Category Archives: Sam Short PIeces

Other writings by Sam Hicken

Kittens in the Ceiling

Dotsie is helping me type this story.  Dotsie is a cat, and as anyone with a cat knows, they love to help out by walking around on the keyboard.  Dotsie got her name because she has two distinctive dots on her pretty face, while her sister Foosball, who looks almost exactly like Dotsie, is dot-less.  As kittens they were hard to tell apart except for the dots, so we called one kitten Dot and the other NotDot, but when we started affectionately calling Dot “Dotsie” we had to find a new name for NotDot, because “Notsie” sounded bad.  (Nobody wants to hear, “Look at that cute little Notsie.”)

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A Modest Proposal to Fix Health Costs

“A Modest Proposal to Fix Health Costs” is a second-place contest winner.


Stand down.  Steven Brill was just the messenger.  Brill didn’t invent the stomach-turning revelations laid out in his 2013 TIME cover story “Bitter Pill – Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us.”  Brill bared the ugly facts via diligent sleuthing, but it’s hard to thank him for an exposé that sickened us, because – and Brill should know this better than anyone – we can’t afford to get sick.  When Brill doubled down during his appearance on The Daily Show our hearts sank again, hopefully not into cost-prohibitive thrombosis.

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Social Media: Good or Bad?

We’ve heard the pros and cons.  Social media has been called everything from de facto democracy to ceaseless selfie.  What if three great minds could get together and debate the issue?  That’s the idea I pitched to Hollywood.  Every word of dialogue in the following screenplay is authentic, except for those of your humble host, which are made up.  All panelists and phone-in guests speak in their own words, quoted verbatim (though out of context, of course).

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You Say You Want a Revolution?

♫  You say you want a revolution.  Well you know, we all want to change the world.
♫  You say you’ve got a real solution.  Well you know, we’d all love to see the plan.

I’m not sure how I feel about revolutions, but I do have a plan.  It’s disheartening to peer out over a sociopolitical landscape of selfishness, inequity, corruption, and violence; I’m just not convinced that the key to those recalcitrant puzzle boxes is conventional rebellion.  Maybe I’m too old for that sh*t.  Nevertheless, I looked into the matter.

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