I’ve been reading a lot of news stories lately that keep referring to our economic doldrums as, “The Great Recession.” “The Washington Post reports today on a new study highlighting the effects of the ‘Great Recession’ on marriage,” read one such piece, and still another told us, “How to throw the perfect ‘Great Recession’ party with only a few cabbage stalks, a half-used candle and a dusty bottle of peppermint schnapps.” (Or something to that effect.) The more I see it, the more it bugs me that such a tremendous, devastating, unrelenting period in our nation’s (and the world’s) history has such an anemic and pitiful name. “The Great Recession.” Phooey, I say. What kind of name is that? If you want people to stand up and notice — to really shake in their boots and then go trembling into the world ready to do something about it — we need a name that will make the hair on a fat man’s back standup straight. Something that strikes the right balance of fear, trepidation and doom. Like “The Great Morass.” Or “Crappyville.”
What foulness seeps from the kitchen? Ah … homemade dog food!
“It’s the most beautiful day outside,” my wife said this past weekend. The windows to the house were open and she was on the porch eating ice cream and doing things Floridians love to do in January when the rest of the country is shoveling snow. No wonder people hate us. “You can even start to smell spring,” she continued, “which is why I feel especially bad that we’re stinking up the street with the stench of that dog food.” Homemade dog food, thank you. “Can you really smell it outside?” I asked, standing over my special concoction, a clothespin pinching off my nostrils. “Well, I could right before I passed out. Some of the trees have started wilting.”
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.
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!
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!”
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.