"Alligator found guarding 34 pounds of pot in a Northern California home."

"[Sheriff's Sgt. J.D. ] Nelson said [Assif ] Mayar apparently acquired the alligator, named 'Mr. Teeth,' in 1996 to commemorate the death of rapper Tupac Shakur."

It all makes sense. If you had an alligator, you'd name it Mr. Teeth. If you had a big supply of marijuana and an alligator, you'd use the alligator to guard the marijuana. If you wanted to "commemorate the death" of Tupac Shakur, you'd acquire an alligator. I don't even know why banalities of this kind make it into the newspaper. You might say, well, maybe they had an exciting picture they wanted to scare us with. Actually, they have 2 pictures. I especially liked this one:

Alligators are very sensitive.

Non-native pythons and anacondas are eating all the native mammals in the southern part of the Everglades.

WaPo reports:

The snakes are literally fighting with alligators to sit atop the swamp’s food chain. In October, a 16-foot python was found resting after devouring a deer.

“There aren’t many native mammals that pythons can’t choke down,” said Robert N. Reed, a research wildlife biologist at the U.S. Geologial Survey’s Fort Collins Science Center....

The snakes were released by pet owners into the Everglades, where they started to breed....

The Obama administration recently banned the import and interstate commerce of Burmese python, two species of African pythons, and the yellow anaconda. But under pressure from the U.S. Association of Reptile Keepers, trade of the world’s longest snake, the reticulated python, and the boa constrictor were allowed to continue....

What's the point? Is the solution to ban pet snakes or not? If you don't have the political will to do it, why do it part way? But if the real problem is the idiots who release pets into the wild, why not punish them severely enough to get some deterrence? And yet, the problem is already out there. The swamp is full of snakes that are lunching on everything and breeding like mad.

I love the last line of the article. It's like the ending of a 1950s monster movie:

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service predicted that a new generations of Burmese pythons on the edge of their non-native range can adapt and “expand to colder climates.”

And now... they're coming for you!

IN THE COMMENTS: ~N. quoting the article — "The snakes are literally fighting with alligators to sit atop the swamp’s food chain" — said:

Yeah. They made a movie about this.

Ah, yes! I found the fabulous trailer:

Chomp ahoy.

Animation of my photograph by Chip Ahoy. Witticism for the title of this post by Meade.

Tags.

You may have noticed that I've started making more specific tags -- the various labels at the end of each post. There are so many posts on this blog that huge numbers build up in the broad tag categories. The "Obama" tag has 896 posts.

So I've decided to get more specific -- with that "boring Obama speech" tag I created today and "Obama songs," things like that. There is a danger I'll make a new tag and then forget to use it again, like "shut up and believe." I sort of remember to use "written strangely early in the morning," but probably not as often as I write something strangely early in the morning.

When I first started doing tags, I tried to keep it general, with things like "animals." Now, when I have a post about an animal, I make a tag for the specific animal. Then, I do a search for all the old posts with that animal, and I'm always amused when some particular animal has been the subject of a lot of old posts. Of course, there are many old posts for "dog" and "squirrel," but I was delighted to find out, after I did a new "alligator" post, that I had 10 posts that could take the "alligator" tag. I had no idea I'd been writing about dolphins.

And today, when I created the "lobster" tag, I saw that I had 16 posts that deserved it. I clicked on the tag to see a page of miscellaneous old posts. I'd forgotten the time we murdered a lobster for dinner. (Recipe for Chilled Pea Soup with Lobster, Crème Fraiche and Wilted Watercress reachable through that link.) "We were just squealing and shooting photographs a la Annie Hall." I wrote that back in 2005, so it not only pre-dated tags, it pre-dated YouTube. It makes me want to do this now:



I love all the many ways the blog lets me reach into the past 5 years.

"Alligator shows political bias."

Headline of the day.

"Get me a robot arm that looks like the Terminator... but I'd rather have my arm back."

Video and news story about Devin Funck, the boy who lived — minus one arm — to tell the tale of his encounter with the 500-pound alligator they call Big Joe. In the video, he says that when he woke up in the hospital — it wasn't a dream — "I wanted to kill the alligator, but they already killed him."

On Sept. 6, he will be the guest of honor at a car show fundraiser being held at the Northshore Harbor Center in Slidell. He is going to receive Big Joe's stuffed head during the event.

"It takes my arm, I take its head, " said Devin.

I hope he gets a great Terminator arm... or series of arms (which he will need as he grows).

Hey, Florida readers, are you okay?

What a long tropical storm. Is your front lawn a pool swirling with alligators?

The conservative mindset. The liberal mindset.

This half of a Pogo cartoon strip by Walt Kelly says it all:



Photographed from the framed original on display at the Mustard Museum in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin.



Why is that cartoon at the Mustard Museum? The other half of the strip mentions mustard twice, and the Mustard Museum has diverse things mentioning mustard...


(Enlarge.)

... plus a lot of mustard:



In case you're wondering about the second half of the strip: The mouse goes on to say, "Bong! Bong! Bong! Corned beef on rye on the nose and all is mustard." The alligator (Albert) says, "A delicious time of day." And the rabbit says, "Some time call! Corned beef on rye on the nose an' all is mustard! What's that amount to?" The mouse answers, "To you, a buck fifty, with java, two clams even." So the old Father Time character says, "Strike that liberal."

IN THE COMMENTS: More than one commenter doesn't understand the comic strip, and I explain it here.

And here's a link to the Mustard Museum website.

"I high-mindedly declined the Chardonnay-Clay Body Wrap: it savored too much of yet another method of taking in booze, through the pores."

Christopher Hitchens reports on his luxury spa experience. With gruesome pictures of the man who admits that, naked, he looks, from the front, like "a condom hastily stuffed with an old sock" and, from the side, like "an avocado pear and, on certain mornings, an avocado pear that retains nothing of nutritious value but its tinge of alligator green."

He reflects on "self-improvement" in the cliff-hanger ending of what is part 1 of his spa saga:

I ... had to admit what I have long secretly known, which is that I positively like stress, arrange to inflict it on myself, and sheer awkwardly away from anybody who tries to promise me a more soothed or relaxed existence. Bad habits have brought me this far: why change such a tried-and-true formula?

I also take the view that it's a mistake to try to look younger than one is, and that the face in particular ought to be the register of a properly lived life.

Pilgrimmage to 3rd Street.

This morning at about 8 a.m., I set out on a long walk where my goal was to see the place I lived in Park Slope for 2 years before I moved to Madison in 1984. I'd lived in 4 other places in New York City before that: East 91st Street, East 85 Street, Jane Street, and Washington Square Village. Every single one of those places was a 2 year lease, so that was 10 years in New York, with the last 2 years in Brooklyn, on 3rd Street.

I wanted to start out walking south on Smith Street, because readers keep writing in the comments that I will probably like Smith Street. And they were right. I did like Smith Street. (Smith Street was named after Samuel Smith, who had a big farm centered at what is now the intersection of Smith and Livingston and who was mayor of Brooklyn for a short time in 1850. Source: "Brooklyn By Name.")

I found a nice café, where I sat by a window, ate some eggs -- not cold eggs, scrambled eggs, with salmon -- and picked up some WiFi:



Café LULUc. Where they serve delicious french fries with their eggs.

There were lots of other interesting looking places, like Stinky Brooklyn (a cheese store):



Now, Smith intersects with 3rd Street, so that looked simple enough, and I knew there was the issue of getting over the Gowanus Canal. You can't just walk down any street going east around there. You need a bridge over the canal. But 3rd Street, I knew, had a bridge, and I was just hoping the area wouldn't be too dicey. The fact is, it did scare me a little. There was that abandoned handbag near the "hazmat trained only personnel" sign:



And then the canal itself:



It's creepy. The canal was once a creek, Gowanus Creek, named after what "Brooklyn by Name" calls the "Canarsee sachem Gowane," that is the leader of the Carnarsee Indians named Gowane. There were Indians here once, and that oily horror was a creek. The creek was widened into a canal, and industrial development followed.

I walked quickly, across numbered avenues, beginning with 3rd Avenue, toward my goal just east of 7th Avenue. There were only a couple blocks that made me nervous. That block between 4th and 5th Avenues brought back a strange memory. We were driving home one night and the instant we entered that block the police put up a barricade behind us. In front, there were police cars everywhere and cops -- did I see guns? -- squatting for protection behind opened car doors. What were we supposed to do? We kept driving. There's always another block to get to.

Crossing 7th Avenue felt like walking into the past. The trees were so heavily overgrown. Maples, making the street a dark tunnel. A dark tunnel into the past -- more unsettling than the Gowanus Canal.

Which building did we live in? It was one of the first few brownstones on the north side of the street, but which one? They look nearly alike. I looked at the gates, which have different designs, and thought that when I saw the right one the memory of it would light up my brain. We lived on the ground floor -- or I should say the below-ground floor, because the window sills were at ground level. That meant we looked out at that wrought iron gate constantly. Shouldn't I recognize the one that I gazed at for 2 years?



No. No memory flashes. I kept walking up the street, toward Prospect Park. (Named after Mount Prospect, which is now the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Eastern Parkway, but was a strategic outlook -- a prospect -- for our soldiers in the Revolutionary War.) A quarter century ago I walked these two blocks toward the park a hundred times, with two young boys and a husband. See that bench by the 3rd Street entrance to the park?



A big family drama took place there. Where does ours rank on the list of thousands of human dramas that have taken place there?

I decided to walk down 2nd Street, back to 7th Avenue and then walk north on 7th Avenue, which was my long walk to the subway to go to work (at a Wall Street law firm). I wanted to see how it had changed in all these years. Had it become as posh as I've gotten the feeling it has when, living in Madison, Wisconsin, I read in the New York Times about life in Park Slope? (Answer: No!)

As I walked toward 7th Avenue, I saw this:



I know that little building! It wasn't blue 25 years ago. And it wasn't called Two Boots. Nor did it have an alligator out front for my kids to beg to ride. But I knew that stumpy building. It had a big noisy ventilation fan on the roof that undercut the pleasure of hanging out in our backyard (like this).

So let's count the paces from here to 7th Avenue, walk back to 3rd Street and count out the same number (35), and then, here it is:



This is it. Past arrived at. But it's closed up, shut off to me now. I can only weakly replay the mental pictures of the things that went on in those years, when we were all so young.

"One of the biggest acts of political malpractice in the history of American politics."

According to Terry McAuliffe's new memoir, “What a Party! My Life Among Democrats: Presidents, Candidates, Donors, Activists, Alligators and Other Wild Animals,” that would be John Kerry's decision to forbid attacks on George W. Bush at the 2004 Democratic convention. Yes, that was Kerry's big problem all right. He was just too darned nice to his opponents.

Why you should spend a lot of money on your handbag.

To show you care:

For busy women who do not live on mountaintops and who are not nuns, the choice of handbag is fraught these days, sending signals of status, taste and identity that others instantly interpret. “Bags help them suss out who’s their kind of person and who’s not,” the fashion historian Valerie Steele tells the author. “You can wear jeans and cowboy boots, but as long as you carry a $2,000 bag, people will place you where you want to be placed.” Ms. Gallagher dates the bag-as-icon trend to the rise of Miuccia Prada and to the emergence of must-have bags like the Birkin in the late ’80s. As recently as the ’60s, she writes, fashionable women labored to create color-coordinated outfits — the couture answer to Garanimals. Though the purse matched the outfit, it didn’t “make” it. But lately, the put-together look is fashion anathema. Clare Sauro, the accessories curator at the Fashion Institute of Technology’s fashion museum, explains: “Now the goal is to look like you’ve just thrown yourself together and don’t really care.” A $25,000 Gucci alligator bag reassures the world that, secretly, you do.

The preppy look -- what does it mean?

Here's NYT op-ed about the preppy look:

[T]hat craving for order may have been what made the preppy world look interesting in the summer of 1980, when a group of glib Ivy Leaguers (including me) put together the book as a tongue-in-cheek guide to one of America's obscure little subcultures.

Hey, we were just talking about "The Preppy Handbook" here last week!

Anyway, you might think from that excerpt that the piece would end with a pithy political observation about how today is like 1980. But no:

And now [preppies are] back. It makes sense, I suppose, from a fashion point of view. We just got through the hippie phase and preppy was due to be recycled. The alligator shirts and wood-framed handbags are a pure fashion revival, though, with little reference to the original subculture that spawned them.

Maybe sometimes fashion is just fashion, and it doesn't mean a damned thing. And we're not even going to amuse ourselves by reading meaning into it?

That's kind of a new idea, isn't it?

I wonder what that means about what our culture is coming to?

Wild animals in the city: 3 things.

The Capital Times reports this discovery in Milwaukee:

More than 70 ducks in a basement pen were only part of the menagerie authorities found in [Jamie L. Verburgt's] Milwaukee area apartment after other residents complained of the stench coming from the unit.... Others among about 200 live creatures in the apartment included snakes, rats, turtles, a pair of alligators, toads and scorpions. ...

John Walters, Verburgt's boyfriend, was prosecuted in 2000 for mistreatment of exotic animals. At that time, police found a female cougar, female leopard, silver-tailed fox, monitor lizard, two caracals, a coatimundi, chinchilla and a reticulated python in Walter's apartment in Greenfield, another Milwaukee suburb. ...

(Ah, see: there's someone for everybody.) (Mmmm... "reticulated"!) That story reminded me of this passage from "The Life of Pi":

If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it, you'd be amazed at all the animals that would fall out: badgers, wolves, boa constrictors, Komodo dragons, crocodiles, ostriches, baboons, capybaras, wild boars, leopards, manatees, ruminants in untold numbers. There is no doubt in my mind that feral giraffes and feral hippos have been living in Tokyo for generations without being seen by a soul.

And that reminds me of the movie "12 Monkeys," which has a great animals-in-the-city theme. (And to say that is to allow Brad Pitt to make a second appearance on my blog today. So I'll just add that I'm not really a Brad Pitt fan, but I do love a couple of his movies, "12 Monkeys" and "Fight Club.")