Smartphones and over-connected crocodiles

Comes this story from the Ukraine that I just couldn’t pass up: “Croc gulps phone, starts ringing.” That’s how the headline read. A woman taking a photo with her cell phone at a zoo leaned over the crocodile pen — always a wise thing to do, lean over a crocodile pen! — and dropped it. Mistaking it for a dead chicken, and not realizing he would have to assume the 2-year cell phone contract with additional data and text charges, the croc swallowed it. Zookeepers didn’t believe the woman’s story until the croc started ringing, and checking his stocks, and tweeting that the zoo food made a wombat puke purple for a week.

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Brother bonding under power lines and the roar of a chain saw

As the giant mulberry branch crashed to earth, nearly crushing me to death, all that ran through my mind was this: “Man, I sure do love these projects with my brother.” When I say “giant,” I mean the kind of branch that brushes the fuselage of airliners. They never seem so big when you’re standing there pondering the angle of the cut, how it will fall or why if there’s beer in the fridge you’re out here in the first place. But the minute it starts to go — the minute it starts coming for YOU! — the full scope, scale and size become crystal clear. RUN!

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Skyping away those childhood dreams

There I was, sitting at the computer having a video conference across Skype with a guy in Nicaragua. He’s the designer on the college magazine I edit, a former college professor who picked up and moved to Central America because the surfing’s good and it gets him farther away from me. We Skype a lot. If you don’t know, Skype isn’t a kind of fish, but a program that lets two people video chat across the Internet. It’s almost as good as being in the same room, only I can’t reach across the desk, grab his shirt and scream, “Where are my pages?” (I miss that part.) So there we were, chatting it up like I’ve done dozens of times before when the grandest of revelations occurred to me: “Holy time machines, I’m in the future!”

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The Great Holiday Food Exorcism

It takes mental fortitude — steel in your boots, ice water in your veins, the courage of 18 lions — to do what I did. There was a half-eaten box of chocolate turtles sitting on the kitchen counter. It was like a drug pusher trying to lull me in every time I walked by: “Hey buddy, you looking for chocolate bliss? Why don’t you come over here. This’ll make you fly.” Oh, OK. Maybe just 14. When I caught myself in a staring contest with the box — tears running down my face as I begged for it to release its demonic hold — I finally realized what had to be done. An old fashioned exorcism.

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