My mom called me first thing Monday morning.
I know this only because she emailed me Monday night to tell me she’d been calling at various times since first thing Monday morning and that my phone was going straight to voicemail.  She was just making sure I was okay.
I checked my iPhone and there was no mention of any missed calls.  She said she’d left a few voicemails; it showed none.
I called her and asked her to call me back.  Nothing happened.  So I rebooted the phone, hoping that would help, …

The grocery store chain Food Lion, along with the other chains in the Hannaford family, is running The Great Grocery Giveaway contest, which involves shoppers receiving scratch-off cards for purchases they make in the store.
I’m not exactly sure how they determine how many scratch-off cards you’re supposed to get based on any specific dollar amount, because every time I shop there, though my tally is normally in the same general area, I’ve sometimes received two cards at once and sometimes received five.
For the most part, they had been stacking up …

This week, we saw a new hero emerge onto the American scene, a hero whose very appearance trumped two long-held tenets in our culture: first, that the customer is always right; and second, that airlines never get it right.
Former flight attendant Steven Slater, whose now famous (or infamous) exit from a JetBlue airplane after using the intercom to tell a passenger who had possibly assaulted him and probably cursed at him what she could go and do with herself, is now the stuff of t-shirts, buttons and Facebook pages.
And …

Every once in a while, a strange story pops up about a body being discovered belonging to someone who died without anyone taking any notice.
The most recent one I reported was the story of a 50-year-old who told his family he wanted to be left alone, then died in his room without his death (or absence) noticed for up to four years.
Now there’s a story out of Japan, regarding the man believed to be the nation’s oldest-living resident.  Only he was found to be no longer living, and likely never …

For those who’ve never set foot in a television studio, I should point out that most television studio cameras have tally lights, small lights — usually red — that illuminate when that camera is on the air. The little signal tells the talent where to look and when they are or are not on camera at a given moment.
It doesn’t take working in television for very long to learn that in a studio, if something can go wrong, it always will.  Always.
This is why most folks are told to always …

I know a lot of folks up north envy people down south during winter.  Here’s a reality check:  while winters down south tend to be nice with very little snow by comparison, summers are miserable.
Every year.
At its hottest month, which is usually August, the South offers you the opportunity to step one foot out of your house and immediately feel drenched in sweat as soon as the humidity hits you.
That’s worth moving down here for, isn’t it?

Here’s a fascinating piece of history that’s related to obsolete things, which was the topic of yesterday’s edition of the Sunday Seven.
Those of us who grew up with them never had to have any elaborate instruction on how to work an old-school rotary phone. We just somehow got it.
But when rotary phones first started appearing, replacing previous models with no dials that required asking a local operator to route your call every time you wanted to speak to someone, a major educational campaign was produced to explain to telephone …

This morning on The Early Show, a sponsor billboard ran that got my attention.  It was for Nicorette, a popular gum designed to help smokers kick the habit.
Fortunately, I’ve never had to turn to such a product because I was fortunate to be born with a mild allergy to cigarette smoke, which meant I never had any desire to start smoking to begin with.
But what made me stop what I was doing was the slogan — which apparently really is their slogan:

Forty-five years after its death, Roy Rogers’ beloved golden Palomino, Trigger, is returning to television.
The remains of the horse were purchased at auction for more than a quarter of a million dollars by RFD-TV, a rural program-oriented cable network.  The net also purchased the remains of cowboy’s dog, Bullet, a German Shepherd.  Bullet fetched a hefty $35,000.
Both animals were stuffed and mounted, and had been on display at the Roy Rogers & Dale Evans Museum before its closure in December of 2009.

A 50-year-old man tells his family he wants to be left alone, then goes into his bedroom and closes the door behind him.
His family apparently took him at his word. And didn’t bother him. For years. Until it was too late.

Here’s a news flash: singer Teddy Pendergrass has died.
This story was a “trending topic” on Twitter Sunday night, which means that a lot of eager Twitter users were sending tweets to announce it as though they thought they were members of the Associated Press.
Then the message started changing a bit, when a few people who are obviously more familiar with Pendergrass’s career began tweeting a little reality check:

I’m not sure where this is from, but here’s something you don’t see every day: a dog leaving its mark on an automobile after an impatient driver honked at the canine.
I’m assuming this is genuine; there have been other videos posted that look a little less than authentic. If this is special effects, they did a really good job with them.
If it’s the real thing, it appears that someone needs to call animal control. If not for the dogs’ safety, for the automobiles’.