Stories Short and Strange
17 short stories for general audiences ranging from the unusual to the unbelievable to the just plain strange.
Why Are Pandas Distinctively Black and White?
Giant pandas have always captured our imagination. Their distinctive coloration certainly gives a new meaning to the word cute. But why are they colored that way? A new study, published February 28, 2017 in Behavioral Ecology, suggests two reasons — camouflage and communication. Tim Caro, a professor in the Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology
This Is For Anyone Who Loses Stuff
I am constantly misplacing things around my house. I attribute this to owning a lot of black objects, which I tend to lay on black furniture. It also doesn’t help that the spot I remember placing them is about three iterations old. Fortunately, I’m not the only one. I’ve just heard about a clever writer
Babies Who Can’t Touch The Ground
From the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction department — Talk about they way children are treated in different cultures, babies on the Indonesian island of Bali are subjected to an unusual custom — their feet should not touch the ground for their first 105 days of life. This is because belief in reincarnation is widespread and a birth is
Who Was The Richest Man of All Time?
We are obsessed with wealth. Virtually everyone in this country is familiar with the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Forbes magazine always garners attention with its list of the richest people in the world (https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerenblankfeld/2016/03/01/forbes-billionaires-full-list-of-the-500-richest-people-in-the-world-2016/#3de9d98d1897). But who has been the wealthiest of all time? As you might imagine, compiling such a list
Original Story — The Personality Test
In February, I mentioned the nice folks at Bewildering Stories published another short story of mine in issue #701 (http://bewilderingstories.com/issue701/personality_test.html). If somehow you couldn’t access it then, I’m repeating it here today. The Personality Test “Ah! Mr. Young. I’ve been looking forward to this.” The diminutive man sporting a tasteful suit and huge
A Day Without Women — So What?
In celebration of International Women’s Day on Wednesday, March 8, 2017, the organizers of the January 21st Women’s March organized a “Day Without Women” protest that encouraged women to stay home from their jobs. So what? Time magazine, in its March 8 Daily News Brief, included a feature entitled “Here’s What a Day Without Women
A Sports Match Where The Object Is To …Lose?
From the life-is-stranger-than-fiction department — If you are a real sports fan, you root for teams to win. But when would it be an advantage to lose? Granted, there are times to rest star players. In football, it may be a tactical advantage to give the other team a safety. But to deliberately try to
Women’s Independence Through Body Art
I’m writing this on International Women’s Day, not because I’m an expert on women (far from it), but because I’ve just read an interesting theory about how women took control of their bodies — tattoos. In a “Quick Take” essay on page 23 of the March 13, 2017 issue of Time magazine, Olivia B. Waxman
Happy Birthday, Aspirin
We like to think that our ancestors were pretty limited when it came to available medications, but that’s not entirely true. Granted, they didn’t have the modern miracle drugs, but they did have their own arsenal of remedies. I saw this first-hand in Egypt where I learned how effectively inhaling vapors from mint extract in
Is the Solution to Mental Illness No Solution?
It’s a question that has bedeviled us for centuries — how do you treat the mentally ill? We know what doesn’t work; did you ever wonder about the origin of the word bedlam ( https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bedlam)? But perhaps what works best has been under our noses all along. This story begins with a young lady who