America Entranced: A Super Bowl Reflection

 Image Courtesy of US Air Force

What if my cell phone coverage, Internet and television services went out not just on any random day, but on Super Bowl Sunday?

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Santa Goes High Tech: NORAD Tracking Brings Tidings of Comfort and Joy

Updated on Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 8:57PM by James Dugan

While I had to rely on the method of leaving cookies and milk to trace Santa's whereabouts, the children of today will probably look back fondly on their technology and know with pinpoint accuracy when and where Santa had visited.

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A Wii Catastrophe

In 18 years, I have only seen my husband cry once, but the other night, I found him in our basement on the verge of tears. He was sitting on the couch staring at the wall. He just kept saying, “They broke it. I can’t believe that they really broke it.” What he was referring to and what he was blankly staring at on the wall was the $900 flat screen TV that his brother bought him for his birthday.

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Bring it on Ancient Mayans!

A lot has been said recently about the year 2012 and the apocalyptic speculation that comes with it. I remember a similar period of enthusiastic pessismism right before the turn of the millenium. The night before the supposed doomsday, my adolescent friends and I all gathered at somebody's house, with full parental supervision of course (we were much too dorky to be invited to a "cool" New Year's Eve party). We ate wings and played computer games in anticipation of midnight, while my buddy's dad paced back and forth announcing his certainty in the impending disaster known as Y2K. He told us how lucky we were that he has a full basement stash of bottled water, canned food, back up generators, and probably some fire arms he didn't mention to the crowd of teenage boys at his house. Anyway, you know the ending to this story, the year 2000 came and went without incident. All that came of our misplaced fears was a subtle reinforcement of a notion that had already been formed by our life experience; that this world mostly lacks the high drama lurking in our imaginations.

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