Drawing a Blank

I was sitting in traffic this morning looking for inspiration for today’s post… nothing.

Arrived at the office, took one look at my inbox and even that didn’t inspire anything, other than fear. Leaning back in my very comfortable, ergonomically enhanced, office chair, looking around my office… still nothing.

A strange place to be for me. Usually I have a million things whirling around in my head. Maybe it’s finally full, reached it’s capacity.

With nothing else to go on, today’s post is about ‘drawing a blank’, when there’s nothing there. An excerpt from the Know Your Phrase webpage on the origin of this phrase explains it this way:

This phrase is believed to come from old lotteries from, or around, the 16th century.

Apparently, lotteries back then worked something like this: There were two containers; one container had lottery tickets placed inside of it, which may have had the names of the participants written on them. The other container held the tickets or notes that had the prizes written on them. When it came time for the lottery to start, a lottery ticket would be drawn from the first container, followed by a prize being drawn from the second container. Well, some lotteries had blank prize notes, meaning that if a blank was drawn, then the person would win nothing.

Sounds about right…

We’ve all heard writers complain of this affliction from time-to-time but I’m just a scribbler, I’m all about ‘random thoughts’, short posts and hopefully causing a smile or two along the way. I’ve been inspired by the oddest things; junk food, Moleskines, paper shredders and most recently, irritating phone calls.

As you can see from just some of the topics I cover, there should be no shortage of topics in my world.

Today, my readers will have to be satisfied with learning the origin of a phrase rather than being ‘enlightened’ with any of my random thoughts.