cycle

scribblelive.com

i.

He brings his girlfriend to the hospital to deliver
quintuplets
But gets a huge
surprise
instead

Their baby seemed normal
Then they saw this

Nine Secrets
Doctors Wish
Parents knew

Are we over vaccinating our children
The answer might surprise you.

Three year old hears for first time

The things this four year old is doing?
So cute
The reason he’s doing them?
Heartbreaking

She was bullied for being different
So she did this
And stunned everyone

As soon as I
Heard
Them
Sing
I knew

These girls are the future

 

ii.

Something totally bizarre is happening in
Alabama
Texas
Kansas
Massachusetts

Enter your name
Wait 17 seconds

This drunk girl wrote notes to her sober self

Her dress dropped jaws

I was a
Teenage
Lesbian
Cybersex
Junkie

A stranger approaches a woman’s bed
Puts an onion in her sock
You won’t believe
the results

iii.

So I have been
using this every day for about

3 weeks now.

I can’t begin to desribe how incredibly this works!
Ladies, if you
want
feels
free
from wrink-kle
lets try this soon

Watch a married couple
Confront each other
About other sexual partners

Eleven reasons
You need to make your
Divorce Lawyer
Your BFF

iv.

Celine Dion’s
Announced the launch
that is because her husband is deid
and she is very sad

Madonna weeps
Oprah weeps
Ellen weeps
Mariah weeps
Fans Furious
The treachery

I’m crying!
I’m shocked!
The Dirt
Linked to their name
I’m stunned!
I can’t stop laughing!

I was speechless
I am speechless
Speechless
Speechless

I’m destroyed

The judges have no explanation
Bankers don’t want you to know this

v.

20 Celebrities you didn’t know were
Gay
Muslim
Actually Black
Bi
Trans
Men
Women
Dead
Living
Citizens
Twins
Cancer Survivors
Real Life Disney Princesses
Real Life Superheroes

Where are they now?

 

vi.

UGH…
after Menopause
I had bigtime problems
with sun-spots & wrinkles.

Now my husband can’t get over it…

The wrinkels that covered my forehead,
eyes
neck
just
vanished like
ghosts

Even after I showed him, he still can’t believe
this is what cut half-our-years-off our faces!

OMG
This botched plastic surgery
Is HORRIBLE

vii.

a folding robot
made of pig parts
removes batteries from stomachs
with magnets

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself
not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.

this really made me think

I really need a potato ricer

Ducklings see water for the first time
Cows see fields
This dog was left out in the rain
Just look at him now

O Brave New World
You won’t believe what happens next

[all misspellings are verbatim]
©Melinda Rooney, 2016

From the Clickbait Archives: Numbers

drodd.com

One Weird Trick
Two Sure Ways
Three Cute Hairstyles: You Won’t Believe How Easy
Four Weird Fruits

Five Reasons You Should Never Visit
The South

Six-Pack Abs In
Seven Days
Eight Things To Never Do
Nine Children from Nine Fathers
Ten Pounds In Ten Minutes

©2016 Melinda Rooney

From the Clickbait Archives: Tiffi’s Gift

Parrot by Barbara Franc; http://barbarafranc.co.uk

Tiffani Scott had a huge surprise for her military husband when he returned home after a year-long deployment to Afghanistan.  Unable to speak any longer in anything but canned, rote phrases, Tiffani asked her mother-in-law, Becky, to tell us her story:

“My Jeff was always a bird guy.  He used to joke he was raised by my pair of lovebirds, that in a lonely, only-child, working-mom single-parent home they were his only friends, his best companions, his model of a healthy relationship. After he was called up, Tiffani told me she wanted to give him this special gift. She wanted to welcome him home in a big way.”

Imagine his amazement when he was greeted at the door by a Greater Jardines Parrot, brilliant as a Christmas tree ornament!

“At first I didn’t realize.  It was only when she cocked her head to one side and bobbed it up and down without breaking eye contact that I figured it out. ‘That’s my girl,’ I said to myself. ‘That’s my Tiff.'”

What Tiffani couldn’t have known was that from the beginning, birds had figured prominently in Jeff’s experience in the war-torn country on the other side of the world.  Jeff’s primary assignment was heading up a patrol unit in Kabul’s bustling marketplace where he’d occasionally snatch a few moments of simple joy in the Bird Market, lowering his M-4 to insert a finger through the bent bars of stacked cages, many of them strung with colored beads, to invite the birds to tap his fingernail with their bills.  He’d grappled with guilt for months over the fact that he was more devastated when a row of caged parrots–African Grays, Amazons, and, yes, a Jardine– was vaporized by a rogue mortar than by the destruction of his unit’s MRAP by an IED three weeks later, a tragedy that look the life of one friend and the leg and lower jaw of another.

It also did not escape his notice that at every opportunity wild birds, piping to one another in Pashto, set themselves with fierce determination to the task of destroying U.S. military vehicles: peeling away windshield wipers like ropes of licorice, pulling at plastic trim, pecking at loose headlights, gnawing through ignition wires.  And once one flew as if with full intent into the windshield of a moving jeep, flustering the driver so badly that the vehicle flipped into a ditch, flinging its passengers into the dust, the bird, neck broken, instantly dead, landing on its back a few yards away.

‘All along,’ Jeff said, ‘the whole time I was there, and I’m a patriot, I’m proud to fight for my country, but I’m not sorry to say I kept thinkin’ those birds, well, they didn’t want us there. Innocent victims, you know, sabotage, little suicide bombers.  I can’t help it,’ he finished, swallowing hard.  ‘It changed me.’

Somehow, Tiffani knew…that special, psychic bond between people in love that keeps hope alive during difficult times, the triumph of the human spirit, the will and the wish to go on, to take a wild stab at a different kind of happiness.

Once she’d put her mind to it, Tiffani, who also changed her name to Tiffi (‘it just sounds more birdlike, don’t you think?’ Becky asks), didn’t find the process as difficult as she’d imagined.  ‘You have to really want it, you know?’ Becky explained.  ‘This is America.  Jeff has committed his life to defending our freedom to believe it and achieve it.  Men like him?  He’s why we can be whatever we decide we want to be.’

Tiffi was able to hide her rapid shrinkage, sprouting pin feathers, cracked black bill and gray, thickened tongue by claiming her Skype link had crashed so that she and Jeff could only communicate by phone; then, once the words were gone, she passed the task on to Becky.  ‘Won’t pretend wasn’t hard,’ she squawked, a phrase Becky taught her by offering her a Froot Loop for each word she mastered.  But it was the itching, Becky says, running her hands lovingly over Tiffi’s now-glossy back, that was the worst part, and learning to open jars using only her feet.  Formerly an accomplished cook, Tiffi has been forced to resort to take-out. She’s learned to accept Becky’s help when it’s time to switch out the newspaper in the bottom of her cage. ‘She never liked depending on others,’ Becky said, picking a nit from behind Tiffi’s head and crushing it between her fingers,’but you do what you have to do.’

But that was not the only surprise Tiffi had for Jeff when he returned, released after the requisite PTSD observation at the nearby VA.  Lighting on his shoulder, reaching over and taking his camouflage collar in her beak and tugging, she led him across the room to the tall cage in the corner, in which she had prepared a nest with leftover strands from Becky’s yarn stash.  She ruffled her feathers proudly. Jeff’s eyes filled.  ‘But baby,’ he said.  ‘You kept sayin’ you wanted to wait.’ In response, Tiffi rotated her head until it was completely upside down and offered him a fetching wink: I’m ready now.

But the happiest moment came when she spoke the handful of phrases she and Becky had practiced for weeks: ‘Love you,’ ‘Missed you,’  and, of course, ‘welcome home!’

‘I love you, baby,’ Jeff said to Tiffi, perched on his shoulder, claws digging into his shoulder through the thick fabric of his fatigues. Tears poured freely down his face. She bobbed her head, blinked, rested her vivid head against his wet cheek. He lifted his hand, ruffled her crest with a finger, cracked a smile. ‘Now, don’t you go poopin’ down my back!’

Needless to say, Jeff was incredibly impressed by how his wife had handled things during his absence.

©2016  Melinda Rooney