Isn’t it crazy that there is such a thing as electric eels? Apparently, they are not even eels; they are “knifefish.” Either way, they’re like a combination between a fish and a belt, and they hunt and defend themselves using powerful electric charges *generated by their bodies.* They can generate a shock of up to 500 volts. That’s enough to kill a large person (or start an enormous car)!
They are like Lightning Lad:
Or Black Vulcan:
[Plus a fish and a belt]
I am going to write more about the science of it here, in this paragraph, later. I have to go to an office and freelance today. I intend to investigate where electric eels get this power. Are they normal eels that swallowed car batteries? Were they exposed to gamma rays? Do they wear one long wool sock and rub up against things? I will investigate once I am done copyediting. In the meantime, try to steer clear of them.
If we don’t learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. I was thinking about that saying this morning, while I was spending hours rewriting one of the chapters I lost when my computer up and died. The original version is actually “Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it,” from George Santayana, but the phrasing was clunkier than the sentiment, so it has been Telephone Gamed over the years.
I learned a lot from this album.
However you phrase it, the saying fit my situation in at least two ways, even though it was coined long before computers started crashing and causing people to have to rewrite fiction and have other first-world problems. So it’s a good, sturdy aphorism, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be reworked in various nonsensical ways. Herewith:
If we don’t learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.
If we don’t finish the casserole, we are doomed to reheat it.
If your dog pukes up its food, he is prone to re-eat it.
If we like what Drunk Hulk tweets, we are apt to retweet it.
If our sheep imitation fails, we will have to rebleat it.
If we don’t spelunk while, um . . . If your aardvark doesn’t, er . . . OK, I think the well has run dry for me. Feel free to chime in with your own, though. I think you will find the bar set nice and low . . .
My online presence has been low lately. Normally, that would mean I was incarcerated or on the lamb (figuratively). In this case, it’s because I have been knee-deep in the first-pass pages of my second novel, Trapped, which is about a group of students stranded in their high school during a weeklong blizzard and is now due for release in February. That’s a month later than originally planned but, for reasons I probably shouldn’t oughta say, a good thing.
Much like a bill must go through many steps before becoming a law, a manuscript must go through many steps before becoming first-pass pages. The editor must make notes, and the author must make changes. Then the resulting pages must be copyedited, designed, and laid out. All of these things have happened, most in this very month.
I received the pages via UPS on Friday morning—the UPS man and I were wearing very similar shorts—then spent the weekend at the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe down on Crosby Street, reading them carefully, making notes here and there, and trying not to get too many crumbs or coffee stains on them.
The picture above came out a bit more “Here’s Johnny!” than intended, so it has to sit here at the bottom and think about what it’s done. On the right in both shots you can see where I’ve scrawled the book’s dedication. This is how the sausage gets made, people, the delicious, blizzard-themed YA sausage. Next up: Can you guess? Second-pass pages! And if we did things right on the first-pass, they’ll be as clean and unbroken as a snow-covered high school field.
I freelance for a magazine company about 10 days a month, 12-5, which is not quite enough to keep me in the swing of the whole office thing. Sometimes, if I haven’t been in for a while, I roam the narrow aisles with the wide-eyed bewilderment of a hermit on his annual trip into town to buy flour and salt. Yesterday, one of the (few) other guys in the office and I arrived simultaneously at a narrow intersection between cublicles. We both stepped aside to allow the other to pass. Then, stalemated, I made the “after you” gesture—hand extended, palm up—just as he said “After you.” His verbal cue beat my hand gesture in the Rock-Paper-Scissors hierarchy of politeness, so I went first. That’s when I said, disastrously, “We almost had one of those Chip n’ Dale moments.”
I was referring to the hyper-polite Disney chipmunks, who were always having exchanges like: “After you.” “No, after you.” “But I insist.” “Oh, but I couldn’t possibly.” The problem is that “Chip n’ Dale moment” sounds just like “Chippendales moment,” as in the famous male strippers, and I could just as well have been referring to, you know, two dudes squeezing through a narrow gap together. Judging by his facial expression, and slight flinch, as I passed, I’m betting that’s how he took it.
I don’t know the guy, um, at all, so I couldn’t really explain it to him. I was going to say, “I meant the cartoon.” But then he’d just think that there are Chippendales cartoons—and that I watch them! Maybe I’ll just wear one of these into work next week:
You wouldn’t think that the eviscerating eye of Doom would blink, but it does. It blinks, looks like a file folder, and has a question mark in the middle. I got a good look at it when my laptop gave up the ghost this weekend: Hard drive not found. I took it to the Mac hospital and they pronounced it dead on arrival, data irretrievable. I am pretty good about backing up my novels, but that’s about it. Final tally: It cost me about 300 bucks, 3,500 words in the work in progress (the thought of rewriting those is an absolute kick in my software), and several years worth of, like, my life.
On the plus side, there are a lot of amusing Eye of Doom
pictures out there.
It was just the latest example of life imitating the musical Cats: “Memory! All alone in the moonlight!” You know, if that song were about vaporized pictures, MP3s, notes, short stories, and Little Pieces of My Soul. So now I’m going through my email accounts, looking for anything that has an attachment. Maybe it’s a picture? A story? A wildly out of date version of my resume?
LOLed of the Rings . . .
I have no folders set up to download the sad little scraps into and no bookmarks set up to navigate to likely internet orphanages (what exactly did I upload to MySpace again?)—I figure I’ll do that stuff as I go—but I’ve got a working computer again. Right now, I’ll take it.
Welcome to Walk Trek 4: The Quest for Pace. Let me start out by assuring you that it was a failure. I had grand plans. I intended to walk from the Upper East Side over to Hell’s Kitchen and then down to the West Village, checking out a few cool places on the way. Unfortunately, I got a late start today, and after writing my thousand words and taking care of some, like, stuff, it was somehow 4:30 already. So I just walked up to the 7-Eleven. Here’s a look at the epic journey:
* Saw a cool bulldog on 76th. It was looking at me all weird-facedly.
* Walked past a Laundromat on 82nd. It had that Laundromat smell.
This came up when I searched “Star Trek 4.” Everyone made
it back from my mission, though.
* Walked past a sad little Ethiopian restaurant, dim and empty, but with a hopeful note taped to the door: “It Is Open!”
* Went into 7-Eleven and got a “BLT salad,” surely one of the least healthy of all salads. But that still equals a medium unhealthy sandwich or a very healthy burger.
An artist’s rendition of my walk. That is
the BLT salad in my hand.
* Walked over to Carl Schurz Park, where a kid named Kashi (like the cereal!) was being reprimanded for reckless scootering. And it’s true: He was a veritable kami-Kashi.
* Read the New York City Ballet preview that came in the mail. Yep, just another dude sittin’ around in a hockey shirt, readin’ about ballet.
* Walked home along the river, watching the city buses circling Roosevelt Island, bringing people home from work.
* Made myself a deal: I can watch an episode of “A Haunting” on Netflix—perhaps the deliciously ominous-sounding “The Attic”—as soon as I write a blog about something—but what?
* Had an idea: “Welcome to Walk Trek 4: The Quest for Pace. Let me start off . . .”
The bus no longer stops at The Place Where the Bus Used to Stop on 68th and 1st. Normally, I would call that a bus stop, but there are flyers on it now declaring: “This Is No Longer a Bus Stop.” Oh, it still looks like a bus stop—two-and-a-half glass walls, a roof, Levi’s Jeans ads—but it is not. It has ceased to be. This is an ex parrot bus stop!
Which raises a number of questions. For example, when a bus goes out of service, is it no longer a bus? Is it just, like, a really big car? And what is the structure now, if not a bus stop: An urban lean-to? A freestanding Levi’s ad? An unfinished solarium?
A large car… Possibly a sedan or roadster of some sort.
Listen, I’m no philosopher. I’m just a guy who blogs about snakes and buses. But if you ask me, it is still a bus stop. The bus just doesn’t stop there anymore. Which is fine, because sometimes that bus is a car anyway.
OK, due to extreme public/search engine demand, I am finally writing this post: Anacondas eating people! Which they don’t :-[ Or, OK, maybe :-] There hasn’t really been a documented case of an anaconda killing and then eating a person—at least not a well-documented case. Oh, they’ve killed people, sure. Pythons have actually killed more pet owners—12 in the U.S. alone since 1980—partly (and ironically) because they are considered more docile. Anacondas, which people tend not to dumbly drape around their necks, have mostly killed members of indigenous populations in their native range and the occasional Jon Voight.
It’s the eating part that trips them up: Anacondas (or pythons) can’t really get their heads around it. I don’t mean that mentally—they have wee little brains—I mean physically. We are the wrong shape because we have these big, honkin’ shoulders.
Let’s face it: All of these sequels were a little hard to swallow.
The giant, or green, anaconda would have much better luck eating a large deer than a small person. And that makes sense, because various deer-like things are part of its diet. The reason—and here you will have to picture yourself as a snake, stretching the hyper-flexible ligaments of your jaws to swallow a meal much larger than yourself—is that the deer sort, well, slopes.
Snakes, in general, swallow prey headfirst. That way, they’re going with the grain of the fur and/or any feathers/quills/spines, which then get pressed down and back. Similarly, the legs fold back and, well, if you want to get all Circle of Life about this, it is basically the same way these animals were born in the first place: headfirst, tucked up, and covered with goo. Except, this time, of course, they’re going in.
Anacondas can eat very large things!
Unless they have big, wide shoulders, because those don’t really tuck up. So there are a few famous cases of anacondas trying to eat people—scientists think the snakes came across the bodies, you know, predeceased—only to get stuck on the shoulders and end up predeceased themselves by the time the snakes were found. Just like there is that famous picture of an anaconda [skip the remainder of this sentence if you’re squeamish] splitting while trying to eat an especially large alligator.
That last one was really more a question of scale, though. Giant anacondas can and do eat smaller crocodilians, and regularly, since they share habitat. They love spectacled caiman, the nerds of the reptile world, and somewhere, an anaconda is probably eating one right now.
“Say what now?”
Which raises the question: Could an anaconda eat, like, a small person? The answer: Yeah, totally. Probably an old one too, since they facilitate swallowing by [again, skip if squeamish] breaking the bones of their prey, and that could hypothetically include those pesky shoulders if the person was particularly frail.
Similarly, even the most famous dwarfs and midgets among us, like that one actor and the family on that show, would be in tremendous danger from a giant anaconda. Which brings us to the most sensitive subject, which I have intentionally put last, to build up your resistance. The most likely potential victims—or, as the anacondas call them, NOMbies—would, of course, be children. The snakes, which can grow up to around 30 feet (and almost swallow an adult) could totally swallow a small child, esp. since [squeam alert, x3—why are you still reading, squeamish person?!] their bones are still developing.
Children? I love children!
And since some humans also share habitat with anacondas, I’d have to say, intuitively, that this has probably happened. You know, somewhere, some time, among some isolated native population. So has an anaconda ever eaten a person? Yeah, probably: someone either very young or very old or just fairly small, and even then, they probably scavenged the corpse.
Is it possible they could hunt, kill, and eat someone, like in the movies? I suppose—but, like, in the same sense that a person might slip on a banana peel and get struck by lightning as they were falling backward into a hidden pirate cave. And, needless to say, if either of those things happens, I will blog about it.
In conclusion: It’s possible in the same way that you
getting with Anaconda-era J-Lo was possible.
As caves are to Planet Earth, the Upper East Side is to New York: An extreme, isolated habitat full of strange, pale creatures, some beautiful, some parasitic, and most seemingly blind to their surroundings. For the last year, I have braved this harsh environment. Here are my latest notes:
Overheard in Carl Shurz Park
“A man sitting on a bench, replete with yamulke and lisp, to the lady next to him: “I’m having a cri-thith of faith, but I don’t like to disthcuth it.”
Spitzer: To a T
I have now seen former New York governor/floozy-hound Eliot Spitzer jogging in Central Park three times. He was wearing the following T-shirts (most recent first):
Pine Plains Hose Co.
Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets
Jeff Gordon “24”
The first is at least from New York, and has a fairly apropos double intendre going on, but the other two seem strangely out of place. Maybe he picks up T-shirts at thrift shops, just for working out? The shirts were pretty worn-out. The other possibility: He’s a confederate spy. I mean, he’s kind of tipping his hand, but then, he never was great at keeping secrets.
Window Dis-played
This is one of those times when it seems like there are plenty of headline options, but none of them are quite right. Like: “Window Dismay” is good but maybe a little too cute, and “Yowzers: Trousers!” is just weird and, anyway:
Sign in store window: “$50 off any denim”
To me, this means, like, two free pairs of jeans. To them, I suspect it is more like one pair of cut-offs for $350.
Aaannnd we’re back! It’s time for part 2 of my sprawling, crawling, random, and entirely unsolicited appreciation of the “Caves” episode of the BBC mega-mentary Planet Earth. Once again, here’s narrator David Attenborough:
“Many caves are like islands: cut off from the outside world and from other caves. This isolation has resulted in the evolution of some very strange creatures. They are the cave specialists, troglobites: animals that never emerge from the caves or see daylight.”
Look at this little guy go: He’s like Daredevil!
And are they weird? Boy, howdy! External gills, super-sensitive skin sensors: You name it, these mini-morlock freakazoids have it. For example, the cave angelfish of Thailand, which use tiny hooks on their fins to cling to rocks in fast-flowing currents and, according to Attenborough, “are possibly the most specialized creatures on earth, for they live only in cave waterfalls,” and then only in “two small caves.”
Similarly, “there may well be less than 100 Texas cave salamanders in the wild,” and it’s worth noting that everything is bigger in Texas, including the cave salamanders.
Look at this guy go: He’s like a cave salamander!
But as strange, isolated, and varied as these species are, they do share some common characteristics: “Living in perpetual darkness, they have all not only lost the pigment in their skin [I feel ya, li’l cave honkeys!] but also their eyes [uh, all you guys].”
Here’s the clip. Tune in around the 4:15 mark for a (troglo)bite-sized portion.
