Stories of madness, death and extreme humiliation
Australians are a bit weird. That’s partly genetics, of course. A lot of them have their DNA firmly rooted in England and the English are as weird as a crack team of mimes on crack. Hell, they used to eat kidneys and kippers for breakfast - and their most successful export product is cricket (which, admittedly, also says a great deal about the sanity of the rest of the world.)
Still, there is another reason that the Australians are somewhat loopy - and that’s because they live in a country that is actually, actively and sometimes quite accurately trying to kill them. There’s a list of the ten most deadliest snakes in the world, and six of them live in Australia. There are also sharks, poisonous spiders and frogs and other weird creatures with only one thing on their evil little minds - and that’s to kill as many Ozzies as they can.
Hell, they even have a jellyfish, called the Irukandje, which is only 2.5 centimeters in diameter but so poisonous it can kill a person in a few lingering and very painful days…
So, it’s no wonder Australians can be a bit strange - sometimes though admirably so:
Mr Howard, 35, almost stepped on a croc as it basked in a shallow pool of water at Casuarina Beach, Darwin.
“He was only a little fella, so he probably got a bit tired in the rough tides or something. All I know is he had good little teeth on him and I think he would have taken a good chunk or two out of you if he had the chance.”
Jimmy Howard wanted to calm down the saltwater crocodile and says his red pants were all he had at hand.
“I just ripped my jocks off, soaked them in the water and wrapped them around its face,” he told the Northern Territory News.
“It was a bit cranky and that was the only thing I could use to cover its eyes.
The good thing about living in what’s not so much a killing field as a killing continent is that, aside from the odd moron, people tend to treat all God’s evil creatures with the weariest of respect - and if they have to deal with them, they learn to be damn creative handling them, like our Mr Howard and his saltwater croc.
Other people in less murderous surroundings haven’t developed these skills in the same manner - to say the least…
A motorcyclist was critically injured Wednesday afternoon when twine that secured an apparently dead 5-foot rattlesnake to the back of the bike he was riding may have come loose and distracted him as he entered a curve on Almonaster Avenue, police said.
Police accident investigators don’t know how, when or where the cyclist had gotten the rattlesnake, and where he was taking it or why. But they said they believed the presence of the snake and the possibility that the driver was trying to keep it from falling off the bike while heading into a right-hand bend in the eastern New Orleans road caused the accident.
Yes, people can be incredibly stupid. Death must be laughing its skinny socks off, every time he catches another member of the human race with his trousers down (and a very stupid look on his face.)
Talking of which:
Phnom Penh (dpa) - A Cambodian man who took off his trousers, tied the legs at the bottom and wrangled a 2-metre cobra into them died when it bit him through the fabric, local media reported Monday.
Khmer-language daily Koh Santepheap quoted police as saying Chab Kear, 36, saw the reptile swimming in a river just outside the capital last Thursday during a drinking session and captured it in the hopes of selling it later in the day.
He tied the animal inside his trousers and a scarf around his waist, but as he continued carousing the enraged snake managed to get its fangs free and bite Kear three times on the stomach.
The newspaper reported Kear’s last words as being “Don’t worry - it’s nothing a drink can’t fix” before he succumbed to the cobra’s venom.
Of course, there are trouser snakes and then there are trouser snakes…:
Firefighters helped operate on a man who was rushed to hospital after getting a metal ring stuck on the end of his penis.
Doctors at Royal Wigan Infirmary in Greater Manchester put out the alert after fearing the man faced amputation as the ring cut off his blood supply.
The firefighters placed a thin sheet of metal around his penis to protect the skin while removing the ring, which appeared to have been cut off from the end of a pipe.
Then they used a mini hand grinder to cut through the ring during a 20-minute procedure.
Not good - but wait for it…:
It is understood the man, aged in his 40s, was given an anaesthetic.
As a card-carrying member of the male species I must say I really, really love that ‘It is understood.’
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April 18th, 2008 at 06:25
I was on my boat with my family at casuarina beach and I saw that croc, I drove right up to it and was centimetres away from it, it was about 1.5 meters long but I tell my friends that it was massive! :D