Stories By Van

thepitchkc.com During the summer of 1972, newspapers all across the country picked up the story of “Momo”. Momo is a short abbreviation of Missouri. MO is the abbreviation, and when you say this shortened name twice, you get the word Momo. This United States monster story happened in a small town that is located in northeast Missouri. During July of 1971 is when the first reported encounter happened with Momo, the Missouri monster. It all started when there were two people out for a picnic when they witnessed a “half ape half man” creature. The creature reportedly had an awful smell to it. The couple said the monster walked out of an area of thicket, and then started to come towards them. They ran into their car and locked the doors. The couple say the creature ate the peanut butter sandwich they left when they ran into the car. After eating the sandwich, the creature went back into the wooded area. The two women, who were the two at the picnic, reported this encoun...

“What’s wrong with millennials?” What’s really wrong is anyone who thinks they can characterize an entire generation. A video, which I’ve embedded below, purports to explain everything about millennials in the workplace. It’s from “Inside Quest” and has accumulated 61 million views. Tom Bilyeu, the interviewer, is cofounder of Quest Nutrition. Strangely, there is no identification of the expert who does all the talking, but it appears to be the author Simon Sinek, who I had been impressed with until he appeared in this video. Sit back and stop thinking, and a seductive set of assertions and humor lulls you into believing. If you’re not in a critical frame of mind, it all makes perfect sense. Resist. Generalizations about a generation are no different from generalizations about race or ethnic background. This is just another form of ageism, supported by a teeny set of questionable statistics. If a video like this was trying to explain why black people or Asian people h...

Many people in the general public and the media have a very stereotypical image of what OCD is all about. Individuals with OCD are seen as people who either wash their hands too frequently, or who are super-organized and perfectionistic. Thus, it can be difficult to recognize the types of OCD that don’t resemble these common stereotypes. The reality is, there are many forms that OCD can take. The types and topics of your obsessions and compulsions are limited only by your brain’s ability to imagine. OCD is insidious, as it seems to have a way of finding out what will bother someone the most. Many of us grapple with existential questions about the meaning of life, the universe, existence, and so on, at one point in our lives.  However, for those with a type of OCD called Existential OCD, or “Philosophical OCD”, these questions can become all consuming. Steve, a 26 year-old computer programmer: “I can’t stop thinking about why we’re all here and whether there’s any purpo...

When it comes to the history of lucid dreaming, it was all the rage in the middle of the twentieth century, but then just kind of faded out. Generation X missed the lucid dreaming debates of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. After that, the debates faded out and lucid dreaming became the geeky subject matter of a few liberal intellectuals hardly anyone had heard of. Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception, perhaps misleadingly, brought the concept back into the core of the minds of the masses. Lucid dreaming is your chance to play around with the extraordinary abilities buried in unused parts of your brain. Regardless of whether your are superhuman in real life or not, lucid dreaming is a way for you to put the deepest areas of your brain to good use while you’re sleeping. You can be a John Doe while awake and superman while sleeping. All the obstacles of reality can be set aside, as you make trips to the sun or the interior of the earth or test your craziest science experiments on you...

Once the stuff of science fiction, voice-activated virtual assistants like the Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple HomePod now reside in millions of American homes, tweaking thermostats, streaming music and scheduling appointments. While some see these devices as helping hands, others view them as Trojan horses in the age of digital surveillance. "It is outrageous that the Amazon Echo is recording every conversation in a person’s home and transmitting it to the cloud," Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., tweeted May 26. "This is exactly why we need an internet bill of rights! Didn’t we fight a revolution to prevent exactly this kind of surveillance?" Is Khanna correct about the scope of smart speakers’ electronic eavesdropping? We decided to take a closer look. Does Amazon ‘record every conversation’? Amazon’s voice-controlled Alexa products are considered "always-on" devices — but that doesn’t mean they record customers’ conversations. ...

Today we're going to put on our cheap suits, stick earpieces in, and join the legions of multinational Secret Service agents flowing out among the populace of Canada, the United States, and Mexico; as the borders disappear and we round up a unified population into forced socialism under martial law in our gigantic new pan-continental police state. Some believers say this takeover is actually already underway; others reckon the plans are still being laid, but few believers doubt that it's in the works. The ultimate goal, according to the rumors, is for the few elite in the new government to enjoy unprecedented power, control, and profit over a new super-massive mega-state, at the expense of half a billion workers forced into socialized labor. This new police mega-state will be called the North American Union, or NAU. One common theme in the conspiracy rumor is that anytime something bad happens for real, it's generally viewed by the believers as a deliberate attack ...

Chris Trenschel and Tamara Murray thought they had the perfect life. They both had successful careers—Trenschel was a budget analyst for the city of San Francisco, Murray was the vice president of a PR firm. They got married, bought a condo. They blew cash at cool, trendy places. There was only one problem: "In a nutshell," Murray says, "we were dead inside." In order to support themselves, they had to support a work-first everything-else-second lifestyle. After too many nights sitting at home, eating frozen pizza and watching Netflix, it occurred to them: What are we doing? "We basically felt we were wasting our youth," Murray explained. "Travel, learning about new cultures and meeting new people, having meaningful experiences—that's what is important to us." So they saved up money, quit their jobs, and took the plunge. After traveling for a year in Latin America, they bought a red Kia Sedona minivan and converted it into a campe...