I murdered my grandmother this morning.

FDR was sick to death of formalities. Life as the thirty-second President of the United States could be intense, but it could also be simply annoying. Take those insanely long receiving lines he had to endure at the White House. Hundreds of people, big dogs from all over the world, lined up to shake his hand. Meeting the President of the United States.

And nobody ever listened to what he said.

Formalities, formalities, formalities. Of the hundreds of people waiting to meet him, the President was sure not one person actually heard the few words he spoke during each greeting. Like I said, the poor guy was sick of it.

Until, however, he came up with a genius plan. At one of the formal White House events involving a long and tedious receiving line, President Roosevelt decided to change up his receiving approach. He’d still shake each person’s hand and smile politely, but instead of his typical hello-yes-welcome comment, he’d very courteously say each time, “I murdered my grandmother this morning.” I mean, that’s one way to find out if somebody’s listening or not.

I can just see his face as he thought it all over.

Well, the event began. FDR started shaking hands and calmly telling the visiting ambassadors he’d murdered his grandmother that morning. And just as he’d suspected, his guests replied, “Thank you. Well done, Mr. President. God bless you, sir.”

At last, near the end of the line, the ambassador from Bolivia approached. Upon hearing the President’s comment, the ambassador leaned forward and whispered, “I’m sure she had it coming to her.”

It’s just an urban legend, but I love it. You can Google the story and decide for yourself if you think it’s true or not; I’ve done a bit of research and haven’t found a way to either prove or disprove it. All I know is FDR had some serious spunk, and I don’t doubt that if he thought of it, he’d have done it. (I’m sitting at my desk to write this, but I’m tempted to give him a posthumous standing ovation for the story above.)

Either way, I opened this blog with that particular narrative because I think I see a parallel here somewhere, even though I can’t quite figure out where it is exactly. I’m launching one more blog out into the universe. Everybody’s got a blog. Is anybody listening?

Well, for what it’s worth, I murdered my grandmother this morning.

And that’s about it for now, except to clarify that this isn’t a properly new blog. It’s actually an old blog that I’m re-launching, and posts below are from when this was a non-fiction class blog assignment. In some cases, it’s as if a different Randi wrote them. For the record.

And last note, what to expect from this blog now that it’s launched again: basically geekism in the extreme. Writing discoveries, probably; snippets of practice fiction; perhaps book reviews; fangirl reactions to events in various parallel universes, the like.

That’s all for now. Cheers!

No grandmothers were harmed in the making of this blog post.