mld, May 25, 2005 at 4:24:25 AM CEST

Was his name Leo, or Neo?

Can this really be true?

According to the BBC, the Cambodian government on April 30 allowed 42 midgets to get in the ring with an African lion in a fight to the death. One of the governments major conditions was that they get 50% of the revenue.

12 minutes after the fight started, 28 midgets were dead, and another 14 out of the fight with broken bones and missing limbs.

I'm guessing they didn't give the midgets any weapons. WTF were they thinking? I don't think 420 midgets could take down a lion. Had no one involved ever tried to give a cat a bath? A cat that weighs, of I dunno, 500+ pounds?

UPDATE: A hoax. Knew it was too good to be true, but I got the link from a trusted site without checking it myself.

 

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mld, December 30, 2003 at 3:20:00 AM CET

World Record SnakeOil

A zoo in central Java claims to have captured what will, if they are correct, be the world's largest snake, weighing nearly 1,000 pounds, and almost 50 feet long.

Prediction: This will turn out to be untrue. I'll tell you why.

If the snake were as large as stated, it would be half again as long, and twice as heavy as any snake previously verified to have been. Not likely, based on everything I read as a kid working in a pet shop, and devouring all the literature I could find on the matter. There was for many years a big cash prize for the first person to bring in a snake over thirty feet.

Second, some of the other stuff in the story smells to high heaven. According to <link to="www.guardian.co.uk" text="this report" target="none" %>the keeper, the snake was over twelve feet longer when it was captured, but they had to cut out a section of the snake as it had a "rotten deer" in it.

Yeahright. Pythons only eat live food, and their digestive acids can melt bones. This keeper ain't gaining no credibility points with me. He probably has a good career ahead of him in politics, though.

And if they know some way to cut four meters of spine from a vertebrate, and stick it back together, I know some medical folks over here in the States that wanna talk to them real quick-like.

Finally, the pics shown do show one big honker of a python, but it doesn't look all that much bigger than the ones I've seen. It may be at the record, or slightly over it, but it ain't no fifty feet long.

I'll make book on that. :-)

 

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mld, April 3, 2003 at 10:43:00 PM CEST

Calamari, Anyone?

The oceans remain largely unexplored, and there are no doubt still quite a few weird critters down there.

Case in point. "Fishermen working in Antarctic waters have made an extremely rare catch — a colossal squid with eyes as big as dinner plates and razor-sharp hooks on its tentacles, a marine researcher said Thursday. "

I imagine this baby could feed a few hungry folks. Mind you it is less than one-tenth of adult size.

 

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