Stories Short and Strange
17 short stories for general audiences ranging from the unusual to the unbelievable to the just plain strange.
What is a Superbloom?
Think Death Valley and you think desert, with an average rainfall less than two inches per year. Yet the ecosystem is surprisingly diverse, even including wildflowers. And in a year of above-average rainfall, the desert can spring to life with such a profusion of flowers it’s known as a superbloom. Seeds can lie dormant for long periods.
Getting Enough to Eat
The world’s population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. That’s 2 billion more than we have today. How will we feed them? National Geographic magazine ran an eight-month series of articles on this subject beginning in May 2014. With some people going hungry now, it’s going to take some creative thinking to accommodate
How Many Slaves Tried to Run Away?
I was in the classroom earlier this week as an aide in some middle school social studies classes, and they were studying the Underground Railroad. All this week they were watching a movie entitled Race to Freedom about slaves trying to make it to Canada. We hear so much about the Underground Railroad, and movies
Einstein Was Right Again
Scientists still talk about gravity as a theory because they can’t explain exactly how it works. Albert Einstein hypothesized gravity waves, but there was no way to confirm they existed… until recently. Granted, the science is a bit hard to comprehend because all the numbers are extreme one way or another, but basically, over a billion years ago
Happy Early Easter!
On March 20, I had written about our early spring. Today I learned (from the same source, EarthSky News) that this is the earliest Easter until 2035. This is their explanation — Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon in a Northern Hemisphere spring. By ecclesiastical rules, which fixes the
Short Story — Combat Fatigue
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
The Carbon-Negative Country
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
The Three Tiers of Vocabulary
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
Happy Early Spring!
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
A Visit to Hiroshima
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