I’ll avoid the obvious jokes about Samuel L. Jackson’s movie Snakes on A Plane, but for a family from the Memphis, Tennessee area a drive turned into an adventure worthy of an episode on Animal Planet.

Cruising down the road at 65 mph, Rachel and Tony Fisher and their three children were surprised by an unusual stowaway in a situation similar to the Quantas flight that was forced to make an emergency landing. A two-and-a-half foot long rat snake (no, not the Bronx Zoo Cobra)  slithered out from under their car’s hood and then rode along with them for the next two minutes. Rachel, who was driving the car, was much calmer than her husband, but neither of them considered pulling off to the side of the highway to let the snake slither off.

I’ll admit I’ve never dealth with a reptile cruising along with me, but I have had an amphibian hitch a ride. It’s true. Late for work one “dark and stormy night“, I was cruising along trying to make up time through a low-lying area where it was common to see frogs hopping around on rainy night. Granted, it was not a frog horde, but I did have a frog hop across the road, hit the hood of my car and land “splat” across my windshield. Startled, but probably not as much as my four-legged hitchhiker, I hit the windshield wipers. The wiper blades pushed the frog off the glass, but from there it landed on my side mirror. The frog rode about five miles with me before my next stop, where it slid off. And I got to work on time with a tale to tell, even if it wasn’t quite as dramatic as the Fisher’s serpentine story.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that followed, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and NOLA.com did a wonderful job in updating the outside world about the conditions in their city, and have further kept going in bringing the city back together in the wake of the hurricane.  Unfortunately, this is a “what have [...]

Hewlett-Packard is one of the world’s largest companies, and as such, they are not immune to mistakes.  Given their current revolving door at CEO, it’s no wonder the company has been making some bad decisions.  Paying too much money for Palm, killing the TouchPad, and generally just making mistakes left and right due to not [...]

Facebook’s IPO has been an incredible windfall for its founders, and a huge flop for investors.  Since the massive IPO late last week, the stock price has collapsed.  There are concerns over ad sales, revenues in general, and now, there are allegations of insider trading after people have alleged that Morgan Stanley warned favored investors [...]

Solar eclipses are very rare, but they probably should be used as an excuse for a car accident.  Then again, if you saw the sun disappearing, you might freak out a little bit.  A 26-year-old San Bernadino, California, woman blames the recent solar eclipse on a car accident in which she hit a woman and [...]

The Orlando Magic really want to keep Dwight Howard after this season.  Dwight Howard, slam dunk champion,  is one of the best centers in the NBA and that’s a hard thing to come by these days.  Orlando knows they have to do something big to convince Howard to resign with their team, and they’ve done [...]

It was as dramatic as the closing sequence of any James Bond movie.  The clock was counting down–5, 4, 3, 2, 1–and at the last second, everything ground to a halt.  It wasn’t some evil plot that was stopped, but a good plot.  Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, a pioneer in commercial space flight, was scheduled [...]

At one point, the toning shoe was a fad that you could not get away from.  It was a basic sneaker with an odd-shaped sole that was supposedly designed to help the wearer burn more calories and tone up while doing essentially nothing to add to their fitness level.  As it turns out, just walking [...]