"My dental hygienist is cute. Every time I visit, I eat a whole package of Oreo cookies while waiting in the lobby. Sometimes she has to cancel the rest of the afternoon’s appointments."

I have two very rare photographs. One is a picture of Houdini locking his keys in his car. The other is a rare photograph of Norman Rockwell beating up a child."

I stayed up all night playing poker with tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died."

– Steven Wright

SO WHAT DO YOU HAVE SWIMMING IN YOUR POND?

From Donald G. McNeil Jr. in the New York Times, datelined Husavik, Iceland, comes the following:

"Here on Iceland’s northern shore, the arctic grouse are wearing their white winter coats as snows fringing the peaks prepare to creep into the lanes of this tiny fishing town. Whoo! say the city fathers. What an excellent place to raise alligators.

Sometimes it seems as if fish aren’t the only things being smoked in this northernmost of northern settings, with smoke and gasses hissing from the volcanic area at the edge of town. Actually, the idea of turning Husavik into the Everglades of the Arctic is not as wild as it sounds. The 'Krokodil Plan', as it is called by locals, reflects the town’s inventive determination to survive.

Husavik is a town of only 2500 people, which sounds infinitesimal but is nearly 1 percent of Iceland’s population, so it is the equivalent of an American city of 2.5 million. But Iceland’s rural fishing towns are dying as fish stocks shrink, conglomerates in bigger towns like Akureyri buy up the remaining fish quotas and young adults slip away to Reykiavik, the capital.

Husavik is striving mightily to avoid that fate. With three refitted old oak fishing boats, if has become the whale-watching center of Europe, attracting 24,000 visitors this year, up from zero in 1995. Its tiny new whaling museum is moving from a former fish freezer to a former sheep slaughterhouse. To keep industries afloat, the town’s companies adapt. They buy shrimp from Norwegian fishing ships to keep the shrimp-packing plant running. They import oak logs from Maine to cut into flooring for continental Europe because the cost of steam-drying the lumber is almost zero here. That free volcanic steam, in fact, is what makes bringing alligators here possible.

About 12 miles inland, there is a geothermal field whose deepest wells produce water at 248 degrees Fahrenheit. The superheated water flows through an insulated high-pressure pipeline to a turbine plant that generates 75 percent of the town’s electricity. Then it runs through a network of house radiators and frost-fighting pipes beneath the sidewalks.

Pure glacier water flows through the turbine plant, too, as a coolant. It emerges at a temperature of 77 to 86 degrees, then flows into a couple of man-made ponds perched on the cliffs above Skjalfandi Bay. Despite the weeds that thrive in the warm water, some Husavikians swim there in winter, drifting through the ghostly stream. Reinhard Reynisson, 41, the mayor, wants to nudge the swimmers back to the municipal pool and replace them with alligators. The alligators could eat the waste from the fish-packing plants. Better than that, the reptiles would attract tourists looking for the total whale-gator-shrimp-cocktail experience. The alligators would not crawl out at night to terrorize downtown revelers since the cold would make the reptiles sluggish. And they would not mix with local species because Iceland’s lava fields and tundra don’t have them.

There is one drawback: Florida experts say that alligators, once full-grown, would not be satisfied with fish scraps. No problem, says Reynisson. People will eat the gators, or skin and freeze them so others can. He got the initial idea from an article in a U.S. Department of Energy magazine about Colorado Gators, a fish farm in the Rockies in Mosca, Colo, that uses alligators to eat its waste and now holds alligator-wrestling contests, alligator rodeos and family fun events like throwing catfish to alligators.

So far, the plan here is in the very early stages. The town council is exchanging letters with the nation’s chief veterinarian and the Agriculture Department, which has a few questions about how this all fits into the ecosystem.

But there’s no opposition in town. Indeed, there is some enthusiasm. Thorotur Asgiersson, a retired fisherman in his 70s, said he foresaw another environmentally-friendly use for the newcomers. Digging graves is hard work in Iceland. "They can cut down on that expense," he said. "Now they can just throw old guys like me to the crocodiles."