Snakes in the Waves

Sorry for my silence the last couple of days. Wednesday I simply forgot to blog, and then yesterday I was all set to put some photos from our Labor Day weekend onto this blog, but Travalon came home sooner than I had expected, and we ended up going to the Tiki Bar at the East Side Club and then to Islas del Mar, a Mexican seafood restaurant on Monona Drive that several people had raved about. It is very good. Today I will probably not have time to put pictures on this blog, so I will just relate a funny story from our trip:

 We were driving back, and I told Travalon about a science fiction story people were writing online called “D@mn, Nature, You Scary!” where one person would write about space aliens having a very negative encounter with an animal that looks somewhat harmless, say a hippopotamus, and then another person would add an encounter with another animal, until it had become a somewhat lengthy story with no real plot except how these space aliens who had been trying to take over Planet Earth were getting their patooties kicked by its nonhuman denizens. I asked Travalon what animal he would add, and he said he always thought the cruelest trick Nature has played on us is having snakes beneath the waves.

“They’re bad enough on land!” he told me. “Whose idea was it to put them in the ocean?” So we were imagining these besieged space aliens taking a break to go snorkeling, or whatever they would need to do to be under the water, and then encountering an incredibly venomous sea snake that would chase them until it could sink its teeth into them. Then we wondered if space aliens would be susceptible to earth venom; in the other stories, the aliens were killed via mechanical means, generally being torn apart although in one case being surrounded by bees until they cooked. (This is actually what some species of bees do to other insects that are attacking their nests.) Still, I couldn’t stop laughing at the thought of someone’s poor planning, having snakes in the ocean. So whoever is in charge of that, could you get on it? Thanks!

Famous Hat