The tail continues

She’s back & she’s no longer nameless: by popular acclamation the Bronx Zoo’s cobra is to be known as Mia.

As in Missing In Action.

  

But, according to the snake’s Twitter feed, “my true name is Mrs. Justin Bieber.”

& you know this is a cobra with a mind of her own.

Bone appétit!

We may not be in the dog days, but I still think we could use some dog-gone amusement. & some Danish wag has created a YouTube video that absolutely serves up a meal of grins.

Not the classiest establishment—the waitress doesn’t seem to know that you serve from the LEFT or that you don’t take away over the back of your patron. But in the circumstances I’m willing to overlook that, because the combination of the canine facial expressions & the hands (which remind me a lot of the Muppets’ Swedish chef, now that I think of it) keeping the muzzles out of the dishes is really hysterical.

I did worry a bit about those fork tines going into the maws, but I’m thinking there were a lot of rehearsals before this video shoot wrapped to get everything right.

Death and ...

At 1010 yesterday morning I finally express-mailed my tax information to my accountant. 

I don’t know what it is about the words “tax” and “data” conjoined that turns my brain cells into overcooked oats, but this year was the worst. I’d intended to have all the materials to the CPA by the end of February. I know that he'll have to file notice of extension, but there's nothing I can do about that at this point, given that I haven't been gifted with the Knowledge of Turning Back Time. (& if I did, I assure I'd use it for plenty of other things than getting my tax returns filed early.)

Oh, well—now to put all the raw data—utility bills, mortgage statements, credit card receipts, check registers, etc.—into labeled envelopes & then stuffed into a carton.

Filing for this year’s taxes will come round all too soon on the calendar.

Music to my ears

Here’s an interesting apparent contradiction: you’ve probably heard of the Mozart Effect, the theory that listening to Mozart’s music increases spatial/temporal reasoning capabilities. & the popular extrapolation of that idea to enceinte yuppies aiming classical music at their gen-whatever offspring in utero in hopes of (eventually) getting the spawn into Harvard Business School.

So you’d think that classical music would be generally deemed to be A Good Thing, improving intellect as well as tone in its environs.

And yet police in Portland, Ore., are using the classics to cut down on crime at light rail stations. They’re broadcasting over the PA systems operas, chamber music, symphonies & the like to literally drive away the potential perps who gather around public transit stations pretty much all over the country.

I have to admit that I wouldn’t stick around if BART suddenly spouted Tannhäuser at Embarcadero. & a wind quintet would prompt me to pick up the pace at the exit.

But in general I’d not have thought that Bizet or Copeland would be used to the same end as US troops driving Manuel Noriega out of the Papal Nuncio’s residence by blasting it with hard rock.

But I guess I would be wrong.

TLP 3

March may have been as funny as a bagful of sedated pythons on their way to Dubai, but it was really, really bad for TLP. You know—trying to make sense out of my life.

February went pretty well—I was diligent about most of my tasks & especially pleased with the work I did on improving my health.

But March roared in & I completely lost the plot. I don’t know when I’ve felt so sludgy & drag-ass, which interfered with a number of my tasks. I kept track of my exercise & meals for about three days & then just quit.

Also—you may recall that I made the statement that I needed to have all my tax information to my accountant by the beginning of the month or “I’m going to be one sorry, sorry person”? Well, I’m about to send my accountant enough data for him to file an extension, because I didn’t get round to putting stuff together until last week, when I discovered I’m missing three 1099 forms that will add about $120 worth of interest income to my 2010 total. Though the amount is negligible, the IRS & my CPA are real sticklers for having the official documents.

&, trust me, my degree of sorryness is about as immense as you could find.

Part of my slide into the slough of despond may be chemically induced; my sleep specialist MD (what—you don’t have one?) had added a new medicine into the mix in late February & about two weeks later I hit the skids. We’ve rethought that & moved in another direction, which I’ve been taking for a couple of weeks, so I’m hoping that’ll help.

Anyhow, it’s April now, & all I can do is climb back into that damned saddle again. & hope that the other kids on the merry-go-round don’t laugh at me as I cling to the pole.

It's here...

As if March wasn’t good enough at tickling the funny bones, what with snakes on the town, recruiters from a parallel universe &, of course, Congress—here we are at April Fool’s Day.

Naturally, Google is on top of things, announcing a super innovation to Gmail: Gmail Motion. You use your natural movements to write your emails. So better watch some of those hand gestures, boyo, when replying to your boss’s latest completely unreasonable demand.

(Click on the “Try Gmail Motion” button for the denouement.)

For some straightforward fun stuff, here’s a cartoon that combines two of the funniest realms around us: cats & the office. The panel with the two of them at the copier might be the feline version of a Gmail Motion reply to your boss.

So, fools—it’s your day. Get out there and enjoy!

Yesss--more snakes

Well, March has finally slithered into the sunset. I have two apparently unrelated news stories to support that.

First, it’s not without regret (and some degree of suspicion) that I report the recapture of the Egyptian cobra by the Bronx Zoo. Zoo officials claim the snake was found in a dark corner, as they’d predicted all along.

I’m suspicious because of course that’s exactly what you’d expect them to say; people aren’t going to be falling all over themselves to visit the zoo if they think they may have a really close encounter with a venomous serpent. Plus, how hard would it be for the zoo folk to find another female cobra about the same age/size as the escapee and foist it off on the public? Do you remember that sequence in My Blue Heaven where the distraught DA accidently puts her kids’ turtle through the garbage disposal & then goes to the pet shop to find a replacement turtle so she won’t have to tell the boys where their pet went? 'Nuff said.

And I’m sad about the recapture because it’s bound to have a deleterious effect on the Twitter feed from BronxZoosCobra, which as of 1600 today has about 213K followers. That roving reptile had the rapier wit of a Dorothy Parker perfectly suited to the 140-character tweet format. In fact, I’m kind of surprised she (obviously a cosmopolitan girl with sleek lines and considerable discrimination) didn’t glide over the Algonquin and pay homage to the Round Table with a dry martini. With a straw, of course.

But the close encounters of the ophidian kind this month weren’t limited to the Big Apple. We here in the humble Silicon Valley have our very own story.

The Daily News of Palo Alto reported an incident of a snake discovered in the toilet of a Redwood City restaurant Tuesday evening.

Okay, it was a two-foot long gopher snake, and the Humane Society came and took it away before it could get its own Twitter account and report adventures up and down the Peninsula. But still…

Both the cobra and the gopher snake have been checked out by vets. The cobra’s in some kind of secluded undisclosed location in the zoo’s reptile house, while the gopher snake has been released into San Mateo. I’m guessing that it’ll find plenty of its kin there.

So March has wound and moulted its way to an end. We’ll see what April Fool’s Day brings to us.

Earmarks? What earmarks?

You may recall all the posturing and pontificating last fall about Congressmorons banning earmarks. You know—earmarks are the pork projects that get tacked onto completely unrelated legislation. They allow the Morons to trade votes on the larger bills in exchange for bringing money into their districts that otherwise wouldn’t stand a job in the full House or Senate.

Like a recreation center construction project in, say, Denver, appended to a bill regulating coastal cleanup in New England. I mean, there’s absolutely nothing subtle about these earmarks—think the Bridge to Nowhere for which Alaska Republicans are famous.

Anyhow, blather against earmarks is popular these days, on account of the Tea Party fulminating about spending & the fact that persons of normal intelligence have long since sussed that such projects benefit no one but the pols themselves in the long run. (Of the pols, by the pols, for the pols, so to speak.)

The House even passed a bill ending the custom back in November, but they were counting on their senatorial brethren to scotch the snake, which they did. President Obama has sworn he’ll veto any earmark-contaminated law that crosses his death.

But even as they star in their sound bites & photo ops vowing to go straight & not sully their hands with earmarks, the Morons are circumventing their “voluntary” ban by just going directly to agencies to get their pet projects going, thus guaranteeing the flow of pork into their districts.

Seriously—these guys have no shame. One hand has the pious sock puppet on it, another the begging bowl & the prehensile tail barely covers up the smirk.

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.

Chest thumping & other news

Okay, if it’s absolutely imperative that you keep up with the latest on the situation in Libya, I refer you to a source that’s about as reliable as most: Andy Borowitz.

& look—you get two aging, butt-ugly tyrants with compensation issues for the price of one!