Mood:
lazyToday's blog title is taken from some spam that oozed into my inbox yesterday. Consider yourself alerted (in case you were only planning to be a midnight snack).
So, the other day, I found myself utterly mesmerized by a PBS program called "When Sharks Attack". Predictably, most of the stories were about unlucky surfers in Florida, California, Brazil, South Africa, and Australia. The story that horrified me the most was a guy whose teenage son got eaten by a shark while swimming after dark in a lake in Queensland. That's right, a lake. Apparently, there is a system of open canals and lakes which connect to the sea. Baby sharks occasionally swim through the sluice gates, then grow too big to get out again. After the boy's body was found, fishermen caught three sizable tiger sharks out of the lake.
Let us all pray that the cast and crew of Australia remain safe from shark attack (including land sharks, pool sharks, and card sharks).
Sharks don't give me the willies nearly as much as snakes (I didn't see Jaws, but I did see the Indiana Jones movie where they get trapped in the tomb with 80 gajillion snakes and one torch. Brr.). It's just one of those unexplained phobias that one is born with. One day, in Kentucky, I saw a water snake swimming down a stream. I nearly passed out. It's bad enough watching a snake undulate across the grass in two dimensions, but watching one writhe freely through space made me want to crawl out of my skin and up the nearest tree. Virtually all water snakes are poisonous, which added a few extra jeebies to my heebies.
We used to have a "snake man" in the Old Port section of the city, a neighborhood where sailors on shore leave mix with drunken college students, drug addicts, magicians, tourists, and people with eccentric opinions scrawled on cardboard signs. (The Old Port also has the most fabulous concentration of restaurants this side of San Francisco.) Our snake man wasn't a professional like the one at La Perouse. He was just a regular guy with a pet 8-foot python named Gus. In the summertime, Snake Man and Gus liked to stroll around the sidewalks and attract crowds. In particular, Snake Man and Gus liked to pose outside the window of whatever restaurant I was eating at. I didn't mind, so long as there was a pane of glass safely between me and the muscular, scaly flank of Gus. And so long as Gus wasn't being fed.
A couple of years ago, the cops cracked down on public python mongering. Gus and his owner no longer roam the streets, delighting tourists. And the Old Port is just that much less colorful for it.
Mercifully, sharks are even less of a threat here. The ocean water is much too cold. The biggest worries are kelp drifting inside your bathing suit, and your feet going numb from frostbite (the signal that it's time to get out of the water). A crab might pinch your toe, but you're not going to get munched on by anything bigger than you.
Perhaps I should change the subject line to ALERT: DON'T be a banquet.
