The 100 Word Stories Podcast

The current administration refuses to allow people born in Jerusalem the right to put Jerusalem, Israel on their passports.
They say that it is taking a position in the ongoing dispute over the city.
Yet, the State Department has its Arab-speaking consulate in East Jerusalem, which Palestinians claim as their eternal capital.
Every time someone runs for president, they say that they will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
But once they get elected, the former candidate sheds their campaign promise and continues the policy.
Then the next wave of candidates make their promises. To eternally raise capital funds.

Ted needed a new mattress, so he tried one with coils and springs.
The recoil threw him into the ceiling.
Then, he tried a sleep number bed. But the bed wasn’t so good at math, and he ended up spending all night working out long division with an abacus.
After that, he bought a memory foam mattress.
But this one was defective. At first, he thought it had some kind of amnesia, but it turned out to be early-onset Alzheimers. He forgot his dreams.
In the end, he decided to cross the mob, and he peacefully slept with the fishes.

I recently visited my parents.
They have two old square televisions. They were blurry, low-definition, and letterboxed the video feeds.
So, I bought them a big flat-panel television, a wall-mount, and a disk player. Oh, and a box of high-definition scenery to use during the rainy dark days of winter.
They were going to upgrade their cable, but they went with a satellite provider instead.
I got an email from my dad that says the picture quality is great on the television in the bedroom.
Except that’s one of the square televisions. The new flat-panel is in the living room.

Unlike hundreds of others, William was smart and wore his bandana as a mask when he looted the Walmart.
He picked up a new pair of Air Jordans, some cool sweats, and a laptop computer.
The sneaks and sweats, he wore to school.
The laptop, he got set up with his neighbor’s WiFi.
The next day, the cops searched that neighbor’s apartment for stolen goods.
“Shit,” said William.
They caught William sneaking down the fire escape with the laptop.
No, they couldn’t match William’s face to Walmart’s security tapes.
But the bandana that hung from William’s belt was a match.

Doctor Odd built a robot.
Amy loves the robot. So does Betty.
They fought over it.
So, Doctor Odd used telepods to duplicate the robot.
The duplicate is a perfect copy.
And he gave it to Amy… or did he give it to Betty?
Now, they’re fighting over who has the original robot and who has the copy.
Doctor Odd is sick of their fighting.
So, he used the telepods to merge Amy and Betty into one person.
The robots now fight over who gets Amybetty.
Robot fights are much cooler than girl fights.
Doctor Odd pops popcorn and watches.

Hopper Coopersmith ran the Five and Dime on Main Street for years.
When he first opened it, Five was a nickel.
When he retired, Five was a five dollar bill.
“I remember when a haircut was a quarter, the newspaper was a penny, and a steak and egg plate with coffee was thirty-five cents.”
Harper had a heart attack last month. All those steak and egg plates took their toll, I guess.
Doctor says Hopper needs a heart transplant.
“How much were those when you were growing up?” asked Hopper’s great-grandson.
The oxygen mask on Hopper’s face muffled his response.

Hospice Incorporated started as a nursing home operator which replaced nurses and staff with robots.
However, they got a reputation as being cold warehouses for the elderly and terminally ill.
So, they performed integrations in customer homes, providing robots that could navigate any environment and offer quality-of-life improvements without the need of a nursing home.
Eventually, they integrated the automation into the patients themselves, helping them to walk, eat, bathe, and monitor their vital statistics.
When the patient dies, the integrated system hails a car, goes back to the factory, gets cleaned off, and it’s recycled for the next installation.

The Elisa Museum and Research Center walks visitors through the history of The Elisa Robot Series, from her beginnings as a clockwork harpsichord-playing mechanism to the sophisticated better-than-human android, who frequently enjoys walking along with the visitors through the exhibits.
Sometimes, a visitor realizes that she’s Elisa, and she likes to give them a hug and tell them stories about the system in the exhibit, or the benefits to medical science that came from a particular advancement.
In a way, she’s conducting research on them, the visitors. How they stand there. How they move.
So they don’t notice her again.