I continue to be obsessed with the 49 foot python. It’s a snake. It weighs 992 pounds. They feed it dogs.
I sort of like the idea of snakes that big, simply because it’s darn hard for them to catch you by surprise. My plan to genetically engineer snakes so that they are born with little bells about their necks isn’t going so well. Just not wild about the snakes. Nope, not a bit.
(editors note, June 2010: The link is dead and I have no memory of this particular obsession).
I’ve been obsessed with this for over a decade and you’ve all laughed at me. At last, someone at CNN finds it as sad as I do. Or maybe they’re going for the tabloid-esque ick factor of a story about snakes in the toilet. Do you mind if I at least pretend that they care? Thanks. Appreciate it.
now…some geekiness.
First up: flying snakes. “Flying snakes slither through the air: Fancy moves propel Singapore serpent’s acrobatics.” Ick. I find the idea of flying snakes too upsetting for words.
The sneaky bastards even have their own homepage, flyingsnake.org.
I bet there’s secret flying snake research happening at the Pentagon even as we speak.
Here’s where flying snakes live in the wild, in case you want to get them something nice for Christmas.
Next, a couple of really geeky sites that always amuse me:
Math in the movies is a guide to, well, math in the movies. It’s more fun than it sounds. I do have to say, however, that I tried to watch a bit of Bedazzled on HBO once and it hurt pretty badly. Consequently, I have my doubts about whether it contains mathematical in-jokes, as this letter to the editor suggests.
Insultingly stupid movie physics is also quite amusing. To those of us who don’t get out enough, anyway.
“Boa Confiscated During DUI Stop.” The Washington Post reported:
Commonwealth Ave., 100 block. Police who had stopped a vehicle and arrested the motorist on charges of driving under the influence called animal control after they found a boa constrictor in the trunk of the car. An animal control officer took the three-foot-long snake to the animal shelter. It was later returned to its owner, who claimed the reptile was kept for protection.
Protection?
There was also story about a deer that was cornered in the stair well of an apartment building. How does that happen? Don’t deer prefer to take the elevator?
Burmese pythons have been quietly advancing their quest for world domination since at least the early 1980s. I slept better when I was a kid, before my father’s herpetologist friend shared this with me soon after they caught an escaped burmese python named Julius Squeezer in our neighborhood. I wish the archives of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune were online, I remember the article being screamingly funny to my brother and I.
The herpetologist’s doom and gloom about nature being devoured by invasive species of snakes? Less funny.
an earlier version of this post stated that Squeezer went to live out his days at Jungle Gardens, but I’m fairly certain that is incorrect and he was returned to his owner, so I’ve removed that information.