Sometimes the bedtime stories we tell our kids take a life of their own.

When my kids were younger, the bedtime stories I told them were family origin stories: how my father's father, a Polish citizen, had been conscripted into the German army during World War I and how he escaped or how my father and more than 40 members of his family escaped Germany in 1933, for example, and how he eventually emigrated to the U.S.

They do love those stories but -- while I am very grateful, I don't have any similar personal stories. So I began telling them ghost stories, which they liked more than I expected. Ghost stories may seem an odd choice for when you're trying to get kids ready to sleep. 

But we lived near Salem, Mass. at the time, and ghost stories are kind of a lingua franca of the area. So I told my kids aa series of ghost stories involving two teenage best friends, Bob and Eddie.

After a while, I decided to write up the first of those stories into what became "Wooden Kayaks," which was published in Spaceports & Spidersilk Magazine.

I learned a couple of things in transferring an oral story to the printed word. The characters and plot elements remained the same but the way I introduced the characters, the settings and the narrative itself had to adopt for it to make sense for readers who are not my kids. I enjoyed the process, and was pleased when the editor, Marcie Tentchoff, described it as "A great traditional style ghost story, and I'll admit that I love the nautical theme." Which is what I had been aiming for when originally telling it to my kids: It's spooky without being scary, which was important since we lived a few blocks from the ocean. 

I knew this story was successful when elements appeared in a story my daughter wrote in elementary school. Since her version appeared in print before mine, she claims credit. But then I claim credit for the good grade she received. So perhaps we're even. 

It's been a while since I've posted while I've been working on short stories. I've started submitting them so we'll see.

But that isn't what's kept me up at night.

Of course, politics has kept me up. But I don't want to get into that.

So I asked my mother, a professional hypochondriac and a semi-pro insomniac for some sleep tips.
 
She wrote an article that was published in the "Funny Women" column at The Rumpus under the title: "Sleep Tips by a 90-Year-Old Insomniac." So there.

I'm proud of her. It's a charming piece. And the editor at The Rumpus was really supportive (I know because I served as liaison for the editing process since my 90-year-old mother isn't familiar with Google Drive, where the editor had posted changes to the article).

The thought of her getting published when I haven't written a humor piece in a while isn't what's keeping me up. Honest.

But I am publishing a blog post about her article and including her clip on my list because she doesn't have a website of her own, and it seemed like the best way to track her humor pieces, too. She's already at work on another piece.

More than 20 million Americans play Fantasy Baseball -- but for several years now, I've felt there's something wrong with the concept of Fantasy Baseball, in which participants pretend to be owners and manage a team comprised of real players. The point is to outscore the other teams in your league based on how the actual players do in real life.

The problem, I think, is that while participants get to imagine what it's like to manage a roster of players, the game of baseball remains the same. It takes a lot of effort to compete in Fantasy Baseball -- so much so that there a subscription-based websites dedicated not to Major League Baseball but to Fantasy Baseball statistics and articles just to give you insights to compete against people in your Fantasy Baseball League. While some leagues do pay the winner a nominal fee if your team comes in first, you could spend real money to compete in an imaginary league.

The problem, from my perspective, is if you're going to spend real money and put in a lot of time into Fantasy Baseball, you should, at a minimum, come up with some ideas to improve the game, ways to make what once was America's pastime more interesting and compelling.

So please check out my latest article, "Welcome to Fantasy Baseball 2019," that includes some of the following recommendations:

• Shorten the game: Fans have to get some sleep – not during the game – something not possible with games longer than “Lord of the Rings.” (Average length of an MLB game in 2017 was 3 hours 8 minutes; “Lord of the Rings III” runs 3 hours 20 minutes). Games will now stop after 2:45 hours regardless of the inning.
• Require Teams to Have Cooler Names and Logos: Are fans of the Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox really rooting for an article of clothing? (How about something more relevant, like baseball caps? If not, how about spelling socks correctly?) Meanwhile the White Sox logo doesn’t even depict something that looks like a sock, so what’s the point?
• Update "Take Me Out to the Ball Game": Baseball loves its history but to appeal to younger fans, update the song to reflect what fans in the stands are really buying (it’s not peanuts and Cracker Jack). Might as well update the second to last line because no true fan feels that if the home team doesn’t win, “it’s a shame.”

There are other suggestions. Let me know if you have other suggestions to improve the game.

I don't often do sequels.

After the 2018 World Series, I wrote about how a Red Sox shirt I bought in Cooperstown, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, helped the Red Sox beat the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Every fan likes to think they, along with their particular superstitions, help their team win. But I have proof: The Red Sox went 2-0 --  winning 100% -- of the World Series games when I wore the shirt. When I did not wear the shirt, they went 2-1, a significantly lower winner percentage.

Unfortunately, we live in a world in which there are doubters, claiming that the wins were the result of either:
A) Coincidence; or 
B) The team with the best regular-season record in the league doing their thing.

In other words, haters gonna hate.

So when the New England Patriots were set to play the Los Angeles Rams in 2018-19 Super Bowl, I decided to test out my lucky shirt.

As you can read in my article, "Shirt Tales Part II: How My Lucky Red Sox Shirt Helped the Patriots Win Super Bowl LIII," I put on the lucky Red Sox shirt when the Patriots needed us most, and the Patriots won the Super Bowl.

The shirt is now 3-0 in a World Championship series, particularly in games in which a Boston team plays a team from Los Angeles.

Two championships in a 100 days? That's not just a coincidence.

And the Patriots were not the best team during the NFL's regular season.

So what could be a driving factor in Boston teams' success in the two already-concluded professional sports season?

Clearly it's the shirt.

​I hope you enjoy the article.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, Boston's professional sports teams have won more than 11 championships: the Patriots have won 5 Super Bowls, the Red Sox 4 World Series, the Celtics 1 NB Championship and the Bruins 1 Stanley Cup.

That's a significant run of luck considering the Red Sox hadn't won a World Series in the 86 years before they "broke the curse" in 2004.

What brought about a culture of winning to Boston's teams -- boosting the sense of pride for New England and its die-hard fans?  

Ordinarily modesty would oblige me to not toot my own horn. But this is my blog, and no one else has editorial rights to the page so it is left to me to answer.

Until the prior decade, I lived in New York City. Then my wife and I moved to the Boston area, and well, I think the record shows for itself. New York teams -- even the Yankees -- have been in something of a slump (I'm sure there's a better word to describe the Mets and the Knicks) while Boston's teams have done exceptionally well, almost all of them consistently making it to the playoffs.

No doubt there are other factors, but my move to Boston is certainly one of them.

Same for my lucky Red Sox shirt, which I discovered accidentally. You can check out my article on GlossyNews.com.

A long time ago, in a city not very far away, I wrote a short story that involved physics and puns -- even though I had taken (and passed) only one physics course during college.

At this point, it's been so many years that I can't remember what inspired me to write the story, "It's All Relative at the Space-Time Cafe." But I wrote it, worked on it, revised every line several times, and showed it to a friend, my geekiest friend, whom I thought may be the only one I knew who might get the jokes and the scientific references. He liked it (he said) but thought the references might be too obscure. So I filed the story away, not thinking that perhaps my friend didn't like it as much as I did because he didn't get the references himself.

I dug the story out from time to time, and it always made me laugh -- which is not always the case once I see an article in print; sometimes, I see too many places I should have improved the piece with different word, pacing, punchline, etc. or could have improved it by deleting a joke. But this story always pleased me.

Finally, I revised it one more time, added a new section, and submitted the story -- and it got accepted. By one of the great science fiction magazines, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction! The story is available only through the magazine but you can read my interview with F&SF here.

That closes out a pretty good year...though I'm at work on a number of different humor articles and short stories at any one time. Here's to an even better 2016!

If science fiction, fantasy, mystery/thriller and other genres can have sequels, why not humor pieces? While editing a piece called "The Gods Must Be Rebranded," about how the Greek gods need to update their image so as to capture the imagination of today's generation for whom electronic devices hold more interest than immortal Greek deities, I came up with some jokes about Greek gods needing HR.

The HR-related jokes didn't fit into the rebranding article so I sat on the article a bit, then after a meeting that touched on some HR-related issues, I was able to come up with some additional jokes to round out the piece. I'm not saying it really is a sequel, and I'm not saying it was based on real people I know...

​But you can find the first article here, and check out "Confidential HR Memo of the Gods."

Now I've got to figure out if and how to finish the trilogy. Which is to say, I actually do think there could be a good office sitcom featuring the Greek gods.

My first published short story will appear in the Nov./Dec. 2015 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I've always been a science fiction fan but after 11th grade, and one awful mission-to-mars short story, I resolved that it might be better to read and watch science fiction than for me to attempt to write science fiction.

But at some point -- so many years ago that I can't remember the circumstances -- I wrote a story called “It’s All Relative at the Space-Time Café” that told about a love story in which the characters were all actual famous physicists who, in the narrator's world, were writers, performance artists and cops. It was speculative fiction although I didn't know that term them.  I thought it was funny but that the jokes and science references might be too obscure, and I wasn't sure what to do with it, what magazine might be a good fit.  I remember thinking it was funny, and dug it out late last year. Then I tinkered with it a bit, and added a new section this year, and a scant 11 months later, the story will soon appear in print!

What I didn't realize is that there are two outlets -- Locus Online and Tanget -- that review science fiction short stories even before the issues hit. So there are two reviews of my story. Here's my fav: 

“'It’s All Relative at the Space-Time Café' by Norman Birnbach is essentially an excuse to create multiple puns. The story itself is nothing more than a medium to pack as many science jokes a possible into 2000 words. The effort is hit or miss with the reference to the Schwarzschild radius being particularly good. Other jokes fall flat and feel forced. Whether you enjoy it will depend on how strong your liking for jokes about string theory is."

He's right -- the goal was to pack as many jokey science references into 2000 words. Looks like I accomplished that. (The joke the reviewer did like was the one I thought few people would get. Also, for the record, I wrote only one string theory joke in the piece.)

The only problem with F&SF is that short stories stay behind a paywall. To read the story, you need to subscribe to or purchase the hardcopy. You can do that here:  https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/buy-sub.htm. I really liked the other stories I read in the issue.

Hopefully my next short story will take less time to germinate!

After my article about industrial products that needed one more iteration to get things right -- like WD-39 or SixUp, the um, cola -- appeared in McSweeney's, I wrote a sequel of sorts involving book titles. (Long after I wrote the piece, which appears on RejectPile.com), I found someone else had come up with a similar idea on McSweeney's but with different, and fewer, jokes, years before I became a regular reader of that site.) 


You can check out the article here. But here are some additional titles that ddn't make the cut but that I liked anyway:

• 99 Years of Solitude
  
• Valley of the Doll
• Six Years in Tibet
  
• 1983
• The Six Habits of Mildly Effective People
• Where the Wild Thing Is
• The Second Man
• And Then There Was None
  

Here are some offered by my friend William Vodrey:

• Moby-Richard
  
• The Pretty Good Gatsby
• As I Lay Mildly Constipated
• The Satanic Limericks
  

To all my follower(s), let me know if you have suggestions of your own.

Many Hollywood celebrities you hadn’t thought about in a while will deliver a commencement address -- the way stars back in the 80s used to do a guest spot on “The Love Boat” or “Fantasy Island.” It was quick, fun, and showed your fans some range they didn’t always associate with that celebrity. Plus it’s a lot easier than joining a Reality TV show.

So I wrote an article that satirizes the trend of celebrity commencement addresses in part because they follow a general pattern: after talking about what an honor it is to be speaking to the graduating class, they almost always offer a humblebrag joke about their careers -- in case some parents and grandparents aren't familiar with the celeberty's oeuvre. Next comes a section about being a mediocre student -- especially for those speaking at their alma maters. The "meat" of the speech is an inspirational lesson focused on their struggles to make it to the top of the Hollywood food chain. In between there are the requisite jokes about hungover seniors moving back home to their parents' homes.

If you haven't seen them, colleges these days post these speeches onto YouTube. Jim Carrey gave one last year. Ed Helms and Amy Pohler each gave one. But then so did Snooki from "Jersey Shore." They can usually be very funny because these are (Snooki aside) great performers. But their speeches can seem a bit canned and formulaic.

After watching a number of celeb commencement addresses, I wrote the piece that appeared in the Boston Herald. And very nicely some people shared it among their social media peeps.

That's where the negative comments comes in. One friend posted it to our alumni page, and one person (who graduated before I arrived at the school so there's no history here) wrote: "What a waste of time." Another person (also no connection) wrote that she had never heard a celeb commencement address but the one given by Marion Wright Edelman at true college today was excellent.

In the history of negative comments, these don't even rank -- I realize that. But the first comment was somewhat annoying. If you don't like it and don't want to support the efforts of a fellow alum, don't write anything, I felt like posting. (Which I didn't over there but am doing over here.) As to the second commenter, Ms. Edelman is an accomplished activist, and while well known, is not a Hollywood celebrity -- so it's not a fair comparison. Ms. Edelman has a real point to make whereas a lot of the celeb addresses are meant to be entertainment. Which is why some speakers actually change hefty fees to "give" a commencement address.

Snooki charged Rutgers $32,000 to speak, more than it paid Toni Morrison. This year, the University of Houston admitted this week that it is paying Matthew McConaughey $135,000 -- plus travel and a fee to a booking agent.

But back to the mildly negative comments. I could respond with the idea that any controversy would be helpful in generating attention to the article or to me.

On the other hand, I've experienced little negative feedback until now. And I can't expect for everyone to be aware of the trends I try to satirize or to laugh at my jokes.

I also don't want to be thought of as thin skinned or as having no sense of humor about these things. (I laughed hard when a writer I don't know said he hated that one article of mine that got published that he wanted to quit the business. I actually took it as a compliment.). So I'm probably not going to respond.

But I reserve the right to change my mind.