Cold and the Winter Snow

My wife called her cousin in Long Island, New York, just to see if they were OK. It was the blizzard, you know? Twelve inches of snow had fallen — an inch an hour. The roads were impassable. The front yard now stretched for snowy miles. The cold was pounding on the front door, demanding to come in. The insulation in heavy jackets had called a strike, tired of all the overtime and demands to keep people warm in steadily declining conditions. The salt had frozen. The wolves were out asking people for spare change. The snow was marauding through town, drunk and kicking over street signs. And if the federal government didn’t start dropping-in hot chocolate, people were surely going to die. Well, these are things I figured happened in a blizzard. I’ve never witnessed one firsthand, and never want to. Check that: Most of me doesn’t — the part that gets so cold that my internal organs tie-up into Christmas bows and makes my toes want to drop off and crawl to warmer climates. I’m third generation from Tampa, and before that, two-thirds of me came from places where you’re lucky if ice will last in your drink. My DNA is coded to withstand heat, like Teflon, and has several warning labels about letting the temperature get below 50. “Caution: In freezing temperatures, skeleton may eject from body. Look for it in Key West.” I don’t know blizzards, but some strange part of me — the part I’ve […]

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The Secret to Effective Warning Labels

I think it’s time we do something about warning labels on products, and especially tools. Oh, and if you think I’m going to advocate removing them all, you’ve got another thing coming. I want them to be more effective — even interesting — and I think I’ve found a way. First, let’s remember that the real purpose of labels stuck on power saws, ladders, toasters and toothbrushes is not safety, but preventing lawsuits. When a guy named Drunk Bob accidentally plugs his un-electric toothbrush into a wall socket, that tends to, uh, spark legal filings. But not if Drunk Bob’s toothbrush had a 13-page manual that clearly warned of this, right after it told him, “Don’t stick in ear while lit with kerosene” and “Do not use as a weapon during a bar fight.” Only they’re so ridiculous, no one pays attention to them. Warnings should be heeded, not something you try on a boring weekend — “I wonder what WOULD happen if I dropped a running hair dryer into a bath tub full of water.” So I’ve struck upon something, and hear me out: Instead of warning labels, lets use the X-rays of people who have misused these products and wounded themselves. I’m serious. A recent and perfect example: A man was using a nail gun. It misfired and a nail several inches long shot into the roof of his mouth and poked about four inches into his brain. Miraculously, he survived. Even more miraculously, he didn’t realize he […]

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An Alligator Addiction

I got my wife a lot of nice things for Christmas. I always do. I’m a nice guy. I buy nice things. I got her a spa package, and a calendar with very bizarre chickens in it, and a book the size of a garbage dumpster with every cartoon that has ever been published in The New Yorker. They were nice gifts. I spent a lot of time thinking about them. But I don’t think anything she got this year came close to something her mother got her — a year’s pass to the St. Augustine Alligator Farm. Her eyes lit up like a little kid and she blurted out, “YES! Just what I wanted.” “Eh?” was my reaction. I had never been to the alligator farm in all the years I’ve lived in St. Augustine. And neither had my wife. She has been talking about it since about the day we met, but I had never taken her. A strike against me, but it didn’t seem like the kind of place you take a girl on a date — “And over here is another reptile who can rip off your limbs before drowning you. Feel like making out during the animal show?” So when her sister came to town, she went without me, and now she’s a regular Crocodile Hunter. She wants the newsletter. She wants to work there. She wants to raise alligators and teach them how to be civilized and knit. She wants to give them all […]

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Here Come the Big Keys Rats

So here it is Jan. 7 and we already have a contender for the most bizarre story of the year. Maybe you saw it the other morning. It was headlined “Large African Gambian rats have Keys officials worried.” This should be one heck of a new year if we’re starting it like this. It was really the subhead that caught my attention: “Rats that can grow as big as a raccoon could threaten other species …” What? Big as raccoons? Now that’s what I call a rat. The African Gambian pouch rat. And officials down there are worried the needle-nose critters could decimate local wildlife and run off tourists. Tourists will swim with barracuda, but mention a rat and they’re off to the other coast. What a great story. When I was a reporter it was the kind of piece I literally begged for. Something that is filled with color and total absurdity — that draws all kinds of great imagery in a reader’s head. Like how it mentioned pouch rats are so big they don’t have any natural predators. Cats won’t go near them. It cites a woman who went outside one night to investigate a loud shrieking noise only two find two pouch rats fighting, maybe over a girl named Judy or some pizza crust. Then, and here’s the kicker, what’s watching the whole thing but two cats. In my mind I hear one cat lean over to the other and whisper, “Jeez, the neighborhood’s really going downhill […]

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