Stories Short and Strange
17 short stories for general audiences ranging from the unusual to the unbelievable to the just plain strange.
What if Women Ran the World?
How would things be different if women ran the world? I hesitate to speculate about humans, but there is one primate species where females do run things — lemurs. After roughly 55 million years of evolution, most lemur species have females in charge. The June, 2015 issue of National Geographic magazine (in the “Basic Instincts”
Poem — My Mistake
This is from Some Poems About Life, available on this website. My Mistake I never make mistakes, I’m quite meticulous. I pride myself on veracity and never make a fuss. Of course I might make a gaffe, a misstep I might take, or even an inaccuracy, but never a mistake. I’ve been known to
What Happens When Your Brain Says You Don’t Exist?
There was a fascinating program today on NPR’s “Fresh Air”. http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/ The guest was Anil Ananthaswamy, author of the book The Man Who Wasn’t There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self, which covers topics like Cotard’s syndrome, a very rare mental disorder in which the sufferer is convinced he or she
How Large Can a Locust Swarm Get?
Here’s an interesting entry from The Writer’s Almanac of July 20, 2015 — “It was on this day 140 years ago, in 1875, that the largest recorded swarm of locusts in American history descended upon the Great Plains. It was a swarm about 1,800 miles long, 110 miles wide, from Canada down to Texas. North
“The Secret History of Wonder Woman”
Did you know Margaret Sanger was an inspiration for Wonder Woman? I’ve just finished reading The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore, and it really was a complicated tale bound in secrecy. “The story of Wonder Woman’s origins wasn’t a neglected history, waiting to be written. It was a family secret, locked in a
Short Story — A Fateful Evening
This is a short story I wrote last year that is also available on the Internet at http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue571/index.html A Fateful Evening Hello. Please allow me to introduce myself. I am Fate. Perhaps you have heard of me? Maybe by another name. Some people call me Luck, others Good Fortune. Occasionally it’s Irony. But it’s all
Why Do People Scream?
We take so much for granted in the world. Like why we scream. I hadn’t given this a thought until I saw this discussed in a Time magazine news brief. Time reported on new research in the journal Current Biology that suggests hearing a scream may activate the brain’s fear circuitry. Normally, your brain takes
A Poem About Apples
Here is an original poem in preparation for Fall — APPLES Do you like apples? Johnny Appleseed came to me in a dream and told me to plant apple trees. (Not really, but it makes more sense this way.) So I planted three apple trees in my yard. Now they
How Koalas Keep Cool
I just got back from a week in sunny Southern California (although it did rain for a day). I was catching up reading my National Geographic magazines (they’re a good size for airplane trips) and I ran across this in the July 2015 issue — A 2014 study led by University of Melbourne ecologists showed
What If You Need a New Kidney?
Al Roth is a professor of economics at Stanford, and he was co-winner (with Lloyd Shapley) of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012. An engineer by training, he became an expert on designing markets because in certain situations, money alone can’t solve some problems. For example, Stanford University doesn’t use supply and demand to