As a young kid, back when I had a pre-Internet attention span and actually enjoyed reading words of ink printed on paper, I went through a phase of reading ‘A Boy and His Dog’-genre stories. Which kind of made sense, since I was a boy, and I had a dog.

One story in particular that sticks with me to this day is “Where the Red Fern Grows”. A key plot point in the story revolved around an odd yet apparently true fact about raccoons: To trap a raccoon (the kid in the story hunted raccoons, which I did not…and, in retrospect, yuk) you drill a hole in a log, drop in a shiny object like a ball bearing or a quarter, and then pound in a serious of nails around the circumference of the hole in the log, all pointing inwards, at an angle, towards the Shiny Thing.

Read more…