Bitten by an Iguana

I've had lots of pets over the years, but none of them ever got as excited at feeding time as my iguana, Gwangi.

At the mere sight of her food dish, Gwangi leaps from her basking shelf to the cage door. When I say "leap" you'd swear iguanas could fly, because she does.

Not being the sharpest knife in the drawer, Gwangi hasn't yet figured out that I can't open the door and give her the food as long as she's attached to it, so I have to lure her to the other side of the cage with a shred of collard greens fed through the bars.

With any luck, she takes long enough to eat the lure for me to get the door open and get her food dish inside. Supper is usually torn up collard greens, broccoli slaw, celery and sometimes grapes or watermelon thrown in.

It doesn't take her long to realize she's been duped though, and soon she leaps over to where I've placed her food dish.

I try to get my hand out of the way pretty quickly, because, like most herbivores, iguanas have eyes on the side of their head. It gives them a broad field of vision so they can watch out for predators, but it also gives them a blind spot right in front of their face.

Since they can't see what's directly in front of them, iguanas depend on the sense of taste and smell to know when to bite into their dinner, and if I still have some collard green smell on my fingers she will sometimes nip at them.

She's not being mean though, and immediately releases as soon as she realizes her mistake. Iguanas have dozens of pointed teeth and can inflict a painful bite when they want to, almost always breaking the skin. When I first got her and she was still afraid of me, I had to really watch out for that.

Because they start out small, a lot of people get iguanas as pets for children. This is a really bad idea. An adult iguana can grow to five feet long for a female and six feet for a male.

Being reptiles, iguanas don't think like we do which can lead to painful misunderstandings, both for the owner and the iguana.

For an adult though, iguanas can be a pretty cool pet, so long as you're willing to do the research and provide the proper kind of habitat for them to live in.

Ignore the Polls: Obama Wins

Normally political polls are valuable and accurate because Republicans and Democrats are equally likely to actually get out and vote when the polls open.

In that way, whatever opinions they give to pollsters before the election are just about equally likely to turn into real votes when the time comes.

That's normally, but the 2008 presidential election is far from normal because Barak Obama is half black.

Polls today show Obama, the democrat, and McCain, the republican, more or less neck-and-neck in votes. That's not unusual, Americans have a sort of yin and yang thing going on as far as considering themselves conservative or liberal and the two forces are just about equally divided.

Although I consider myself a liberal, I also think it's good we're equally divided on these issues because both sides are just about equally likely to be right and just about equally likely to be wrong and with both sides just about equally popular, we have a fair chance that both sides will correct the other's mistakes, while preserving the things they do right.

I suspect Obama will win the November election by a landslide because I can't imagine any black American who is able not getting out to vote for him, and their sheer numbers will overwhelm the republicans who will probably vote at about the same rate as they always do.

Black people have had a pretty tough time in these United States over the last three hundred years, and Barak Obama's candidacy represents a watershed change in all that. So much so, that even if they're not liberal like Obama, I just don't know what to think about a black person who doesn't physically get out and pull the lever to elect him.

That being said, I like John McCain a lot. I supported McCain long before I'd ever heard of Barak Obama, but, lets face it, McCain isn't the most popular guy among the rank-and-file republicans and I just can't see them being all that motivated to stand in line and vote for him.

No matter what the polls say, it's who actually stands in line to pull the lever that decides elections, and in November that will be Obama.

Astronaut Punches Asshole

LaReeca Rucker's really cool article about UFO's in Mississippi, the recent death of Eric Beckjord, and former astronaut Edgar Mitchell's claims about UFO's, made me think about the whole genre of fringe science today and one of my favorite stories ever.

In 1969, Edwin Eugene (Buzz) Aldrin was the second human being to ever walk on the moon. His responsibility was to actually pilot the Eagle Lunar Module from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon. Buzz Aldrin is not only an American hero, but a world hero as well.

Ever since that day, fringe people have put forth the theory that the whole thing was a hoax. There's a million reasons why they're wrong that I don't have time to go into here. Suffice to say, we really did go to the moon no matter what people say.

The reason Bart Sibrel is an asshole instead of just being a guy who thinks we faked the moon landings, is that he has a habit of stalking ex-astronauts. Besides the yelling and screaming and accusations of lying, Sibrel is known to ask moon-walkers to to swear on the bible that they actually went to the moon, carrying his own bible to aid the task.

In 2002, Sibrel laid in wait to ambush Aldrin at a California hotel. When the astronaut showed, Sibrel accused him of being "a coward, a liar, and a thief" to which, the seventy-five year old Aldrin decked Sibrel in the teeth, nearly knocking him off his feet.

Sibrel made noises about charging Aldrin with assault, but the police and court would have nothing to do with it. Watch the punch on the video below.

Uncle Forry on Facebook

"You were turned into a zombie by Forest Ackerman"

When Facebook first introduced the Zombie Application, it really got to be kind of annoying as person after person was "biting" me online, so I turned the application off.

That was before I was bitten by the most famous Zombie of them all, Forrest J Ackerman.

When I was a kid, Ackerman was the editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. "FM", as we called it, was a newsprint magazine dedicated to all the monster movies from the golden age of Frankenstein and King Kong to the latest drive-in schlock. (Even a movie called Schlock! that had Ackerman in it.)

Of all the classical elements of Western Culture over the past four thousand years, and American Culture over the last three hundred years: none had as much of an effect on my life as those movies and Famous Monsters magazine.

When I grew to become a man, I actually got to meet Uncle Forry on several occasions and visited his famous Ackermansion in Horrorwood, Karlofornia.

He always acted like he remembered me, but I think he was just being polite because there have to be at least a million kids like me that he runs into every day.

Always on the edge of science and technology, Ackerman, now in his 80's joined Facebook a few weeks ago. Immediately I clicked "add to friends" on the hopes that he might confirm me. How cool would that be!

So now, like millions of new facebook users before him, Uncle Forry has taken up the Zombie application and started biting his friends. This time it's different though. All those millions of other Zombie users probably would have no idea what a "zombie" was if it wasn't for Ackerman, so, when Uncle Forry Bites me, I'm gonna damn well stay Bit!