Tag Archives: heebie-jeebies

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.

The Last Giant

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2016-03-19LastGiant9834

As you all know if you’ve watched the Animal Channel at all, is that big things once roamed this land we live on. Really big things, like totally humongous things that were Elephant shaped. Only our modern elephants would look like these guys calves if they stood next to them. Mini-mammoths if you will. Then they died and turned into fossils that we go out and dig up if we can get the proper funding.

The largest that we currently know about is the Mammoth Columbi (Mammuthus primigenius). Even its name is big. It was like several of those double-decker busses that they have in London put together. Mammoths lived in the Pleistocene epoch, or about 400,000 years ago which as you also know, is about 382,000 years before the Earth was formed. Our scientists, which are pretty smart guys, are still trying to figure that one out.

However regardless of niggly little facts like that it cannot be disputed that they were here. We got their bones. You can go to any Mammoth Bones display place and for a small fee walk right in and see them. Some places even let you touch them if you’re careful. Can’t hardly argue with that even if you are really bull-headed. So far with the limited funding we’ve been able to scrape up we have only been able to unearth the skull and part of its trunk and the shoulders. We hope to work on getting the tusks revealed soon. Perhaps with a new administration our funding will be restored.

But what a lot of people do not know, even if they are avid watchers of mammoth based shows on the tube, is that there were once even larger mammoth kind of things walking the earth, way earlier than when the regular run-of-the-mill mammoth columbi were out and about. I’m not even sure how that fits in with the time line of when the Earth was formed. I know it sure throws a monkey wrench into the logic, but then that stuffs hard to figure out when you’re limited by really dumb facts.

What we do know however is that back when these really big guys were walking around, give or take several hundred thousand years, they were the biggest animals to live on the earth whether it was here or not. (We try not to take sides when we’re having a serious scientific discussion about this stuff.) How do we know that? Why are we so sure? Because we found one. Not a live one mind you, but a dead one that had the good graces to stay out in the open where you can see it, touch it, walk around it if you have the time, stick your tongue on it and taste it ( it tastes like chicken) and generally be amazed and in awe of its overall size. That’s what you are viewing in the excavation photo above.

The size of this unnamed beast, we are proposing mammoth dwighticus horribilis hoping the fossil naming society will accept it, is close to unbelievable. That trunk sticking up out of the ground could very likely pick up your average sized office building. The tusks are buried in the ground but you can still get some idea of their size as several hundred feet away there is one point sticking up out of the ground. It is taller than your average basketball player and you can’t even chunk a rock from the base of its skull and hit the tip of it.

There is a lot that is unknown about these big mammoth animals but we can surmise a few things. They ate grass. One of the reasons there is very little vegetation left in the areas where these remains are often found is that these guys ate it all. We know that the smaller, more dainty Mammoth Columbi ate up to 400 lbs. of grass and vegetation a day so you can imagine what these big fellas ate. We figure each molar alone was the size of Volkswagen Jetta, the diesel one not the gas model.

Also many of the small pockets of water, little ponds, small lakes and such were likely caused by water filling in their hoof prints or their dust wallows. Like modern buffalo or elephants these mammoths had to roll around in the dirt to remove parasites and sand burs. Just thinking about how big the ticks must have been to fasten on to one of these guys is enough to give you the heebie-jeebies. We also think that they were Vegan, prone to bump into things, but social if clumsy animals. We don’t think astrology played an important part in their lives. They may have used the Julian calendar but our guess is that they figured time by how long it took to consume several cubic tons of fodder, then make it to the nearest water hole and drain it dry. That may be why this one became dead. He was late to the water hole. No water, no life.

If you’re still a skeptic and we know that there are some of you out there, just go to Arches National Park and Mammoth burial grounds and see for yourself. Sometimes fiction is stranger than life.