One could - and many do - wastefully ignore wallowing, suffocating swathes of time in an effort to formulate a novel idea. Oh, how splendid it would be to be a creative! To conjure fantasies for others! To maufacture dreams for the rest! To mass-produce in Chinese plastic inaccuracies for the masses! And to pocket the profits!

Authors capture my imagination. I always think how wonderful are those talented thought-dribblers, sitting in their rubied wigwams, scratching magic ink onto secret paper with a giant quill.

The desperate irony, of course, is that they really live in grubby, expensive studio flats somewhere which is technically part of a capital city but which is more informatively understood to be a particularly crap suburban coucil estate in denial, and they cram like crazy to get the last scrawls of their hated manuscript down so they can collect their pay-check and spend it all on one night of glorious pretence in which they visit a priced-beyond-their-means wine bar and guffaw in an effort at smugness at jokes they try so hard to get that they fail to notice are either not funny or about themselves. Then it's back to bed and the expected cascade of mornings of miserable brain-wringing, trying to squeeze out another printable titbit.

They slave too hard to tend to their dignity. And yet they needn't work to capture my imagination because I will put it in a cage for them and hand over the key. They struggle to be as mediocre as they are and I worship them for the impossible brilliance I attach to them. All in the name of a good idea! Something new! Something not-yet-thought! Something from outside my claustrophobic mind!

Then, long-rapt by this convoluted dance of aspiration and admiration, our heads lift just once and mother nature sees them rise from the pages. And what a show she provides just to put us in our place! This is how it's done...

Snake bursts after gobbling gator



"An unusual clash between a 6-foot (1.8m) alligator and a 13-foot (3.9m) python has left two of the deadliest predators dead in Florida's swamps.

The Burmese python tried to swallow its fearsome rival whole but then exploded... [Frank Mazzotti, a University of Florida wildlife professor] said the alligator may have clawed at the python's stomach, leading it to burst.

"Clearly, if they can kill an alligator they can kill other species," Prof Mazzotti said.

He said that there had been four known encounters between the two species in the past. In the other cases, the alligator won or the battle was an apparent draw."

Full story from the BBC

Go snakes!

Categories: Science, Weird, Humour, News