So, this is an alligator. When you walk on trails in the Everglades, these dudes are just hanging out in the swamp — right there, no barricades or chicken wire (or alligator wire? if that exists …) Which is pretty terrifying. And awesome. OK, mostly terrifying at first, but then a park ranger — complete with khaki hat — told me that the Everglades alligators are so used to people that they tend not to attack.

Pythons. Those are what you should watch for, he said.

After getting our fill of alligators, we walked back to the car on a path marked “Bobcat Trail.” That’s not scary. At all. And those are real, too. But they only “sometimes” walk across the path when people are there, ranger guy said.

Love that place. Nature and people are so face-to-face in Florida.

There’s an interesting discussion of the value of technology in the last chapter of this Chuck Klosterman book (same guy who did “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” …).

The heart of his argument: “Technology is bad for civilization. We are living in a manner that is unnatural … The benefits of technology are easy to point out (medicine, transportation, the ability to send and receive text messages during Michael Jackson’s televised funeral), but they do not compensate for the overall loss of humanity that is its inevitable consequence. As a species, we have never been less human than we are right now. And that (evidently) is what I want.”

On a lighter note, his chapter slamming TV laugh tracks — he says the reason they’re creepy is that there are dead people in all of those recordings — is hilarious.

And here’s a fun social experiment I might try: “For years, I’ve tried to avoid overused words like nice and cool whenever I make small talk.” A replacement suggestion, from him: “Wow! That’s an unorthodox haircut.”

But he says that doesn’t usually go over well: “As it turns out, most people — and especially most women — hate this.”

So, I made this goofy video about Consumer Reports saying you can fix iPhone 4 antenna problems by slapping a piece of duct tape on the phone.

All well and good. I figure no one really watched. Then some dude in the line for coffee later that week turned to me and said: “Hey, are you that duct tape guy?”

A colleague suggested I “had been recognized.” I don’t think being “that duct tape guy” is quite the same — really at all the same — as being “recognized,” and the idea of even hardware-store-level recognition pretty much freaks me out.

But I wasn’t sure what to say, so I answered the coffee-line dude with something like, “Um, I guess so?” So maybe I am that duct tape dude. The barista said she’s going to start writing that on my cup now. And baristas know best.

Hope you check back in soon!

PS: The photo is from an Atlanta bowling alley. Makes pretty much no sense, but still awesome.