Bob: Alright, quiet down everyone. This meeting of the Pinellas Pines Town Council is now called to order. Madam Vice President, let's skip the reading of last week's minutes. Carol: No prob, Bob. Bob: (sighs) Please don't do that. OK, our only item on the agenda is the crisis at hand, and that is the sinkhole that appeared at the intersection of Winston and 7th last night. Ken: Appeared? You're downplaying this, Mr. Mayor. It didn't just appear, it swallowed Winston and 7th, and I demand to know what you're going to do about it. Bob: (bangs his gavel) Order! Order! You demand? You deman ..read more

"Hey, Kid, what's this bear thing I've been seeing online for the last few weeks?" my friend Karl asked. I said, Did you finally find the naked people on the Internet, Karl? We were sitting at the bar at First Editions, eating dinner. There was an open mic reading that night, so we decided to show up early and enjoy some cheeseburgers without our family telling us they were bad for us. "No!" Karl shouted indignantly. So you already know where they are then? "Damn right," said Karl, more than a little proud. "Anyway, the bear thing, not bare thing." He took a bite of his cheeseburger and c ..read more

Hello, theatre-goers, my name is Brantley Addison — "Mr. Addison" to the kids in the Ezekiel Tottendale High theatre department. I have been teaching your children about the wonderful world of theatre, which I have dedicated my entire life to. You can tell, because I constantly spell it "theatre" and not "theater." I sometimes even pronounce it "theatah" unironically. I have appeared in a number of different plays and musicals starting in my own high school days through a brief run in the vibrant St. Louis theatre scene where I once appeared as Underling in The Drowsy Chaperone. I have spen ..read more

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. I was done. Two stories about a marriage and a divorce, and that's it. No more. That's all I ever want to write about a British woman marrying a ghost. I try to make it a hard-and-fast rule about never revisiting a subject more than twice. That's how I did it with Amanda Sparrow Large when she married the 300-year-dead Haitian pirate named Jack Teague in 2016, only to divorce him several months later. I was happy to write about their marriage. And I was happy to write about their divorce less than a year later. Well, not happy, per se. I ..read more

Were you injured by the recent solar eclipse? Do you live along the path of the eclipse between Texas and Maine? Did you look up at the eclipse without any sort of eye protection despite repeatedly being warned not to? If so, you may be entitled to monetary damages for your injuries. At the law offices of Janssen & Lockyer, we're committed to helping everyone receive justice for their injuries, no matter who was actually responsible. So if you looked up at the eclipse despite being told numerous times by astronomers, medical professionals, your teachers, and well-meaning strangers, you'r ..read more

There's a list that went viral recently called "The Diseases and Casualties this year being 1632," and it is, for the most part, fairly hilarious. The list purports to be the causes of death in the city of London 392 years ago. It shows that while the American healthcare system may be a dumpster fire, at least we didn't live in the early part of the 17th century when you could die from some of the worst or dumbest ways imaginable. It also shows the terms they used for modern diseases, and how they tried to understand diseases of the body that actually make no sense today. Like Purples, which ..read more

I am not mechanically inclined. At all. If it involves turning a wrench or working with metal in any way, I'm terrible. I've often thought of tackling a mechanical project like restoring an old lawn mower, but I've never actually taken the steps to undertake such a project. The actual thought of it sends me into an apoplectic fit. It goes back to my 8th-grade metal shop class at McKinley Middle School in 19-none-of-your-business. I was scared to death that working on anything metal would cause flying steel shavings to make a beeline right for my eyes. That's because I had been frightened in ..read more

In June 2014, a rather impressive male impregnated 100 females in just a few short weeks. Randy the guinea pig was a resident at Hatton Country World in Warwickshire, England when he somehow found his way into a females-only pen filled with 100 female guinea pigs. He lived there undetected for a few weeks until Hatton staff discovered that all 100 female guinea pigs were pregnant. And in the corner, wearing a smug grin was one very exhausted male guinea pig chugging a Gatorade. I had a chance to catch up with Randy, a few weeks before the ten-year anniversary of his astounding —  some ..read more

When the automotive industry first introduced robots to their factories, factory workers yelled about robots taking their jobs.  And when artificial intelligence exploded onto the scene a year ago — after several years of operating without notice — creative professionals screamed about robots taking their jobs. Now a Spanish artist living in the Netherlands, Alicia Framis, wants to marry an AI hologram and no one is saying a word. Of course, there are people who complain that robots are taking their jobs, but what about taking their relationships? Some people are already in relationshi ..read more

One of my great shames as a Hoosier is that I have never had a vegetable garden of my own. We had one every year when I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, but I have fallen short as an adult. Nearly every family in my neighborhood had a backyard garden filled with tomatoes, green beans, and squash. One year, my parents even planted a few stalks of corn. Every spring, we dreamed of eating garden-fresh tomatoes as big as a baby's head and barrels of green beans. We told stories about tomato sandwiches of years past and zucchinis you could carve into a canoe. But by the middle of August, we w ..read more