This is an original short story that first appeared on the Bewildering Stories website, issue #585, in August, 2014 (http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue585/combat_fatigue.html) Combat Fatigue by Bob Welbaum “First, let me verify your information. You are Staff Sergeant Stuart B. Jamison, United States Army. You are 24 years old, single, and have completed two tours in
I guess this falls under the category of Every Little Bit Helps. The odds are few people can find Bhutan on the map. A small country between China and India astride the Himalaya Mountains, it’s strictly third world with an economy of only around $2 billion. But thanks to some enlightened leadership, it’s taking a first-world
There are anywhere from 400,000 to a million words in the English language, and they can be organized in any number of ways. One of the latest is to divide words into three tiers. Tier One consists of the basic words. These are words like book, girl, and dog and usually have only one meaning. There
Did you know this is the earliest spring since 1896? According to the EarthSky News, the March equinox, when the sun crosses the celestial equator going from south to north, signals the beginning of spring in the Northern Hemisphere and autumn in the Southern Hemisphere. The March equinox can actually come on March 19, 20 or
As a history nerd, I jumped at the chance to visit Hiroshima during my recent trip to Japan. Today, Hiroshima is a modern, vibrant city. But the past is being brought to vivid reality by the Peace Memorial Park, which is on an island between the Honkawa and Motoyasu-gawa Rivers, and the Atomic Bomb Dome
Did you know languages can be grouped into “families”? For example, English is a Germanic language, and the Romance Family includes Latin and all its derivatives, including Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian. I was thinking about this during my recent trip to Japan. To a Westerner like me, the writing systems in Asia all look
Home Repairs I have a dead-bolt lock that sticks. It doesn’t want to open from the outside. So I squirted oil into the keyhole from the outside. That made it worst. I squirted oil into the keyhole from the inside. No change. I squirted oil into every crack and
I hope you’re not as tired as politics as I am. Our system is so long and drawn out, I’m already wishing the election was over. But this is the system the Founding Fathers gave us, so we’d all better pay attention, because we’re going to need the best possible leadership in the years ahead.
During a recent trip to Japan, I got to visit a colony of snow monkeys which live in a national park in the Nagano area. Their species name is actually the Japanese macaque, and their range is through much of Japan. I was expecting white fur, but they actually have light brown fur; the name comes
This may come as a shock, but not everyone is satisfied with our current calendar. We presently use the Gregorian Calendar, which was first established in 1582. But everyone is familiar with its quirks, like months with either 28, 30, or 31 days. What if it there were no leap years, holidays fell on the day day