Tag Archives: Great White sharks

He’s So Mean He’d Bite His Own Self

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Rattlesnakes. That’s all you’ve got to say to give many people the Heebie Jeebies. And rightfully so. My old man, who I loving referred to as Dad, or Father if I’d done something really bad like wreck the family car or torn out the centerfold in his Playboy magazine, used to say about somebody he didn’t like much that “He’s so mean he’d bite his own self.” to make a point about the person’s character. Now biting one’s own self conjures up a picture of somebody that just couldn’t hold that meanness in no matter what and if there weren’t no one around to be mean to they’d just go ahead and bite their own selves just to feel good about being so mean.

Rattlesnakes are low down. That’s in the western, cowboy sense of not being tall, or in another way, not being of good moral fiber as in “He’s a no-good low-down snake in the grass.” meaning, well, he’s a low-down no-good snake in the grass. Stay away from it and don’t have no truck with it at all. Don’t do anything fun with it like go camping or maybe out to dinner, or even just have a friendly conversation on a hot muggy day. Because they’ll bite ya. Even if you don’t need getting bit. They’ll do it just to see that look on your face.

A really good friend of mine, a lady of good reputation from North Carolina, was one time jumping over one when it reared up and bit her in the foot. There wasn’t no need for it  to do that. She was just trying to get out of her garage and saw it laying there so rather than step on it, she’d been well brought up by a loving southern family and taught not to go stomping around on snakes, so she took a mighty leap in the air to avoid it, but that didn’t mean anything to that no-good low-down snake. It just up and bit her good while she was in mid-air.  She survived after using up most of the anti-snake venom in the western speaking world and to this day doesn’t think very highly of rattlesnakes. See that just illustrates my point. For a good southern woman who likes everything and is good her own self to everybody and everything to be made to feel that way is just not right. Rattlesnakes are just mean.

 “Why do they have to be so damned bitey all the time?” is a question asked by many snake bit or unsnake bit folks who happened to be minding their own business when coming close to one, who then experienced their meanness in one shape or another. “We wasn’t doing nothing to it and it tried to bite us. That’s low down.” See that’s the problem with the world today. There’s this feeling that everything in the natural world has got to be your friend. Well that flat is untrue. Wrong. There’s plenty of stuff in the world that doesn’t give a flat flying fig about you at all. Snakes, particularly Rattlesnakes don’t care about you. Politicians, and I almost have to apologize to snakes when I lump them together, don’t care about you. And I almost forgot, Badgers. Badgers are almost worse than snakes when it comes to not caring. For proof of that just type in badgers in the search box at the top of this page and you’ll see lots of stories about how mean and uncaring badgers is. The Thing About Badgers is just one story that proves my point. Great White Sharks is another. When is that last time you heard about a Great White Shark gently nudging a drowning baby back to the boat to be rescued. Nope you haven’t. Know why? They don’t like you. They is just mean.

The snake in the picture above is a case in point. It is currently doing life in a New Mexico, correctional facility for biting a god-fearing, but upstanding citizen who wasn’t doing nothing but trying to hit it with a stick. Unfortunately for the citizen that stick was too short and well, it ended badly. Now the snake is doing hard time for just being true to itself. Which is a good thing, don’t get me wrong. They should lock them all up and it wouldn’t bother me at all. This one is participating in a new type of therapeutic rehabilitation where it is exposed to people by being placed on display in a glass cage where people can come up and bang on the glass to annoy it. The idea being that this will change the snakes attitude about people and it might, maybe could be, released back into society. It seems to be working as the snake has become pretty indifferent to people in general. But every once in a while a cute little kid will come up to the cage and raise their delicate little kid hand to smack the glass a good one when the snake will suddenly lunge at it, rapping its fangs a good one on the glass just millimeters away from burying those long teeth it that pudgy little hand. So I guess it needs a little more time in the box, so to speak.

I guess if there’s a moral to this story it’s not everything wild in this world likes you. So leave it alone. Don’t mess with it. And try to have good luck when all else fails. Because there are things out there that are so mean they’ll bite their own self just for the hell of it. Rattlesnakes is one of them. Or if you can’t do that make sure your stick is long enough.

April Fools Day – Sorry Australia

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April Fools Day, the bane of serious scientific organizations all over the world.

Here at The Institute we have enough of an image problem without adding to our misery by trying to play lame-ass jokes on ourselves or other scientific organizations so we have had a ban on playing April Fools jokes from the beginning of our presence here on the World Wide Web.

Take our Space Program for instance. How can you be a creditable user of space when no one takes you seriously. You can’t, that’s how. So first thing this morning we sent up our usual reminder to our crew in the “Institute1” our own space station and Earth orbiter, built and launched from our space center over behind the commissary right here on The Institute’s complex saying “No Freakin’ Jokes Today, Got it !”.

Well we were too late of course. We sent the ‘no joking around’ message in plenty of time but the goofs up there were doing that thing with the radio where they say ” What’s that? Can’t hear you.” and “Sorry you’re breaking up,” making those fake wind and static sounds, ” must be solar interference.” then they hang up and keep doing what they’re doing. We could hear them up there laughing and making those fart noises with their hands in their armpits, someone had butt-dialed Earth and didn’t know it, so we could hear everything they said. That really cheesed off The Director, as not doing that joking stuff is one of his most stringent rules. Somebody’s butt is grassed when they get back down here.

Well you can see what they had done in the image above. They had already drawn all over Australia with a white permanent Magic marker dividing the country up into sections. They had sections for who had the most beer drinkers, that’s the spot down in the lower right hand corner where it’s almost all white, a section for how many Australians who had actually seen a wild Koala bear, zoos didn’t count. How many really carried those big knives and actually said “That’s not a knife, this is a knife” pronouncing knife like knoife, and which ones thought Great White sharks were like totally their best friends ever and would swim with them whenever they were asked to. That would be those big blue areas in the middle of the country. We understand the sun shines there every single day and it’s really hot so that could explain that lapse in good judgment.

We finally got a hold of the crew later in the morning and gave them a stern talking to. However the damage was done. We told them to get back there and start cleaning that marker off the place but they said “Sorry, no can do, we ‘re already over Indonesia and by the time we make another circuit the marker would be so dry there was no way it was coming off.” then they started that “Can’t hear you” crap again. Man that’s irritating. Now we ‘ve got to apologize to the whole damn  Australian country explaining that we did it, but we didn’t mean it. ‘Sorry it was an April Fools joke that went awry.” Like they’re going to buy that. So much for our credibility.

To indicate our displeasure with the crew up there in Institute1 we have informed them that their next shipment of oxygen will be a week and a half late, oops sorry, our bad. Maybe they’ll pay attention to the rules next  time. Actually our guy over at Mission Control says they only have enough air left for five days. That could get dicey.

The Institute1,our space station, was designed and constructed right here on The Institute’s grounds. Since our Space Grant had not come through for the fourth time in a row we decided to tackle the job ourselves and build it out of available funds. We were able to get five of those 40′ shipping containers, a tuff shed, some of that 8′ diameter sewer pipe they bury in those subdivisions and a huge deal on off-brand duck tape from our local hardware store.

Picture the five storage containers joined at each corner forming a pentagram with the tuff shed to store the oxygen tanks and other explosives suspended in the middle of the pentagram by the 8’ sewer pipe and all joined together by massive wraps of duck tape and you’ve got a picture of what the Institute1 looks like. Of course there are holes cut in the roof of the storage containers for venting things that have  to be vented, bathroom areas, the area around the pellet stove, and so on. There are also Plexiglas viewing ports around the outside perimeter of the station so they can take pictures, use that pricey single tube 16x telescope we got when Wal-Mart had their sale, and to wave and make faces at the Russians as they go whizzing past in their fancy new space station, the Ублюдок!!!.

If we can keep the Aussie’s from going ballistic over the white marker thing we may not have done our space program irreparable harm. And we’ve got to get our new spaceship, the “Flying Flounder” up there to delivery the next load of oxygen bottles and pick up the empties. The late fees on returning those are horrendous so things have to proceed as normal, otherwise we have to consider pulling the plug on our entire “Visit Space – The Place Where Nothing Is” program. That would set back our entire Scientific Mission structure weeks and weeks if not months.

So one thing we can be thankful for is except for our friends down under, we didn’t play any practical jokes on the rest of the world. That’s a relief. So if anybody from The Institute says “Happy April Fools Day!” to you, just ignore them.