Snakes are a plane

Here's the worst nightmare for those of us who are afraid of snakes: A few Asian species that fly through the air.

Today's Washington Post has an interesting article about the gliding snakes here. Warning: The article has an accompanying video of one of these "mildly venomous" snakes wriggling its way through thin air. Brr.

Only thing more terrifying? The U.S. Department of Defense is studying the snakes in search of new flying machine designs.

I won't be getting any sleep tonight.

Mysteries of the suburbs

In everyday social discourse and, especially, on the Internet, we’ve seen an ever-growing number of Urban Legends, those friend-of-a-friend stories that everyone has heard, but no one can prove.

Such wild tales are torn from tabloid pages or dreamed up around campfires, and pretty soon a majority of oppressed Gullible-Americans believe alligators roam big-city sewers and the prosthetic hooks of madmen dangle from car doors all over the country.

You don’t hear so much about Suburban Legends. We’re quieter out here in the suburbs, kinda keep to ourselves, but many strange and fearsome myths emerge from the master suites and empty lawns of Outer Suburbia:

• The neighborhood that’s haunted by the ghost of a persistent child, who rings doorbells and tries to sell band candy. The child will only go away if the homeowner takes a pre-paid order. Then the ghost is never seen again.
  
• Clyde Farber, the Sasquatch of the Suburbs, an extremely hairy man in Westingtonshireham East, NJ, who insists on parading around the neighborhood without a shirt.
  
• A family locked an annoying brother-in-law in the attic of an imitation saltbox in Delaware, then forgot he was up there. When the house was sold, years later, the new owners looked in the attic and found he was still up there, surviving on a diet of rainwater and pigeons.
  
• Stanley Quismado, the man with the perfect lawn and the haunted look in his eyes.
  
• At a certain house in the neighborhood lives a woman who vigorously exercises in the nude. Once in a while, she forgets to close the curtains. You have to check every day. (This one’s particular popular with 13-year-old boys.)
  
• The wily camouflage of snow snakes.
  
• The mysterious lawn workers who vanish whenever a Border Patrol vehicle passes by.
  
• The many sleepless neighborhoods haunted by the shrieking wraiths of car alarms.
  
• Suburban sewers are full of alligator wallets.
  
• This man on the West Side loaned his Toyota minivan to his teen-aged daughter. Though she claimed there had been no accident, the next morning he found -- still attached to the axle -- a torn-off towing hook! Oo-ooh.
  
• Mythical meter readers. You never see them, but you know they’re out there.
  
• Brutus, the dog that ate meter readers.
  
• In a planned community outside Phoenix, a freak accidental release of a chemical gas caused all the address numbers to rust and fall off in a single day. Because all the homes looked the same, whole families wandered around lost for weeks, until finally the Federal Emergency Management Agency rounded them up and shot them.
  
• A suburban park that echoes with dribbling basketballs, even deep in the night when no one is around. Oo-ooh.
  
• Strange but true: The people who deliver your mail do not like the term “going postal.” Trust me on this.
  
• An Indiana man spent the night with a strange woman in his suburban home. When he awoke, he found written on the mirror in blood-red lipstick: “We’re out of milk.”
  
• Prudence O’Shaughnessy, the quiet neighbor with 214 frenzied cats.
  
• Scary: A leaky four-bedroom ranch-style house with a cracked foundation and a sinkhole in the lawn. A suburban fixer-upper at only $429,000.
  
• Really Scary: The flight patterns of a major airport were permanently diverted over a suburb built on a drained swamp, and all the residents became the Zombies of Bankruptcy Court.
  
• Scariest of all: The Creeping Sprawl. What happens when the whole planet is one big neighborhood? What if that neighborhood’s a slum? What’ll happen to my property values then? Oo-ooh.
  
  

E.T. lodestone

Business must've slowed at the 1947 Roswell Incident museum and other alien-related attractions in Roswell, NM, because they've found a new artifact to stir things up.

As you can read here: Local man reports finding a strange rock carved with moons and stars similar to those in a box of Lucky Charms. The two-inch-wide rock also has weird magnetic properties.

Extra points: The hunter who found the rock kept it in his safe deposit box for three years before telling anybody about it.

Poe little monkey

Fortunately, this escaped orangutan couldn't find his way to the Rue Morgue.

Dieting at your desk

Americans are obsessed with their diets and spend billions every year on how-to-lose books and "lite" foods and various other snake-oil remedies. In an attempt to cut off a slice of that action, we now present the Easy Diet Plan for Home-Office Workers.

Millions of people now work out of their homes, sitting alone at computers all day, while the refrigerator is right there, humming its song of seduction. A diet plan for these workers should be a lucrative hit on the market. Get in on the ground floor!

With our Easy Diet Plan, we reveal the secrets to good nutrition known only to those who work at home. It's all about calories, friends. Consuming 'em and burning 'em. But unlike other so-called diet plans, we don't insist that you count calories all day or worry about every little thing you feel like stuffing into your mouth.

No, with the Easy Diet Plan, we teach you that some foods, depending upon how and where they're eaten, have no calories at all. Our research among at-home workers -- who tend to be a peculiarly gourd-shaped people -- has found they are convinced of this Proven Fact, and their eating habits reflect a superstition bordering on religious fervor.

You probably know the most common tenet of this dieting belief system: Food eaten while standing over the kitchen sink has no calories. This dieting maxim is so widespread there are websites maintained by its followers.

What you learn from our Easy Diet Plan is WHY eating over the sink is preferred by anorexics everywhere. It's the Drip Factor. Crumbs and spills from your messy food drip into the sink, carrying calories with them. Clean-up is a snap, and all those nasty calories are whisked away down the drain. Time for dessert!

Research has found many other such exceptions to biology, and they're all revealed in our Easy Diet Plan.

For instance, did you know that food eaten at your mother's house has no calories? It simply doesn't count! Doesn't that make you want to go visit Mom?

Here's one that especially important for home-office workers: Food eaten at your desk contains no calories. How can this be, you might ask? We don't know. But we firmly believe it to be true.

Coffee, that home-office staple? No calories. Even if you load it up with cream and sugar and that frothy stuff people wear in their mustaches. No calories. Not a one. Coffee is a stimulant, people. It burns up calories. If anything, you should drink more of it. Right now. Go get some. Faster, faster.

Food dropped on the floor? A caloric freebie. Of course, for reasons of food hygiene, you should always follow the Five-Second Rule. If the food's been on the floor more than five seconds, it's probably acquired too many high-calorie dust bunnies to be safely consumed.

Here's another Proven Research Fact: Any food you can eat without benefit of a napkin has no calories. No, really. This is why so many of us home-office workers wear relaxed-fit jeans all day. We wipe our hands on our pants. With blue jeans, you can't even tell. For days.

Food items too drippy or otherwise messy to be eaten at the desk or without a napkin should, of course, be eaten over the sink. It's simple logic, friends.

If you work at home, you can eat light, quick meals (over the sink) several times a day rather than sitting down to the dining table for three hearty, calorie-heavy meals. This so-called "grazing" method is recommended by dietitians and snake-oil salesmen worldwide.

By "grazing," some at-home workers have been known to eat upwards of 15 light, nutritious meals a day! And they don't gain more than twenty, twenty-five pounds per year. Try applying your calorie math to that!

By carefully monitoring your frequent snack-food intake and the geography of your dining habits, you, too, could enjoy the benefits of the Easy Diet Plan for Home-Office Workers.

Sign up today!

CEO = Corporate ethics omitted

Today's topic: "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Lying."

Corporate America has been shaken and stirred recently by one scandal after another. Almost daily, it's revealed that trusted honchos lied about their companies' financial health, then sold off their own stock holdings before the resulting crash. Or, they "cooked the books" to make them more palatable to investors. Or, they "loaned" themselves millions they knew they'd never pay back, then fled through the nearest fire exit.

The Bush administration has pledged -- without audible snickering -- to go after these corporate criminals, and a handful have been arrested. A few crooked CEOs eventually will exchange their pinstripes for a different sort of striped suit, one that complements the surrounding décor of steel bars and clanging doors.

(We can only hope they don't wind up in so-called "country club" prisons with cable TV and tennis courts. The average American wants corporate wrongdoers locked up in real prisons, preferably in the same cell with Junior, a sweaty 360-pound inmate who likes to dance.)

Whatever the punishment, it's too little too late for those of us who had money in the stock market or in one of the looted pension funds. We've lost our assets, the economy is staggering like a drunk on payday, and our dreams of retirement homes now center around cardboard boxes that once contained major appliances.

These shocking developments have led Americans to lose faith in Big Business and to ask themselves whether "business ethics" has become a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron like "jumbo shrimp" or "holy war."

Now, no doubt, we're in for a long period of navel-gazing as pundits, politicians and tycoons re-examine the nation's business practices in search of any evidence of ethics. It's an opportunity we shouldn't let slip away.

All of us should take a hard look at our own business ethics. Whether you work for a multinational corporate conglomerate or off your kitchen table, you're given the choice, nearly every day, between cheating and conducting business in an honest fashion.

How to be sure you're on the right road? Examine your own ethical nature with the following quiz:

Question: If given the opportunity, which office supplies would you steal for home use?

A. Pens and pencils.
B. Scotch tape.
C. Oil paintings off the walls.
D. The corporate jet.

Q: You're making change for a customer who gives you too much money. You can correct the error or pocket the difference. How much money would it take for you to choose the dishonest route?

A. Dime.
B. Quarter.
C. Dollar.
D. $400 billion.

Q: What should be the proper slogan for corporate America?

A. "The business of America is business."
B. "The customer is always right."
C. "Great googly-moogly, where'd my 401(k) go?"
D. "Greed is good."

Q. What is your worst vice?

A. Lying.
B. Cheating.
C. Stealing.
D. Making Securities Exchange Commission investigators weep.

Q: Say your company is going under and you're caught cashing in your stock options on the way to the Bahamas with a false identity and a briefcase full of purloined pensions. You should:

A. Claim it was all a misunderstanding and offer to repay the money.
B. Claim you were set up by your competitors.
C. Blame your employees.
D. Blame your accountant.

Q: If a client complains about a service or product, you should:

A. Refund his money.
B. Solve the problem to the client's satisfaction, no matter how much time or expense is involved.
C. Show him the fine print where it says you're liable for nothing, ever.
D. Buy the client's firm and liquidate it.

Scoring: If you answered "A" or "B" to any of the above, there might be hope for you yet, if you clean up your act. If you answered "C," it's too late to change. You might want to "make a killing in real estate" by investing in boxes labeled "Amana."

However, if you answered "D" to all of the above, then you're ready for a job as a chief executive officer in a major international corporation.

The recent arrests have created some new openings at the CEO level, but you'd better hurry. Junior's dance card is getting full.

Reader feeder

Thanks to my wife and something called FeedBurner, you can now subscribe to the Home Front blog by e-mail or by a "reader." Beats me. Click on the orange thingies at top left and follow the directions.

Good luck,

Steve

Seeing stars

Horoscopes are silly. Our fates are not shaped by the stars. The zodiac was dreamed up by primitive peoples to explain planetary movements and other celestial phenomena. No right-thinking person truly believes in such superstitious claptrap.

So how come I devour three horoscopes a day? I might be too busy to read beyond the headlines when it comes to world events, but I've always got time to see whether it's a good day for us Aquarians to embark on new careers or to invest in Beanie Babies. I confess that I get a little thrill when my horoscope predicts I'll come into money or finally succeed in my endeavors. On an intellectual level, I know it's all nonsense. But on some emotional level, we all hope for magic.

The problem is that newspaper horoscopes are too general. They're aimed at a wide-ranging audience, and the astrologers must try to tap us all on the shoulders to keep us coming back for more. So I read forecasts about new love (I've been happily married for 24 years) or playing the stock market (with whose money?), and I'm disappointed, knowing the stars aren't really aiming those influences at me.

We working parents need horoscopes of our very own. So much in our lives is unpredictable, it would be a comfort if we could get a bead on the future.

Here then, just for you working parents out there, are some astrological predictions for the rest of the year:

ARIES: This year will seem like one long juggling act. You'll have many projects up in the air, and you must concentrate to keep them all aloft. Try to ignore the screaming child clinging to your leg. Expect conflicts at home during any month that includes the letter "R."

TAURUS: A great year for you bullish ones. The stock market will rebound, and you will prosper. So throw everything you have into the market. And (in case we're wrong) make sure your office is on the ground floor.

GEMINI: Family will be your focus this year. Anticipate many joyful family gatherings and reunions, during which you will grind your teeth down to the gums. Expect your no-account brother-in-law to spend several months on your sofa, watching ESPN and eating Chee-tos.

CANCER: Stop dallying and get busy climbing the career ladder! Neglect your family, your household and your hobbies. Work, work, work all the time. Then, by the end of the year, you'll realize you've been on the wrong ladder all along.

LEO: With Venus in your seventh house, this will be your year for love. Many exciting romantic adventures await you, and it'll be even more exciting when your spouse finds out. A good time to invest in life insurance.

VIRGO: With Mercury in your garage, you'll encounter difficulties with technology and machines of all sorts. Car trouble. Computer failures. Exploding cell phones. We recommend that you avoid machines during the whole year. In fact, you might want to stay in bed.

LIBRA: This year will be another balancing act for you Libras. Try to keep your career afloat while also tending to your children and the needs of your spouse. Run yourself ragged, trying to be everything to everyone. Don't worry, next year you'll get a nice, long rest -- in an asylum.

SCORPIO: A year for fashion consciousness. Avoid wearing suspenders; they'll only let you down. Show your individuality by wearing creative ensembles that look as if you dressed in the dark. This will give you an air of mystery.

SAGITTARIUS: Business partnerships come to the fore in the latter half of the year. That tingly feeling along your spine marks the spot where your partner plans to sink his knife. Beware. Take comfort in your children, while you can still afford them.

CAPRICORN: One word -- minivan.

AQUARIUS: Use your creativity and sense of humor to amuse others. There's no money in it, but it can keep you from weeping all the time. Expect an alien abduction in October.

PISCES: Yes, there's definitely something fishy going on around your house. FBI agents poking through your trash. Tabloid photographers in the shrubbery. This might be a good time to consider relocating. Look for a sunny clime with lax extradition laws.

This idea could take off

I have a modest proposal for the leaders of all the countries in the world: Let's pull together and repeal the law of gravity.

What's gravity's attraction? Gravity is holding us down. Think how much easier life would be without it. People would be happier if they could float freely, without gravity in their lives. And it would be heaps easier to get up off the sofa.

Much of housework consists of battling the effects of gravity. Everything ends up on the floor. I spend hours each week picking up the big stuff and vacuuming up the small stuff.

I started paying attention to gravity after I became a father. When you have kids, gravity works overtime at your house. Every time a kid lets go of something, it becomes another victim of gravity. The kid sees nothing wrong with this. Children actually prefer all their worldly possessions spread out on the floor, easy to see, handy for whatever whim whams them next.

When they were younger, my sons were The Spillage People. So much food and drink ended up on the floor, we had to get a dog.

These days, the gravity at our house appears to be strongest just inside their bedroom doors. My sons stagger in under the weight of their backpacks and jackets until they're just inches inside their rooms, then everything falls. I call this area of rich gravity the Drop Zone.

Naturally, we couldn't repeal gravity altogether. If we did, all of us would go spinning away into space, and I don't think we want to go that far, even if it means no more housework. But perhaps we could get gravity to ease up somehow.

For instance, toys would be a lot easier to gather if they were all floating waist-high. I could dance lightly through the room, plucking them from the air as if they were flowers, and stuffing them into a laundry basket.

There would be kinks to work out. What if all the dust bunnies floated in the air at nose height? That's no good. We'd all be too busy sneezing to enjoy our own new sense of lightness. Or, what if gravity relaxed just enough that our shirts always floated around us loose? Some of us aren't intended to expose our midriffs.

What we need, I suppose, is selective gravity. Gravity that we could control. Then we could get toys to float into the toy box while the dust bunnies stayed in the corners where they belong. We'd be lighter on our feet, but not so light as to bump against the ceiling like helium balloons.

This would be ideal. My sons and I were talking about gravity recently in the car. (We spend many hours in the car. They think I'm their chauffeur.) We decided that the perfect situation would be if you were surrounded by a "bubble" of gravity that you could control with your mind. By slightly shifting the gravitational pull within your bubble of influence, you'd be able to move at will, even fly.

This, naturally, would make you one heckuva superhero. The boys decided we'd name such a hero Gravitron. He'd soar through the air, battling bad guys, knocking them over with his gravity bubble or flattening them to the ground by increasing gravity's pull on them. He'd wear purple tights because that's what superheroes wear and also so he wouldn't have to worry about his shirt floating up and exposing his belly.

If he wanted to work as a house cleaner, Gravitron would be on the gravy train.

But it would be even better if flexible gravity was universal. What if we all could control our immediate gravitational fields? Wouldn't the world be a better place? We wouldn't need fossil fuels anymore. We could just zip around freely, our gravity bubbles like bumper cars, without gravity's friction and oppression.

I hope you scientists and politicians out there will get right on this. We need anti-gravity if we're going to keep getting up off the sofa.

And since I've mentioned it first, I'd like to coin a trademark for this wonder and claim a share of all future royalties. Here's what we call the opposite of gravity: Hilarity.