Beer and snakes do not mix
As some of you might know, I'm the prime perpetrator of the N&R's annual Strange Days feature, kind of an annual News of the Weird-type thing we do at the end of each year. Readers generally find it amusing, and -- a fact I came to appreciate very much when I worked in Life myself -- it fills an entire Life section front at a time of year when we're short of staff and nothing much is going on.
Problem is, pretty much every item we run in that feature has to have a specific date attached -- either the date it happened or the date it was first reported. Otherwise, we generally can't use it. I've stumbled across an item that appears to lack both but was just too good not to share: man sticks rattlesnake in his mouth to show it's harmless. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up:
In early August, snake collector Matt Wilkinson of Southeast Portland grabbed a 20-inch rattler off the highway near Maupin in Central Oregon.Three weeks later, in a show of daring for an ex-girlfriend, Wilkinson stuck the snake in his mouth. He was near death with a tongue swollen to the point it spilled out of his mouth and blocked his throat when emergency room and trauma surgeons at OHSU saved his life.
The 23-year-old became a celebrity of sorts today when broadcast and cable news channels all over the country wondered at his story. On the phone, still out of sorts with sore muscles and nerves from the venom, he sounded circumspect.
Matt. Dude. How?
"You can assume alcohol was involved," he said.
Dude. Ya think?
(Big tip o' the rattler-skin hat to Mr. Sun)
Comments (2)
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Not so! Too much beer and you see snakes, Then you feel them twisting around in your stomach, and then you wish one of them would become an extremely poisonous viper and bite you so that sudden death ensues. Brenda Bowers
I know about these things because I was there about 40 years ago and never ever forgot the experience, therefore I never repeated it. BB
Posted on November 15, 2007 3:21 PM
Brenda, I vaguely recall a humor piece I read somewhere a long time ago, possibly in National Lampoon, that discussed the effects of combining various combinations of illegal drugs. The one that stuck with me -- ostensibly the effect of combining airplane glue with something else I can't remember -- went something like this:
"Your skin crawls off your body and goes to snuggle with the warm primate in the corner. You think you are going to die. Snakes arrive. Then you die."
Posted on November 15, 2007 3:31 PM