Hornswaggler | The culture, the humor, a bit of the sports, not so much the politics, and the workplace distraction
Hornswaggle is an alternate spelling of
hornswoggle, an archaic word that means to bamboozle or hoodwink. I take my
pronunciation from the late Harvey Korman in "Blazing Saddles" --
"I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers,
bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits,
vipers, snipers, conmen, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers,
buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train
robbers, bank robbers, ass kickers, shit kickers and Methodists!"
Wonkette linked to a story yesterday about a man in Taiwan who apparently got bitten by snake that was lying inside his toilet.
I didn't need to hear this. I've spent my 30-odd years of life trying to get beyond the scene in the cartoon adaptation of "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" in which a cobra coils itself around the base of a bowl and waits to ambush the next person to use the bathroom. (Here's part one of "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi." There are links to parts two and three.)
The good news, I guess, is that I don't live in rural Taiwan.
There could be other problems on the way, however. A recent article in The New Yorker on the many exotic animals that have escaped or been let go into the wilds of Florida and taken up residence there included some fascinating information on the Burmese python.
According to the article, a zoologist with the U.S. Geological Survey studied what was known about the python's preferences, habitat-wise, and determined that it could eventually migrate to and manage to survive in one-third of the contiguous United States, including large portions of Texas and California.
California has enough problems without 20-foot constrictors lurking in our streams and lakes, so let's hope this zoologist, as other experts in the story noted, is being too generous with his projections.