On Aug. 1, 1952, 23-year-old Black Women’s Army Corps Private Sarah Keys boarded a bus in Trenton, N.J. to travel to her home in Washington, N.C. for the first time since joining the military. When the bus stopped in Roanoke Rapids, N.C. just after midnight to change drivers, the new driver told Keys to give
The last time I visited Walt Disney World was January of this year. Since I knew WDW, and actually all Disney parks, shut down worldwide due to the pandemic, I haven’t given much thought to planning a trip back. But even though COVID-19 is still raging, the Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom theme parks reopened on July 11, with
I think most of us would agree that this country turned out pretty well. The Founding Fathers did a really good job of getting us started, with a constitution that has been amended only 27 times in over 232 years of its operation. It works about as well in the modern age as in the
How strange am I? Now you can see for yourself. I’ve written 19 short stories over the past several years, eight of which have been published on the Bewildering Stories website (http://bewilderingstories.com/). To keep busy during the quarantine, I put them all together into a book that’s now available on Amazon.com. The book comes in two flavors —
All of my life, I’ve read about our growing population and how it was going to strain our resources. So I was surprised to read the BBC’s “Fertility rate: ‘Jaw-dropping’ global crash in children being born” by James Gallagher. Some of the points made in this article are — — Twenty-three countries are expected to
In 2016, the French government announced it would build a 620-mile highway out of solar panels instead of asphalt. The claim was these panels would generate 790 kilowatts per day, enough to power five million homes. It didn’t work, of course. In the first year, the road only generated half the expected solar power, with
The nice folks at Bewildering Stories (http://bewilderingstories.com/) have published another of my short stories — “Detective Jim Jenkins is quite successful in solving cases and pursuing justice. He has the help of a partner whose career has not really been cut short.” (http://bewilderingstories.com/issue864/help_friend1.html) This turned out really well, so well that I’m working on a
I think at some point, every kid wants to be a firefighter. Part of the allure is getting to slide down a pole to reach the fire engines. That idea goes back to the 19th Century and the informal competition among fire companies to arrive first at a fire. This was doubly true for African
If you’ve ever wanted to write a novel and didn’t know where to begin, you might try looking for a formula or recipe, and simply plug in the words. Yes, there are some basic formulas for writing fiction. Recently I have found two. The first is called “The Hero’s Journey.” Various writers have put forth
There are many different ways to write poetry — free verse, limericks, sonnets, Haiku, etc. I’ve just learned of another — clerihews. According to Wikipedia, “A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line is the name of the poem’s subject, usually a famous person put in an