Man Slapped With a Snake

A man has recently been arrested for slapping another man across the face with... -get this- a four foot python in a motel. Now, how he got the snake into the motel I'm not sure I care to know, but I'd like to know which it was, so that I might make note not to stay there.

The two men had apparently gotten into a fight over loud music at the motel in Rock Hill, South Carolina. They'd argued and the victim of the snake slap says he thought the dispute was over, but a few hours later, as he was standing on the balcony, he was tapped on the shoulder and told to "hey, look at this." The man then claims that the snake's mouth was open and it had tried to crawl into his mouth (because that's just where a snake would want to go, right? And if he thought this, he could have just kept his mouth shut, you know). The owner of the snake was charged with assault and arrested that night. The other man peed his pants and had to crawl back to his room.

Poor snake.

Reflections on Consumption: an hourglass

With industry comes

The unprecedented demand for resource

And so ensues unsustainable harvest.

Fueled by the cause of fulfilling manifest destiny

Justified by frontier ethic,

Industrialization reaps the bounty of the land,

Thoughtlessly, Heedlessly, Wantonly.

Without regard for the future,

Without questioning what comes next,

What remains after.

But "after" always arrives

And the unchecked, gluttonous consumption

Will face a stark reality of the finite.

Gone are the days when man can leave his mess,

Simply move on toward the sunset, the horizon,

For he soon discovers that the world is round.

Inevitably, his actions must be assessed,

His mess must be accounted for.

Everything must come from Somewhere.

Nothing ever goes Nowhere.

Sociobiology

Sociobiology, as laid out by E.O. Wilson, is always a controversial discussion topic, and I really don't understand why it's so emotionally charged. Sure, I get that people don't care to have their personal, emotional exepriences somehow made less by attributing them to evolutionary biology, but I don't think that having a way to explain emotions and social interactions makes their experience any less. It's like telling a teenager that all their angst is just due to hormones. In a way, it's comforting that one can attribute restlessness to chemical interactions in the body and know that one isn't crazy. To be perfectly honest, I think it's rather pompus of humans to shy away from sociabiology, yet feel no hesitation in applying similar concepts to other, "lesser" species. We should either give the animals more credit, or condescend to accept the fact that we may be governed by the same evolutionary behavioral laws that we claim the animals abide by.