Stories Short and Strange
17 short stories for general audiences ranging from the unusual to the unbelievable to the just plain strange.
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
Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!
Whenever I try to write rhyming poetry, a strange things happens — it sounds very Seussian. I didn’t plan it that way, but the similarity is unmistakable. But I shouldn’t be surprised, because Dr. Seuss has been influencing kids for eighty years now. March 2 was the good doctor’s birthday. In tribute, here is his
How to Rate Our Presidents?
I just ran across an article published earlier in February that ranks the U.S. presidents according to a survey of 91 presidential historians as reported by C-SPAN. This updates the last C-SPAN survey compiled in 2009. The best and the worst haven’t changed since that previous survey. These historians consider the top presidents to be
Rethinking Sexual Harassment and Other Behaviors
How long does it take to convince a man not to harass women? For a female journalist in Australia, it was two hours. This young lady, Eleanor Gordon-Smith, had always been bothered by being on the receiving end of “catcalls” from males since she was a little girl (“Call me when you’re legal.”) So she