The Game of Life (and Death)
Sports today are tame by history’s standards. Ancient societies didn’t seem to think twice about spending blood and lives in the pursuit of great athletic entertainment. People have been hacked, poked, drowned, punched, cut, smashed, and skied to death, all in some of...
Endlings 2 – Animals
The tiny mouse-sized pygmy tarsier is a nocturnal primate native to Indonesia. They’re not monkeys, but prosimians, like lemurs. They have big eyes like a Furby, but are only 4 inches long, and most of that was tail. Precious little was known about them, as they...
Throw the First Stone(wall) Revisited
Pride goeth before the fall. Except in Atlanta, where they hold it in October. On the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and just in time for Pride Month, NYC officials announce that a monument [will be erected] to honor pioneering LGBTQ activists Sylvia...
Endlings, part 1 – People
Numbering around 15,000 people in the 18th century, the population of the Juma people of Brazil was ravaged by rubber tappers, loggers and miners who wanted their ancestral land. Only 100 remained by the 40’s and a massacre in 1964 left only six, including Aruka...
Hate to Burst Your Bubble
How much is a nickel worth? 5 cents, as a rule. But what is nickel the metal worth? Now that can vary. In the late 1960s, nickel was in high demand due to the Vietnam War, but there was a shortage of supply due to strikes at the major Canadian supplier Inco. An...
A Farewell to Armrests
Theft and vandalism are not uncommon in our world, though theft of public property is a bit more rare. That was the charge two men in France found themselves facing in 2018. They had removed several of a particular item from a public park. The targets were benches,...
Not a Colonel of Truth
In the 1960’s, many young men joined the fight for equality in the civil rights movement. Boycotts, marches, and protests were organized by groups like Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Georgia, organizing...
The Dose Makes the Poison
A few years back, there was a study saying that the caramel coloring used in colas and other products had been linked to cancer in lab rodents. I knock back a couple or three diet sodas a day, but I know that I am not, in fact, a rodent. To get the same amount of...
I Fought the Law
Lifelong drifter and frequent non-violent criminal, Clarence Earl Gideon, was charged with breaking and entering with the intent to commit a misdemeanor, a felony, in Florida in 1961. At trial, he asked the court to appoint him a lawyer because he couldn’t afford...
Episode 150!
Think you’ve got a cool skill that could break a Guinness World Record? It cost $5 to apply, but if you want an official adjudicator with a stopwatch and a clipboard to come watch you do it, that’ll cost $10,000. An adult queen bee’s body can be 25% ovaries by...
Founding Mothers of Sci-Fi
You’ve got your popcorn, the theater darkens, orchestral music blares, and text crawls up the screen. And crawls, and crawls. Then we meet some characters who don’t matter, get jokes where there shouldn’t be jokes, there’s tons of unnecessary backstory, and it all...
Ananas Bonanza
Picture it, Chatham, ON, in the 1960’s. Greek immigrant Sam Panopoulos has two concerns which are soon to find a common solution. His first problem is that he’s still settling in and trying acclimate himself to life in Canada and trying to become more Canadian. His...