You are a fifth-grade girl who comes home from school to find a doll on your front porch. The doll looks like you, is dressed like you, and there is something about the eyes. Who left it? Why is it here? And what makes this doll so special?
19 short stories for general audiences ranging from the unusual to the unbelievable to the just plain strange.
Learning how to wiggle your ears is really hard. But you can do it if you keep trying. And if you learn to keep trying, no problem is too big. So if you can wiggle your ears, you can do anything!
Happy Disloyalty to Royalty Day! Time to reprise my poem about patriotism. I wrote it sometime around 2010 and posted it last year (and it’s in my book Some Poems About Life, available on this website), but I think it’s still apropos today. The Patriot Jerry is a patriot,he loves his country dear.He waves the flag
I was always taught to be honest. I would never think of lying to my parents. But it wasn’t until much later, when I was well into adulthood, that I finally realized my mother had a subtle way of bending the truth to adjust my behavior. Like saying ” _________ is talking about you because
Have you ever wondered why some items come in odd weights and sizes? In this photo from the Marketplace website, notice the Ziploc quart-size freezer bags are packaged 19 to a box. Why the odd number? I ran across this in an October 20, 2019 article entitled “The Marketing Tactics Behind Those Odd Weights and
The English language is very dynamic. Words are constantly being added and meanings change. I saw another reminder of this recently in an article entitled “25 Words That Don’t Mean What They Used To” by Paul Anthony Jones. It’s quite a surprising list. Here are some of the words that jumped out at me —
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned our world upside down, especially with regard to sports. The NBA is scrambling to finish its season with a 22-team playoff scenario at Walt Disney World’s Wide World of Sports complex, major league baseball is trying to salvage something with a 60-game schedule, and there is no telling what the
Many of our everyday practices have surprising origins. For example, the idea of serving a three-course meal — soup, main dish, and dessert — is actually credited to a Persian (some say Arab or Kurd) known to history as Ziryab. His full name is Abu l-Hasan Ali Ibn Nafi, and he was an educated North
The nice folks at BewilderingStories.com have published another of my stories! As they describe it — The latest tracking device tells a soldier which desserts will shorten his life, and by how much. But what if the device knows more than that? And what to do when the readout goes to zero? Bob Welbaum, When Your Number
If you are running a business, you would want to closely track your assets. How can you improve productivity? How can you increase an asset’s value? At what point does the cost of maintenance exceed the return? These are all important questions. Now, what if these assets you are tracking are people? Or, more accurately,
In my lifetime I can never remember having three crises at once — Covid-19, a stumbling economy, and nationwide protests against police brutality. Put those before an electorate that’s already deeply divided and you have a perfect situation for spawning all types of conspiracy theories. It reminds me of that old saying “You’d be paranoid
From The-Best-Man-For-The-Job-Might-Be-A-Woman Department : Archaeologists had always thought they had found the ideal Viking male warrior’s grave in southeastern Sweden. There were swords, arrowheads, and two sacrificed horses, so the interred must be a man, right? Then Stockholm University bioarchaeologist Anna Kjellström closely examined the warrior’s pelvic bones and mandible. To her, they seemed feminine. When none
