Writer's Block: A Bargain at Any Price
The rubber snakes in my rubber snake collection. I'm nuts about the things. I score gobs of them every halloween, especially, but sometimes once in a while, especially then, there'll end up being these big huge 7 foot rubber snakes, they look so real, they're exactly like great big Australian Taipans, which are some of the most aggressive poisonous snakes on this earth.
Those things will just shoot theirselves through tall grass and suddenly rear up on a man with a loud HSSSSSSS!!!!! People who get bit by taipans get bit on upper arms and necks. The venom is neurotoxic--which among snake-venoms is the kinder-to-experience, yet more likely to be lethal Elapid venom. The venom of vipers and rattlesnakes essentially turns your tissues into jelly. Most people bitten by vipers survive but with massive tissue damage and amputated limbs. But elapids - taipans, cobras, mambas, kraits, tiger and coral snakes - kill you by paralysing your lungs: you just stop breathing.
Zoo herps who get fang-nicks by cobras (delivering less than lethal doses) or get bitten and receive antivenin fast enough report that the venom has a drug in it that makes the experience completely unterrifying.
I guess it just sort of fits with the whole person I am that I'd have this lifelong obsession with snakes. When I was a kid, I had real ones, and I want to start having them again. I am starting to flip over to the Vivarium website and check out their broods of captive-bred kingsnakes. They've gone nuts managing to breed snakes like rose growers breed flowers, crossing albinos with melanos to get these amazing unnatural and striking patterns and colours. These mutant king snakes sometimes look chocolate and orange. I so want one.
But it will cost lots more than the rubber ones.
I have about 174 rubber ones ranging in size from a 6" smaller than a pencil to said taipan monstrosity. Most of them also have colours nature never intended. Someone must be breeding them with plastic dinosaurs..
Those things will just shoot theirselves through tall grass and suddenly rear up on a man with a loud HSSSSSSS!!!!! People who get bit by taipans get bit on upper arms and necks. The venom is neurotoxic--which among snake-venoms is the kinder-to-experience, yet more likely to be lethal Elapid venom. The venom of vipers and rattlesnakes essentially turns your tissues into jelly. Most people bitten by vipers survive but with massive tissue damage and amputated limbs. But elapids - taipans, cobras, mambas, kraits, tiger and coral snakes - kill you by paralysing your lungs: you just stop breathing.
Zoo herps who get fang-nicks by cobras (delivering less than lethal doses) or get bitten and receive antivenin fast enough report that the venom has a drug in it that makes the experience completely unterrifying.
I guess it just sort of fits with the whole person I am that I'd have this lifelong obsession with snakes. When I was a kid, I had real ones, and I want to start having them again. I am starting to flip over to the Vivarium website and check out their broods of captive-bred kingsnakes. They've gone nuts managing to breed snakes like rose growers breed flowers, crossing albinos with melanos to get these amazing unnatural and striking patterns and colours. These mutant king snakes sometimes look chocolate and orange. I so want one.
But it will cost lots more than the rubber ones.
I have about 174 rubber ones ranging in size from a 6" smaller than a pencil to said taipan monstrosity. Most of them also have colours nature never intended. Someone must be breeding them with plastic dinosaurs..