Snakes alive!

Wow, forget going out like a lamb; this March is slithering like a snake.

First there was the news a few days ago about Jakarta customs officials nabbing two guys about to board a flight to Dubai with bags of 40 sedated pythons on their persons. Evidently they were going to make a killing, uh, selling the serpents in the Emirates.

So a case of real snakes on a plane was narrowly averted when the ophidian bags were X-rayed by security. (If this had been TSA, of course, they would have let the pythons pass and nailed the smugglers for half a bottle of Snapple and a crochet hook.)

But there may now be a real snake on the IRT, because a young Egyptian cobra escaped from its enclosure at the Bronx Zoo on Saturday, and is apparently doing the Big Apple like a tourist from Topeka.

How do we know this? Because it’s posting on Twitter, silly! It had 145,000 followers when I checked this morning; and the Zoo itself has 6000. Its handle is BronxZoosCobra.

Of course, I’m wondering how BZC is actually doing its tweets? I mean, no digits, right? Is it bopping its iPhone with its nose or its tail? Does it have a lizard along for the ride who’s ghosting the posts? (I hope it’s not that damned Geico Gecko—he’s already got enough screen time. If it turns out he’s Tonto to the BZC’s Lone Ranger, we’ll never get rid of him. Like Charlie Sheen with scales.)

The Zoo shut down when the cobra count came up short, and of course Zoo officials are assuring the public that the snake is surely still in the reptile house.

But I’d rather believe the Twitter feed. That BZC is one guy who knows how to suck the best out of a big city. But don’t refer to it as poisonous; as a point of pride, it clarifies that it is venomous, not poisonous.

So you don’t have to worry if you run into it at the Apple store in Times Square.