There are still nights when the nightmares take me. I am in the shop I made, standing behind the till. My wares are on the shelves and I wait for customers who never come.

I see them passing by the windows, looking in. Their faces, a mixture of curiosity and contempt I dare not interpret. My heart-beat is erratic. I am 10 kilos down. I sleep maybe two hours a night. I am exhausted.

These are the days and nights of the zombie business; too weak to live, too strong to die. Full story »

I love sports and have my whole life. Ask anyone who knows me. But thanks to my upbringing, I have never been one to lose perspective where athletics are concerned. My grandparents never let me think for a second, for instance, that playing was as important as studying and the lesson stuck. The state of big money college sports appalls me. That our society clearly values the contributions of jocks more than it does educators explains a lot about why we find ourselves in the predicament we’re in politically and economically. Millionaires and billionaires being unable to figure out a way to divvy up the GDP of Barbados has gotten so commonplace that you wonder why it’s even news.

So the Penn State sex abuse scandal, which last night claimed the jobs of university president Graham Spanier and head football coach Joe Paterno, at some level feels like more of the same. Full story »

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“The cyclops woman squints at them, those who deem themselves unlovely, and knows that no one would look at them twice in a crowd.” - “The Cyclops” by Teresa Milbrodt…

We live in an age of integration. We mainstream, accommodate, and in other ways try to make up for the cruelty of much of human history toward humans whose physical, mental, and emotional characteristics fall outside the range of that which we in our blissful ignorance have long called “normal.”

Teresa Milbrodt’s new book, Bearded Women, is the writer’s attempt to make “otherness” part of “normal” human experience. This group of stories takes human characteristics which we would normally associate with “freak shows” and weds them to narratives about “normal” human problems. It’s a brilliant conceit – and Milbrodt executes it so well that the reader finds him/herself following each story not with the voyeur’s eye to the main character’s “otherness” but with the sympathy/empathy that we would show to anyone we encountered who was struggling with problems that we’ve either faced and solved ourselves or helped friends or family members face and solve.

A few examples from the book will serve to make my point here clear:

* In “Bianca’s Body” the main character is a woman with two lower torsos – surely freak show stuff. Full story »

I have no idea whether Herman Cain did or did not assault the four women who have accused him of sexual assault. But something he said during his press conference last Tuesday has me very suspicious. According to news reports, Cain said the following at least twice:

I have never acted inappropriately with anyone. Period.

Why does this statement make me suspicious, you ask? Simply put, any man who makes this claim and isn’t the second coming of Jesus is a liar.

I don’t know a single man who hasn’t acted inappropriately with regard to a woman (or another man, if gay) at some point in his adult life. Some men brag about their sexual conquests to their buddies or on social media. Some mime sexual acts to make their boorish buddies laugh. Some quote inappropriate comedians at socially awkward times. Some reveal personal secrets they were told by a woman in confidence. Full story »

The bar was overcrowded, and a thick mist of human perspiration hung limply in stale air.  There were a couple of thrash bands playing that night, and I’d gone with a handful of friends to see the show.  My buddy Dusty and a couple of his girlfriends hung back in the crowd, opting to avoid the seething belligerence that was mounting amongst that predominantly male audience.  I planted myself right at the edge of the mosh pit, from where I could see the bands and assess the chaos.  I knew some of the guys dancing.  They’d taken off their shirts, and were doing their best to incite all of the audience into a frenzy.  Some were too drunk, and the aggressions inspired by violent music were beginning to verge on assault.  These guys weren’t my friends, and on the best days they’d barely give me a nod passing me on the street.  I was afraid of them.  They were rippled sociopaths, with proclivities for steroids and methamphetamines.  Adrenaline astir, heart rates accelerated, they metabolized their booze quickly, impairing their judgment in ways they wouldn’t otherwise have anticipated.  The guys in the mosh pit were all buddies, and it seemed to me that they were just waiting for an interloper to stumble into their madness.  Hands clenched, those fists were starving. Full story »

I had my editorial all planned out in my head. First, Mississippi was going to be the first state to approve the thoroughly idiotic state constitutional amendment defining a fertilized egg (a zygote) as a person. Second, I… well, I never got past that first step, because Mississippi voters did the smart thing and voted down an amendment that would have made pregnant women second-class citizens at best, and livestock at worst. Full story »

“And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,
To mark the full-fraught man and best indued
With some suspicion. I will weep for thee;
For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like
Another fall of man.”
         - Henry V, Act II, Scene 2

King Henry V was addressing Lord Scroop, a childhood friend who had sold him out to the French just before the English invasion. If the King couldn’t trust Lord Scroop, who could he trust?

These are tough times for a smartass like me. I want to mock the Kardashians and Newt Gingrich and whatever Twilight movie is about to be released (2 parts? Really? Does she need 2 parts to decide on a crib?). But all I can think about is Joe Paterno. Full story »

by Matthew Record

“In the immediate aftermath of the Twenty-sixth Amendment’s passage, nearly eleven million new voters joined the general electorate. Full story »

Full story »

It’s the end of the line for JoePa. You can slice it and dice it, wring your hands and tear your hair, chastise and moralize all you like, but in the end it boils down to one word: recruiting.

Penn State has a long and distinguished history, as both a football program and as an actual, you know, university. Its athletics program has never been tainted by any sort of scandal before, and that may well be because they have not, in fact, cheated (as opposed to the method employed by so many other schools, which is to cheat but not get caught). But make no mistake, Joe Paterno’s unprecedented run as head football coach, which dates back to the early 17^th century, has far less to do with integrity than it does winning. Full story »

by Luke Powers

You know what I hate about death? Dying.

Basically, we human beings are just rotting meat on a skeleton. All seven billion of us.

Even Steve Jobs—he just died you know. The rich die the same as the poor. They just get fancier funerals.

You know, when I was a war correspondent during WWII, I saw a lot of guys die. It was nothing like Hollywood – “Saving Private Ryan.” I saw Private Ryans screaming their lungs out as their bloody guts hung out of their bellies. I once saw a body on fire running around – with no head. Can you imagine that? Just like a chicken with its head cut off. Full story »

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Yesterday I did my third Ironman and Ms. Otherwise participated in her second.

This time it was Panama City Beach, which has a reputation as an “easy” Ironman, easy being a relative term of course. Full story »

Teresa Milbrodt is earning a good bit of acclaim lately, and her new short story collection, Bearded Women: Stories, should only amplify her reputation. Fiction Editor Dr. Jim Booth will have a review of the book in the coming days, and in the meantime we were able to persuade the gracious but extremely busy Milbrodt to field a few questions.

Scholars & Rogues: Bearded Women presents the reader with such a wonderful menagerie of freaks – there’s a gorgon, a set of conjoined twins, a giantess, a three-legged man, a woman with a parasitic twin, a woman with four ears, a Cyclops, women with beards, and the list goes on. I know this is a wide-open question, but can you explain for our readers where all these characters came from?

Milbrodt: I have always been fascinated by people who look different or those who don’t fit in. Full story »

I suspect Frank Miller’s new graphic novel, Holy Terror, is supposed to be gritty and profound meditation on the evils of terrorism, set in a superhero milieu. “Holy Terror chronicles [the] desperate and brutal quest of a hero as he is forced to run down an army of murderous zealots in order to stop a crime against humanity,” the back cover says.

But coming ten years after 9/11, the book lacks any urgency and offers nothing new to ponder. Terrorist commit terrorism and, weeks later, people are still terrified. At the end, a wide-eyed character realizes one middle-of-the-sleepless-night, “No wonder we call it terror.”

It’s not the faux profundity that bothered me so much, though. No, it’s that Miller, one of the godfathers of the modern comic book, has cobbled together what might be the most derivative thing he has ever created.

Full story »

On the occasion of the world’s population reaching seven billion, William Ryerson,  founder and president of Population Media Center and chairman of the Population Institute, told Alanna Shaikh at UN Dispatch:

The first earth day was largely about population growth, then it became taboo. Part of why it become taboo was human rights violations committed by India and China [in the name of population control presumably -- Ed.], and partly was because of Ronald Reagan, who said that population growth was a good thing. He was influenced by Julian Simon, who said [in his book The Ultimate Resource and elsewhere -- Ed.] there was no limit to how many people the planet could support. Full story »