A practice first brought to my attention by Clarice Starling in the Thomas Harris novel, The Silence of the Lambs. Yes, you cretins, it was better than the movie, and million times better than Hannibal. Unless, by Hannibal, you mean the guy from the A-Team or the guy who crossed the Alps with elephants. What do you get when you cross the Alps with elephants? Your ass kicked when you get to Rome. But that's another joke entirely.
Phoning for fish is a method of fishing that is less sporting than noodling or using a fishing rod and slightly more sporting than drift nets or dynamite. One takes a telephone of the old style, with the hand crank and wires, and performs a little bit of surgery on it. The end result is a box with two long wires coming out of it and a crank. The wires are lowered into the water on each side of a narrow creek in which fish are known to live, and turn the crank when you see a fish come by. The fish, shocked at your ingenuity, floats to the surface, stunned but perfectly healthy. Until, of course, you yank him from the water (stop cranking first, smart guy) and eat him. I'm sure other hardware could be built to do essentially the same trick, but phoning for fish sounds so... pleasant. "Hello, fish? Yes, I'd like to catch you and eat you."
In The Silence of the Lambs, some rural persons with head-shoulder assemblies overly exposed to ultraviolet light find a victim of Buffalo Bill's while phoning for fish, and so take longer than they normally would to report the crime. | 
