For Serious Scholars Only

It has been over a week since I have had time to update my vital coverage of news stories involving alligators. Since that time, innumerable gator reports have saturated the news. It may take quite a while to deal with the backlog.

First off, if--like thousands of typical Americans--you're going to state fairs in order to buy your own live alligator, please stop. Unless you want a federal beef on your hands. Uncle Sam's jackbooted thugs, no longer content to monitor our innocent phone calls to Al Qaeda operatives and spy on harmless wire transfers from Saudi banks to Western Union franchises in the mountains of Pakistan, are now coming after our recreational alligators.

I don't know about you, but as for me, they will get my alligator when they pry it out of my cold, dead hands. Or retrieve it piecemeal from my garbage cans and turkey fryer basket.

Like the Constitution says, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear alligators and other enormous man-eating reptiles, shall not be infringed. Crikey."

Actually, it's not the feds, but it sounds more exciting when you pretend it's a national crisis and not a local kerfuffle perpetrated by doughnut-ivorous state employees.

Some guy named Jason Johnson was exhibiting alligators and other reptiles at the Illinois State Fair, when a SWAT team from the Peoria Animal Welfare Shelter (which has the hilarious acronym "PAWS") descended from the ceiling on black nylon ropes and confiscated his inventory. They got the job because no one answered the phone at the Animal Salvation Society (ASS), the Consolidated League of Animal Protectors (CLAP), or the Fraternity of Animal Rights Theorists (FART).

Evidently, Jason (or another alligator "vendor") was handing out flyers advertising alligators. Imagine how infuriating it has to be, to be a parent at the fair and have your whiny ten-year-old son get a hold of one of these things. When I was a kid and we used to drive from Florida to Kentucky in the summer, I nagged my parents incessantly until they pulled over and let me buy fireworks for blowing up lizards (durka durka Mohammed etc.) or itch powder to put down the back of my sister's shirt (it works). I can only guess how insufferable I would have been had I seen a sign advertising live alligators. Or hand grenades. Or surplus .50-caliber machine guns. Every time I travel by car, I keep an eye out for those.

The fuzz got wise to Jason's game when some goof called a local vet to say the alligator he had bought at the fair was refusing to eat its usual morning ration of Van Camp's Beanee Weenee®. Something like that. The vet ratted the customer out and then had the gall to refuse the alligator treatment.

This is ridiculous. We live in an enlightened age where I can knock up your thirteen-year-old daughter (or in Alabama, wife) and then take her to a drive-thru abortion mill where--I think--they poke the Shop-Vac right through the drive-up window, and she doesn't even have to ask your permission. But a man seeking badly needed veterinary treatment for a constipated companion alligator is turned away at the door and forced to go into a back alley and remove the impaction with a coat hanger. Is that justice? Is that what Thomas Jefferson and those other old dudes with wigs intended when they drew up the Bill of Rights? Hell, no. My alligator, my choice, bitches.

When alligator constipation treatment is outlawed, only outlaws will have constipated alligators. Or something. Don't make me connect all the dots again. Learn to think for yourselves. Provided that in the end you find yourself in total agreement with everything I say.

Here's a pointless quote which I will throw in to take up space:

Sgt. Tim Sickmeyer, acting chief of the DNR's investigation unit, said Johnson needs a specific permit to possess an American alligator because they are listed on the federal endangered species list as a threatened animal.

"Threatened"? The sick alligator is threatened all right. It faces the threat of an improperly administered enema. I think the vet should be forced to have one, too. That's what King Solomon would have done. Or maybe he would have cut the alligator in half. And had it made into the most pimp-ass tefillen ever seen on the Temple Mount. He'd be out there in his alligator tefillen, davening with a forty in his free hand. Getting his royal crunk on.

Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his crunk-ass glory and FUBU alligator tefillen was not arrayed like one of these sportin' biznitches.

I'll bet if you look in the Talmud, there's probably a story in there about some lady who rolled on her alligator and suffocated it while she slept and then stole some other lady's alligator and pretended it was hers. Some big fat bitch who ate rugelach and latkes all day. Bitch like that doesn't deserve her own alligator anyway.

Am I digressing?

I guess it would be Eric the half a gator.

I love this swamp employee...bisected accidentally...one summer's afternoon, by me...I love him...carnally.

I'm back now.

Johnson swears he runs a righteous operation, but the state people have their own argument, which is, "We are the government and we can do anything we want." They say he hasn't presented his Alligator Emporium Permit, but he counters, somewhat convincingly, that he can't do that because they refuse to answer the phone or tell him where they are. They probably don't want to get doughnut glaze all over the receiver.

This is how government work works. When called, don't answer. When confronted in person, don't make eye contact. When held down and sat on by an angry citizen, promise the world, then lie back and think of doughnuts. Until he goes away.

In the meantime, no one will tell him where the alligator is. Somewhere under a mountain in Colorado, there's probably a big room containing hundreds of confiscated gators, ten pallets of vodka, several dozen delicious Asian hookers, a gigantic vibrating circular bed that rotates, and Vice President Richard B. Cheney. The real one. Not the animatronic bot that malfunctioned and shot that guy in the face.

Just a guess.

Looks like I got off track a little and gave the Johnson story a little too much coverage, so I guess you'll have to wait until tomorrow to read my penetrating analysis of the story of the guy who got bitten on the ankle.

But trust me. I'm all over this stuff.