It’s time for The Nest to borrow a picture from the universe’s largest Polaroid dump bin as we’ll once again be divinely inspired in this week’s edition of Random Image Inspiration! Let’s put that patent pending process into action by first pulling our numbers from the world famous Randomator…
38, 22, 28, 92
The 38th post in my Reader was this one by The Huntress
The 22nd word in that post is “just”
The 28th word in that post is “so”
To show that you never really know what the hell is going to pop up as the inspiration picture…. putting “just so” into Google Images brought this up as the 92nd result…
No little flash fiction story this week… I’ve been doing enough of those anyway. RII was supposed to be about variety, and this week it looks like I’ll be musing on ALPHA!
Alpha, the first letter of the Greek alphabet… which became our letter A and lent its name to…. well, “alphabet.” Someone recently, either in a blog post or on a comment, remarked on how instead of naming alphabet after the first two letters (alpha and beta), it should have been named “alphazet” since our last letter Z was the Greek zeta. Although the Greek alphabet was a bit different than ours and actually ends in omega, which means they put things in a whole different alphabetical order than we do! Just remember that if you ever need to look up a book from the Parthenon’s library…
Since alpha is first, we refer to leaders or the most dominant member of a group as alphas. I’m definitely not an alpha, nor do I consider myself an omega… I’m the lone wolf who just tries to stay out of everyone’s way and do my own thing.
It’s funny how relationships like that can work in groups of animals. For example, among my two cats, Ody has long been the clear alpha…
Leave us alone. I’m making sure my charge here gets his proper dose of Vitamin D.
With a two to one size advantage on poor little Biskit, it’s no wonder. But it wasn’t always that way…
This is embarrassing, sir.
When Spilly was around, despite his disadvantages that made him not quite right, he was the clear alpha over his brother Ody. Spilly was the people greeter when I had visits while Ody would hide and be antisocial. It was extremely weird how Ody’s social behavior almost instantly changed after Spilly passed and I replaced him with Biskit… and he now became the “front cat” with Biskit remaining in the shadows.
And then there’s the greatest fucking cereal ever invented….
How many naughty words can you spell before you have to go to school?
Alpha Bits, those sugar drenched oat blobs in the shape of letters! There isn’t a cereal I could pig out on more than this, and it’s almost impossible to find anymore…
Looking above, we have Alpha Centauri…
Photo taken someplace without massive light pollution.
I guess I shouldn’t say looking above unless you happen to live in the Southern Hemisphere. Alpha Centauri isn’t a star, but a system of three stars… the two brightest of which combine to make that bright dot I pointed out in the image above. The third star is Proxima Centauri, which is literally the closest star to us right now even though it is about as bright as a unicorn nightlight as seen from the moon. It’s somewhere there in that little red circle. It would only take you about four and a half years to reach it if you traveled at the speed of light…
Perhaps you could drive your Alfa Romeo there. All it needs is a few rocket thrusters and a flux capacitor..
On even more of a tangent, we have alfalfa!
Wanna meet Spanky?
No no no… not that Alfalfa! This alfalfa!
Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about….
I can haz alfalfa?
No, Fuzzy, you can’t smoke the alfalfa! Geez!
And last, but certainly least….
Hey, don’t go dissing the Baby Shark of the 80’s!
More random inspiration with hopefully something other than a Greek letter next Wednesday…
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
Awww your cats are adorable! But that cereal though, really you love AlphaBits? Wow, I tried those once and all I can say is yuck, sorry Evil, lol.
I don’t know what it was about Alpha Bits, but I could have half the box emptied (Yes, cereal is meant to be eaten from the box!) before I knew what I’d done… and if I happened to be drinking soda with it…. well, that was a bellyache waiting to happen! I have some strange tastes. I also loved Product 19, which is another cereal that is nearly impossible to find anymore! And don’t get me started on how it’s ridiculous that Count Chocula and the rest of his friends are only available in October anymore!
I know right? My fave was always BooBerry and that one is soooo hard to find!
I give you A+ on this post. It’s more than just so, it’s a tribute to randomness.
From stencil letters to Alf. Yes, I found the very random thread that connected the two…
Alf, oh he was adorable, I still miss him. It is sometimes good to stop for a while to think some simple thing, like a letter a, and find out how many things are behind it.
Being the first letter gets you a lot of privileges. Of course placement isn’t everything, it’s losing the battle of popularity to a letter in the middle of the Greek alphabet, pi.
You forgot Alpha…that creepy (read…flat scary) character from The Walking Dead. She gives me nightmares.
Well, I didn’t really forget it since I’m not familiar with the show. I was going to ask for any subject material I didn’t cover though, so thanks!
Trust me…she’d scare the pants off you. Psychopathic zombie 🧟♀️ with a heavy dose of evil.
You could do a Nest countdown of the Greek alphabet – from alpha to omega.
I’ve never heard of Alpha Bits but I’m up for anything edible where you can spell out rude words…
The Top 30 Letters of the Alphabet…. that would be both interesting and impossible…
Great pix of your cats…..figuring out who is “top dog” (oops I mean cat) must be interesting to watch. We have ONE cat and he knows he’s in charge of everything (including us of course). I remember Alpha Bits but never was much of a cereal person – I liked cereals that were tasty with raisins dumped in them. Go figure – I had my fruit with my cereal I guess. Well done randomness.
Pam
They always showed the cereal in the commercials with fruit in the bowl (Usually chopped up bananas). And I always wondered if any kids actually did that. Heck, I always ate the cereal right out of the box and just skipped the bowl entirely (It helped that I never could stand milk)…
I put raisins in a lot of the cereals I ate as a kid. Even the ones that HAD raisins got MORE raisins. Not sure why I had a raisin fetish but I suppose it could have been WORSE!
It’s interesting to see how animals sort themselves into alpha and followers. Oddly enough, I think our shy, timid little Gemma is the boss around here. Gary never challenges her authority and Trouble is too clueless to realize that there even is a pecking order.
It seems to work out like that a lot with the littlest being in charge. Not quite with Biskit though, who like me, is way too timid to try and boss anyone around. Of course, Ody isn’t much of a big boss cat since both Sewie and Gypsy used to make him back down on his own territory!
I love this post so much. Thank you for making me smile, even when I’m still sort of half asleep (not from your post but because I’ve been up since 4:00 a.m.)
I’m sure I’ve got some posts that will help you go back to sleep if you want to. An unedited compilation of Buster’s autopsy reports…