Shipping gator aid to the Big Apple

By DON ADDIS

© St. Petersburg Times,
published July 8, 2001

My old cohort in humor, Paul Dickson, with his pal Joseph C. Goulden, once wrote a book called There Are Alligators In Our Sewers & Other American Credos -- "a collection of bunk, nonsense and fables we believe."

Right up front was one of the classics: ". . . That giant alligators thrive in the sewer systems of our major cities as a consequence of people buying baby alligators from Florida, tiring of them, and finally flushing them down their toilets."

That urban legend hardly was confirmed by the recent discovery of a wee saurian in a lake in New York City's Central Park. I suppose it's vaguely possible the reptile got there via the city's sewerage, or more likely was just dumped in the lake by a no-longer-amused pet owner. In any case, it sure wasn't "giant." This little guy, maybe two feet long, must have missed his portion of the mutation-causing radioactive sewage that's part of the sci-fi myth.

But one thing was confirmed: New Yorkers are a comical lot.

I could tell at first glimpse of the video that it wasn't one of our native gators. It was a youthful South American cayman, once popular as a novelty pet in the States.

So there they were -- New York cops, city workers and bystanders cautiously, ever-so-gingerly reaching at the creature with nets, poles and, I dunno, salad tongs. How to cope with this menacing beast? What to do?! Where's that crazy Australian croc hunter when you need him?

So they called in an expert; a specialist. Up from Florida -- land of laughable country hicks, backward, drawling Crackers and other ignorant rednecks -- came a professional gator trapper, sent for by the hip, urbane metropolites. One assumes they paid his transportation (along with his wife), his lodgings and his usual fee.

Said an associate of his, "If there's a gator in there, he'll find it and he'll catch it."

Sure enough. He and the missus got in a boat and went out there on the lake and promptly found the cayman. The missus picked it up in her hand. (Having the proper tools is essential to any profession.)

And there was New York, looking embarrassed and silly and inept and dorky and ignorant and backward. By golly, I love a happy ending!

I see in the paper that two new studies have found the reason why the big animals of Australia and the Americas became extinct. Human hunters, it says here, equipped with wanderlust, fire, spears and an appetite for meat, wiped out in no time (a few thousand years) the saber-toothed cats, mammoths, camels, mastodons, giant ground sloths and the automobile-sized glyptodont, not to mention elephantine marsupials, huge snakes and gigantic lizards -- all of which leads me to doubt the typical hunter's claim that "we eat everything we kill."

Said one scientist, "Human population growth and hunting almost invariably lead to major mass extinctions." The invention of war helped refine the process.

As we might have expected, a spokesman for the National Spear Association denied the accusation.

Speaking of meat, this bulletin was just handed me from the Miami Herald: "GAINESVILLE -- (AP) -- Pork from genetically altered pigs stolen from the Universtiy of Florida showed up in sausage served at a funeral in High Springs, Fla., university police said."

The experimental swine were supposed to have been incinerated, but an animal technician admitted stealing three of them. One of the pilfered porkers ended up in the hands of a butcher who made sausage from the meat and took some to a funeral dinner. The butcher and his brother had sampled the sausage and allowed as how "it didn't taste right."

That might be because the hogs had been genetically altered and injected with enough gorpy chemicals "to kill a 500-pound pig." If anything had gone wrong at the dinner, no problem. There was a funeral home right close by.

I wish I hadn't been handed this story. I'm already mistrustful of what goes into sausage.

Speaking further of meat, I see in the paper there's a theory afoot that Mozart died as a result of eating pork cutlets in 1791. Just goes to show -- you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't trichinosis.

I don't know if he made them up himself, but Michael Barnett, a member of the Tampa Bay Skeptics organization, came up with a list of "Thoughts for Skeptics" that you don't have to be skeptical to enjoy. Jut a few samples:

All those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand.

I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met.

Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don't have film.

Shin: a device for finding furniture in the dark.

Okay, so what's the speed of dark?

The problem with the genetic pool is that there is no lifeguard.

I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

Ninety-eight percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.

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