There's a video going viral right now of a Florida Aligator carrying a dead Burmese Python twice its size in its mouth.

Not a fan of snakes. Had an incident with a snake that was asleep on the lid of our trash that scared the crap out of 3 year old me when I went to lift the lid, and they've given me the heebee jeebies ever since when I see one in person and am in proximity to it. That said, love using them and snake men in my ttrps as the bad guys, and snakes in the movies, in particular the scene in Conan the Barbarian with the giant snake and with Thulsa Doom's arrow transforming into a snake, and the snake filled chamber in Raiders of the Lost Ark, are among my favorite scenes on film in adventure movies.

-M

I have zero problem with snakes. But then, I'm from the UK where the only venomous snake, the adder, is as rare as rocking horse sh*t. I have never seen a snake in the wild here, which is a shame.


Here's the poem Snake by D. H. Lawrence for you uncultured heathens...

SNAKE

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in an undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

-- D. H. Lawrence

"Asps. Very dangerous. You go first."

I've been watching some true crime stuff, and it's ridiculous when regular people call mob informants "rats", and they always have contempt when they say it. Informing on the mob is probably the most moral thing these brutal murderers have ever done. I'm pretty sure these guys are momentarily fantasizing about being mobsters when they do this, which is kinda pathetic.

Snitches get stitches...

I'm rather partial to both Turtles and Frogs. Grew up around them back when had a koi pond in our back yard. Geckos too