Why Novig ran that Sydney Sweeney sports ad 

The latest Sydney Sweeney ad is causing outrage of epic proportions. Heads are exploding and fingers are wagging everywhere.

But what are the supply-and-demand roots of all this? Or: who paid Sydney Sweeney to get tastefully naked again?

Novig is a sports betting platform. The company’s recent ad features Sydney Sweeney holding various sports equipment, clad in little but a come-hither smile.

Critics have blasted both Sydney Sweeney and Novig for “sexualizing” women’s sports.

A part of me gets it. The generation of women who were my classmates during my school years were the first generation of women to benefit from Title IX legislation. I’m a big fan of women’s sports—as a principle and a concept. (This is one reason why I feel strongly about the need to preserve women’s sports only for women—but that’s another conversation.) 

I don’t watch spectator sports very much, regardless of who is playing. But I know plenty of men who do.

And here’s the sad truth of it: most of them are aficionados of a handful of men’s sports: football, basketball, baseball, or hockey. (There are, however, some bright spots. One of these is the WNBA, which has recently experienced a surge in viewership, now nearing that of the NBA. Good for them!)

Why aren’t more men watching women’s lacrosse and women’s track and field? I can sympathize with those who are frustrated here. When I was in high school, I ran cross-country. There was a men’s team and a women’s team. Neither of our teams received much spectatorship in comparison to the school’s football team. I was never particularly bitter about this. That was just the way it was.

There is a stark gender disparity where the sports betting market is concerned. Seventy-seven percent of the people stupid enough to regularly bet on sports are men. Women comprise only about twenty-three percent of the idiots betting on the big game this weekend.

This means that online betting platforms like Novig have to appeal to the male audience. And what’s one way to appeal to the male audience?

A scantily clad Sydney Sweeney!

Keep in mind that men have actually purchased soap infused with Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater. This woman could sell ice to Eskimos—so long as the Eskimos are heterosexual males.

What about charges that Sydney Sweeney’s appearance in the Novig ad sexualizes female athletes? The ad really has very little to do with female athletes—even though Sydney Sweeney gets naked with all that sports gear.

Notice that the sports gear consists mostly of accoutrements for men’s sports. The bitter truth is that the men flocking to Novig to bet on sports probably aren’t betting on women’s lacrosse. They’re betting on men’s football, basketball, hockey, and baseball.

Sydney Sweeney has become a predictable trope in our culture wars. Conservatives are supposed to love her. The very sight of her makes progressives boil with anger.

We live in an age where everything, seemingly, is political. We have become accustomed to combing everything in our culture for some underlying political motive… some coded message to support one larger agenda and undermine another.

But sometimes an ad really is about the cold, hard capitalistic pursuit of lucre—and not much else. The Novig Sydney Sweeney ad, I submit, is one such instance.

-ET

New story: THE WITCHES OF HARMONY

I am drawn to foreign locations. Some of you know that I’m an avid, lifelong student of foreign languages.

At the same time, travel involves many unknowns. There is a lot that can go wrong… especially if you encounter supernatural entities at your destination.

That’s the idea behind my Terrifying Travels series.

The most recent addition to the series is THE WITCHES OF HARMONY, which involves restless 17th-century spirits in the fictional Greater Boston town of Harmony, Massachusetts. Check it out on Amazon.

Amazon book description:

Some business trips are better left unbooked.

Bill Preston has spent years traveling the country for his job, working trade shows in convention centers from one coast to the other. So when he’s assigned to an industrial expo in Harmony, Massachusetts, he expects another routine week on the road.

Then a coworker warns him about Harmony.

He won’t say exactly what happened there. Only that he never wants to go back.

Bill soon discovers that Harmony is a picture-perfect New England town with a history no one wants to discuss. There are whispered stories about witches who escaped the Salem trials—only to meet a more terrible fate in Harmony.

There are warnings not to go outside after dark.

And there are things in Harmony that only certain people can see.

Bill considers himself a rational man. He doesn’t believe in witches, ghosts, or ancient curses.

But something in Harmony has noticed him.

And before this business trip is over, Bill may discover that some places never escape their past.

The Witches of Harmony is a supernatural horror tale of haunted history, business travel, and a New England town with a secret it has been keeping for more than three hundred years.

Lindsay Clancy, the 19th Amendment, and our culture wars

The trial of child murderer Lindsay Clancy has produced yet more political fallout. Over this past weekend, some Republican women in media circles expressed concern over online calls to “repeal the 19th Amendment.”

Let me save you some googling here. The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified in 1920. It was the amendment that gave American women the right to vote.

So why would anyone want to repeal it? There is scarcely anyone left alive who was even born before the 19th Amendment’s passage. No living American woman has ever been lawfully denied the vote because of her sex.

The answer is… because of vocal (though fringe) feminist calls to pardon, exonerate, or otherwise excuse child murderer Lindsay Clancy. Throughout Lindsay Clancy’s recent trial in Plymouth, Massachusetts, pink-clad, overwhelmingly female protesters showed up to demonstrate on Lindsay Clancy’s behalf.

The pro-Clancy demonstrations provoked widespread backlash. At the most extreme end of this backlash are some calls to repeal the 19th Amendment. Such declarations are mostly limited to social media.

According to the logic here, if women will support child murderer Lindsay Clancy, they should not have a voice in our democracy.

Before we go any further, allow me to make a necessary disclaimer. Taking away women’s right to vote is neither justified nor a plausible political outcome.  “That dog,” as the old-timers say, “ain’t gonna hunt.” Women’s suffrage is not some newfangled idea of the social media age. My grandmothers both voted, as did all four of my great-grandmothers. This is not 1919. Women are now CEOs, governors, senators, military personnel and police officers.

And then there are the retail political realities—even if the 19th Amendment is never repealed (which it won’t ever be).  Want to elect liberal Democrats for the next four or five election cycles? Keep talking about the repeal of the 19th Amendment.

Calls for the repeal of the 19th Amendment are so politically toxic that one almost suspects a false flag operation. But that probably isn’t what’s happening here. This is yet another instance of social media rewarding the most extreme and combustible positions available.

***

But two things can be true—or false—at the same time. The wrongheaded, politically suicidal proposal to repeal the 19th amendment must be evaluated on its own terms. So must the affection for the filicidal Lindsay Clancy in certain feminist circles. Continue reading “Lindsay Clancy, the 19th Amendment, and our culture wars”

Hating Boomers without knowing what they are

The other day I came across a news story on Facebook about a contentious local issue. Against my better judgment, I ventured into the comments section. (Nothing good ever comes from reading the comments on Facebook.)

A woman in her early 50s (born in 1973) expressed an opinion that conflicted with the views of many of the younger commenters, who were mostly in their thirties.

Rather than answering her argument, the younger commenters replied with a string of denunciations of “Boomers.”

One even typed, “I can’t wait till all the stupid Boomers die.”

Source: Facebook

There are a number of problems here—the gross generalizations and hopes of mass death aside.

First of all, a person born in 1973 is no Boomer. A person born in 1973 is solidly in Gen X (born 1965 to 1980) territory. So insulting a Gen Xer by wishing death on all Boomers is kind of like insulting a person from Germany by saying that you want to exterminate all the citizens of Denmark.

I have noticed this tendency among some Millennials and older Gen Zs on the internet: They define “Boomer” as anyone ten years their senior who happens to disagree with them. At best, this is a scattershot approach to being an insufferable boor on the internet. At worst, it is a display of rank idiocy.

For the record: a “Boomer” is someone born between 1946 and 1964—i.e., someone between the ages of 80 and 62 at the end of 2026.

If they don’t fall within that age range, they aren’t a Boomer—just like a hummingbird isn’t an armadillo. You can’t use these words interchangeably just because TikTok has told you that Boomer = “bad.”

If you’re going to be a jerk, at least get the terminology right.

-ET

Halloween is coming: 12 Hours of Halloween

Halloween is next month.

For some of us, Halloween is inseparable from memories of childhood: plastic masks, drugstore costumes, jack-o’-lanterns glowing on front porches, piles of candy, and suburban streets that seemed much darker and more mysterious after sunset.

That is the world of my supernatural novel:

12 Hours of Halloween

12 Hours of Halloween takes place on Halloween night in 1980. Three friends—Jeff Schaeffer, Leah Carter, and Bobby Nagel—decide to go trick-or-treating one final time before adolescence brings their childhood Halloween traditions to an end.

They expect an evening of candy, pranks, and perhaps a few manufactured scares.

Instead, they find themselves trapped in a very different kind of Halloween.

A sinister teenager known as the “ghost boy” warns them that they will endure twelve hours of trial. Soon their familiar suburban neighborhood begins to change around them.

Haunted houses. Possessed trees. Restless spirits. And a terrifying figure called the Head Collector, who roams the nighttime streets looking for his next trophy.

But 12 Hours of Halloween isn’t only about monsters.

It is also about that strange boundary between childhood and adolescence—when old friendships begin to change, childhood certainties disappear, and feelings that were once simple suddenly become complicated.

Jeff believes he is falling in love with Leah. His longtime friend Bobby, meanwhile, is becoming someone Jeff no longer completely understands.

And all of this happens during a single long Halloween night.

A Halloween story for the Gen X generation

I wrote 12 Hours of Halloween very much in the tradition of the supernatural stories I grew up with.

If you enjoy the autumnal nostalgia and childhood wonder of Ray Bradbury—particularly stories in which the ordinary world seems only a few steps away from something strange and supernatural—you may find something familiar here.

The setting is deliberately Gen X: Halloween 1980, before smartphones, before social media, and before parents could track their children electronically.

Three kids go out into the October darkness, largely on their own.

And the darkness turns out to contain far more than they bargained for.

12 Hours of Halloween is a coming-of-age story, a supernatural thriller, and a nostalgic trip back to the Halloweens of another era.

With October almost here, this is a good time to take that trip.

12 Hours of Halloween is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions. It is also available to read through Kindle Unlimited.

Happy Halloween—and watch what follows you home.

Zohran Mamdani, 9/11, and the peculiarity of New York

Zohran Mamdani’s appearance at the 25th commemoration of 9/11 caused division in New York City and beyond.

Mamdani takes a different view on Islamism and Western civilization than do the majority of us. Mamdani does not “hate America”—but he believes that American policies have contributed to Islamic radicalism, both at home and abroad. Similarly, there is no evidence that he shares the views of violent extremists or is in league with them. But he is far more willing than most of us to give them a hearing.

Let me turn this around for you. There are many people on the right who would not describe themselves as white supremacists—and could not fairly be described as such. But many of these same people are willing to excuse the rhetorical excesses of white supremacists in certain instances.

Had I been eligible to vote in last year’s mayoral election in New York City, I would not have cast my vote for Zohran Mamdani. Most of his ideas on economics are wrong, at least from the perspective of anyone who has ever taken an introductory college economics course.

And while the conflict between radical Islam and Americanism is a complicated topic filled with some degree of fault on both sides, there is no doubt that the conflict exists. Should the mayor of New York City be an individual who is often willing to contextualize or give credence to arguments surrounding Islamist extremism? During World War II, would we have wanted a New York mayor who was willing to see the merits in the arguments of Hitler and Goebbels?

That said, Mamdani’s speech for the 9/11 commemoration was eloquent in style and perfectly reasonable in content. Since he is the duly elected mayor of New York City, it is difficult to build a legitimate case for why he should not be present at the 9/11 ceremonies.

The greater—and more troubling—question is what Mamdani’s election says about New York City, about what New York City has become. New York City’s foreign-born population now stands at 38%. Pick fifty New Yorkers at random, and nineteen of them hail from somewhere else. This is not a condemnation of the foreign-born. But it is fair to ask if the typical voter of New York City shares the values of the typical American. Zohran Mamdani’s election last year gives us at least one clue.

But that has long since been the case. New York City did not become—in Teddy Roosevelt’s words—“a polyglot boarding house” overnight. It has been thus for decades, and it was certainly thus on September 11, 2001.

New York City is an American city—technically at least—but its American status comes with a very large asterisk.

-ET

Asian students are smarter than your kids, but…

Students in Asian countries—China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan—score higher than their US peers in reading, math, and science. CNN, whose writers apparently fell off the proverbial donkey cart yesterday, describes this as “a troubling trend.”

This is, however, a trend that goes back at least two generations. In the early to mid-1980s, when I was a high school student, there was a panic about US students falling behind. (At that time, we were probably more concerned with US student rankings vis-à-vis West Germans and Finns.)

On January 28, 1986, teacher Christa McAuliffe died along with the NASA crew when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean.

Why was a teacher aboard the space shuttle? The Reagan administration, alarmed over falling US scholastic rankings, hoped that the presence of a teacher aboard the space shuttle would increase US students’ interest in science and math.

Despite the presence of so many world-class universities within our borders, America has never been a scholarly, literary, or test-acing nation. Well into the nineteenth century, the most popular English-language writers in the United States were British writers like Charles Dickens.

In more recent decades, there are worries that Asian students are too far ahead of our kids in math and science. These fears have been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration. In the past, we could steal the best and brightest from Taiwan, South Korea, China, and India. That may become more difficult in the near future.

Why are we such second-rate students? Historically, America was a frontier nation that was stubbornly obsessed with the practical. During the Industrial Revolution, education was tolerated if not necessarily prized. Could an education help you build a better steel mill? That was the relevant question.

The modern era, with its industrial-model grade schools and high schools, has shaped our indifference toward education in a different way. In recent decades, the obsession with competitive games and other extracurricular activities in school environments has far eclipsed the interest in competitive GPA rankings. At least, this was the way it was when I was a suburban high school student in the 1980s.

(The American obsession with watching grown men play boys’ games continues well into adulthood for most of us. This week I have heard little on the news but chatter about the start of the NFL season.)

One of my coworkers from Taiwan, a man I worked with in the late 1990s, was particularly baffled by this. He told me that in Taiwan, sports are seen as little more than something you do to blow off steam and keep your body limber when you’re not studying for the next exam.

All of these criticisms of American priorities are fair game and worth noting. I have noticed them for years and I haven’t been the only one.

But the proof is still in the pudding. The U.S. is still the top economy in the world, the country that draws the most immigrants. People aren’t flooding into Taiwan and China from other countries, despite these nations’ superior math scores.

All of this means that we’re doing something right, and we have been doing something right for decades now, even if we could genuinely use some improvement in our scholarship.

Imagine if we could raise our test scores to the top international levels and maintain the dynamism and competitive spirit that has always distinguished America from its Old World and Asian counterparts. Now that would really be something.

-ET

‘The Bywayman: Book 3 of Deadly Byways’ is now available

Today marks the release of The Bywayman, the third novel in my Deadly Byways series of crime thrillers set in southwestern Ohio in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

If you’ve been following the series, you know the basic idea behind Deadly Byways.

This is an ongoing story about crimes that unfold along the secondary roads, small towns, suburbs, and forgotten places of an earlier Ohio—the world before cell phones, GPS, security cameras, and the other technologies that now make it much more difficult to simply disappear.

And in The Bywayman, people are disappearing.

Three missing people—and almost nothing to connect them

A young hardware store clerk vanishes.

Then a jealous boyfriend disappears.

Then a college student goes missing, leaving her abandoned car beside an Ohio highway.

Detective Will Hayworth suspects that these disappearances are connected. The problem is proving it.

There are no bodies. There is no obvious common suspect. There isn’t even much physical evidence.

All Hayworth really has is a pattern—and the growing conviction that someone is hunting people along the roads outside Dayton.

Then the case changes.

A fourteen-year-old girl named Theresa Chapman narrowly escapes an attempted abduction on a lonely country road.

Suddenly, the police have something they have never had before.

A living witness.

Theresa can describe the man who tried to abduct her. She can describe his vehicle. She can work with a police artist to create a composite sketch.

For the first time, the predator has a face.

The local media gives him a name:

The Bywayman.

And the hunt begins.

But what if the police are hunting the wrong man?

That’s where The Bywayman becomes more than a straightforward serial-killer story.

One of the ideas that interested me while writing this novel was the enormous importance of information in a criminal investigation—and what happens when that information is unreliable.

A detective can be intelligent, experienced, and completely sincere. But every investigation depends upon what witnesses tell the police, what physical evidence appears to show, and what conclusions investigators draw from those facts.

Change one crucial piece of information, and you can change the entire direction of an investigation.

That idea lies at the heart of The Bywayman.

Will Hayworth knows that someone is out there.

The reader knows that someone is out there.

But knowing that a predator exists and knowing who that predator actually is are two very different things.

Sometimes a bad lead is worse than no lead at all.

A thriller set in the Ohio of the late 1970s

The historical setting is an important part of the Deadly Byways series.

The Bywayman takes place in 1979.

This isn’t the distant past, but it is a very different world from the one we inhabit today.

A teenager could leave a party and find herself walking down a dark two-lane road with no way to summon an Uber—or even call her parents without first finding a telephone.

A stranded motorist couldn’t pull out a smartphone and immediately summon roadside assistance.

There were no location-sharing apps. No text messages. No Ring doorbells recording everyone who approached a house. No ubiquitous digital trail documenting where everyone had been.

If you were alone on a country road at night, you really were alone.

And hitchhiking, while already recognized as potentially dangerous, was still something ordinary people did.

That combination makes the period particularly interesting for crime fiction.

The world was modern enough to be recognizable—but still isolated enough for people to vanish.

The roads themselves are part of the story.

I’ve lived in southwestern Ohio for most of my life, and I’ve always been fascinated by the contrast between the metropolitan areas and what lies just beyond them.

Drive a relatively short distance outside Cincinnati or Dayton, and the landscape changes.

The subdivisions give way to two-lane highways.

The highways pass through woods, farmland, and little communities.

There are stretches where houses are far apart and the road ahead disappears into darkness.

Today those places are less isolated than they once were, because almost everyone carries a communications and navigation device in their pocket.

In 1979, however, a breakdown on one of those roads could leave you genuinely stranded.

And a stranger who stopped to offer assistance might be exactly what he appeared to be.

Or he might not.

That uncertainty is part of the DNA of the Deadly Byways series.

The third installment of Deadly Byways

The Bywayman follows The Dungeon and The Bridge as the third novel in the series.

Although each book has its own major storyline, characters and events carry across the series, creating a larger narrative of crime and investigation in late-1970s and early-1980s Ohio.

With The Bywayman, that larger picture continues to expand.

Detective Will Hayworth is trying to understand a series of disappearances with very little evidence.

A frightened teenage girl becomes the most important witness in the investigation.

And somewhere outside Dayton, a predator is watching the police search for him.

He knows what they’re looking for.

More importantly, he knows they’re looking for the wrong thing.

The Bywayman (Deadly Byways Book 3) is available now on Amazon Kindle and is included with Kindle Unlimited.

**View THE DEADLY BYWAYS series on Amazon***

Ohiosaurus Rex: a strange encounter on an Ohio country road

There are places where the boundary between past and present may be thinner than we imagine.

At least, that is the premise behind “Ohiosaurus Rex,” my latest short story for YouTube.

The story begins innocently enough. A married couple sets out on a sunny September afternoon for an Amish quilt festival in rural Ohio. Before they leave, however, a coworker gives them a peculiar warning about the area.

Later, one of the Amish men at the festival gives them another.

If they see something strange on the drive home, he tells them, they should keep driving.

Naturally, they don’t.

A pleasant September drive takes a strange turn

On the way home, the couple spots something flying above a lonely two-lane country road.

It has wings, but it isn’t a bird.

It has an elongated beak, a strange crest, and the unmistakable appearance of something that shouldn’t have existed for millions of years.

A pterodactyl—or something very much like one.

That raises an obvious question: If one prehistoric creature has somehow appeared in modern Ohio, what else might be out there?

They don’t have to wait long for the answer.

What is a time slip?

The idea behind the story is the time slip: a supposed phenomenon in which a person briefly experiences another historical period as though the boundary between two different times has somehow broken down.

In a typical time-slip story, there is no deliberate time travel. Nobody climbs into a machine and sets a date for the past. Instead, ordinary people are going about their ordinary lives when the world around them suddenly seems to belong to another era.

Sometimes the experience lasts only seconds or minutes. Then normal reality reasserts itself.

That’s what makes the concept so useful for uncanny fiction. A time slip doesn’t require an elaborate science-fiction apparatus. It can happen on a city street, inside an old building—or on an otherwise unremarkable country road.

The frightening question isn’t necessarily “How do we travel through time?”

It’s:

What if different periods of time occasionally overlap?

And what if the boundary between them is permeable in both directions?

The strange possibilities of the Ohio River Valley

The Ohio River Valley has always struck me as particularly suited to stories like this. It is a landscape filled with old roads, wooded hills, small towns, farms, river bottoms, and layers upon layers of human history.

Most of the time, of course, a drive through rural Ohio is simply a drive through rural Ohio.

But fiction gives us permission to ask what if?

What if you turned onto the wrong country road at exactly the right—or wrong—moment?

What if something appeared in the meadow that wasn’t supposed to be there?

And what if, instead of you slipping into the past, something from the past slipped into your world?

That’s the situation at the heart of “Ohiosaurus Rex.”

And if an Amish farmer ever warns you to keep driving when you see something strange…

You might want to listen to him.

-ET

Amy Acton and the empty podium

Amy Acton is literally old enough to be Ramaswamy’s mom, yet she’s afraid to debate him because of “personal attacks”?

(Note: I’m not age-shaming here; Acton and I are roughly the same age.)

But this is a very bad look on her part.

Both of these candidates are political neophytes. Neither one has a track record in a major elected office. (We can thank both of Ohio’s two major parties for that.)

And as an Ohio voter, neither one of them looks like a stellar slam dunk to me. I keep waiting for the actual candidates to appear.

But a debate would help me decide which is the lesser of two evils.

Acton’s (ostensible) logic is that Vivek Ramaswamy is just too impure a candidate to share a stage with her lofty presence.  But Ramaswamy, whatever his flaws, is willing to show up and make his case. Amy Acton is not. 

-ET

Ryan Reynolds and the trashing of the 1980s

Actor Ryan Reynolds is drawing some criticism for his negative characterizations of the 1980s.

The remarks came Tuesday night, September 1, at the New York premiere of Mayday, his new Cold War comedy set in 1987. Reynolds was criticizing the tendency to romanticize the 1980s. Speaking to journalists, the Canadian-American actor said:

“When you get far enough away from a time period that’s quite distinct, there’s always a lovely feeling associated with it, almost like you pave over all the trauma with puppy dogs and ice cream.”

“The 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people. It was a fucking mess and people forget that.”

“It was a tremendous strife. Sociopolitical tensions everywhere. We were still pretty fresh off the Cuban missile crisis, which was only 15–20 years before. It’s a tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. Top Gun. Cocaine!’ Like, ‘No!’ It was really scary.”

Regular readers will know that I’m an unabashed fan of the 1980s. I’d take that decade back in a heartbeat. So Reynolds and I definitely disagree here. Continue reading “Ryan Reynolds and the trashing of the 1980s”

Medicare for all, or the Bell System solution?

The other day an older woman in my social circle mentioned that she had to finance unpaid charges from her dual cataract surgery. “Four thousand dollars per eye,” she said. “Eight thousand in total.”

This woman is not indigent. She’s a retired public school teacher on Medicare.  She also has supplemental Medicare insurance through Anthem.

This suggests that neither Medicare nor Anthem is all that great.

What options are available for those who are too young for Medicare? The Affordable Care Act (ACA)—aka Obamacare—insurance plans provide high-priced, privately available health insurance plans that come with high deductibles. And there’s another catch—many physicians do not treat patients on ACA plans.

The Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010 in an effort to make health insurance more accessible to individual purchasers. But the ACA preserved the oligopolistic structure of the preexisting healthcare insurance market. This factor (combined with the inefficiencies of government planning) made ACA expensive and inefficient, despite the underlying intentions.

The typical ACA plan costs $650 per month, with a deductible in the $5,000 to $10,000 range, and a very limited selection of network physicians. This is not good health insurance.

“Medicare for all” has therefore entered the public debate space again this election cycle. DSA-backed Democrats like Abdul El-Sayed are advocating for single-payer public insurance, and this is taken as evidence of the Democratic Party’s sudden lurch to the left.

But the first Democrat to make such a proposal was Harry S. Truman. In 1945, just seven months after he took office, Truman made a written proposal for the creation of a national healthcare program. Universal healthcare was also an animating cause for the Democratic Party in 1992—the election that brought Bill Clinton to power. Neither Harry Truman nor Bill Clinton are widely regarded as wild-eyed left-wing radicals today.

America’s healthcare system is expensive, inefficient, and often unavailable—in practical terms—for anyone who is not insured under a top-tier corporate plan.

The linkage of health insurance to specific corporate employment is a longstanding flaw that is no longer appropriate in the age of the gig economy, entrepreneurship, or—for that matter—the family farm. Recent headlines indicate that large banks and other corporate employers are gearing up for massive downsizing because of anticipated AI-related efficiencies. The demand for health insurance not linked to a corporate plan is likely to increase in the coming years. Continue reading “Medicare for all, or the Bell System solution?”

Moral panic over Pattaya, and an innovative madam of World War II Honolulu

Betty Jean O’Hara (1913-1973) was a famed lady of the night and madam in Honolulu, Hawaii’s Hotel Street red-light district during World War II. O’Hara came up with a novel solution to cope with the demand of randy US sailors during the conflict.

O’Hara set up a Hotel Street brothel that combined sexual services with the assembly-line efficiency of a Ford plant. Each of O’Hara’s employees rotated between a series of three rooms. In one room a man would be undressing, in another a fellow would be engaging in an act of carnal knowledge. In a third room, a satiated sailor would be getting dressed. The Hotel Street red-light district of Honolulu lasted throughout most of World War II.

I never served in the military, but I have met many men who have. In the 1980s I met a man a few years older than me who was stationed in South Korea with the US Army in the late 1970s. He told me stories of “Miss Oh”, a local courtesan in Daegu, South Korea. Based on the gleam in his eye when he reminisced, Miss Oh must have been a proverbial firecracker.

One of my high school acquaintances was in the US Marine Corps during the 1980s. (I’ll call him Mitch.) Mitch also served in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91.

Many years later, I ran into Mitch at a reunion and he told me some war stories.

While relating his experiences abroad, Mitch also mentioned a handful of experiences with professional women—mostly in the Philippines, where large numbers of US service personnel were stationed through about 1992.

I was somewhat surprised. Mitch had been the archetypical ladies’ man in high school: a handsome, charming, multi-sport athlete. Not the kind of guy one associates with sex workers.

Perhaps sensing my surprise at his revelation, Mitch explained: “You’re a young guy in a foreign country, working in a mostly male organization (the Marine Corps). There aren’t many opportunities for conventional dating and relationships.”

Things are different, though, in this enlightened 21st century. The USS Abraham Lincoln has just docked in Thailand. The aircraft carrier and its crew participated in US military operations against Iran, and stayed at sea for more than 260 days—almost nine months.

And what are people worried about? Some of the male members of the crew may visit prostitutes in Pattaya, Thailand, a city famed for its red-light district. Continue reading “Moral panic over Pattaya, and an innovative madam of World War II Honolulu”

“The Door-to-Door Man”: a short story set in the age of “stranger danger”

It’s an ordinary spring afternoon in suburban Cincinnati, 1980.

Eighteen-year-old Michelle Blevins is home with her younger brother when a stranger rings the doorbell.

The stranger is wearing a blazer, tie, and aviator sunglasses. He says he represents a local law firm. He says Michelle’s parents are in trouble.

And he really wants to come inside.

That’s the setup for “The Door-to-Door Man,” my latest original short story for YouTube.

Those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s will remember that this was the era of “stranger danger.”

In some ways, the world was considerably less connected than it is today. There were no cell phones, doorbell cameras, GPS trackers, or Internet searches. If a stranger appeared at your front door, you couldn’t pull out your phone and immediately find out who he was.

At the same time, people were becoming increasingly aware that the world wasn’t necessarily as safe as they had once imagined.

Serial killers, violent crime, and mysterious disappearances regularly made the news. Parents warned their children about strangers. And yet it was still perfectly normal for unfamiliar people—salesmen, repairmen, deliverymen, religious solicitors, and others—to simply walk up to your house and ring the doorbell.

That combination provides the backdrop for “The Door-to-Door Man.”

I’ve been experimenting with writing very short fiction specifically for YouTube: complete stories that can be read or listened to in a single sitting, accompanied by atmospheric visuals.

“The Door-to-Door Man” is one of these stories. It’s a tale of suspense rather than supernatural horror. There are no ghosts, monsters, or paranormal forces here. Just an ordinary young woman, an ordinary suburban house—and a stranger at the door who may not be what he claims to be.

You can watch and listen to the complete story in the video accompanying this post.

If you enjoy “The Door-to-Door Man”…

You might also want to check out my DEADLY BYWAYS series.

Deadly Byways consists of six novels set in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Like “The Door-to-Door Man,” these stories explore the darker side of an era that many of us remember with nostalgia—but which had plenty of dangers and shadows of its own.

The books are available on Amazon and can also be read through Kindle Unlimited.

If you enjoy suspense stories about ordinary people confronting extraordinary dangers—especially stories set against the backdrop of America several decades ago—DEADLY BYWAYS may be for you.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy “The Door-to-Door Man.”

And remember: be careful who you open your front door to.

-ET

Rick Springfield, at almost my dad’s age, is in better shape than me

Rick Springfield is touring this summer, apparently. That alone is newsworthy, given his age. But the 77-year-old performer is also making headlines because of his physique.

There can be no hedging or prevarication here. This guy is in amazing shape for 77. He probably has good genes. But he also works at maintaining this degree of fitness. (I’ve seen some videos about his fitness routines on YouTube, and they’re definitely worth watching.)

From a personal perspective: I’m 58, and Springfield is three years younger than my dad. I can remember the girls in my junior high class, back in 1981, having crushes on him.

It’s all about maintaining good habits as you age.

One more personal note: I might be able to outrun Rick Springfield, but I definitely don’t have his degree of leanness. Now excuse me, while I head to the gym for an extra workout.

-ET