One Mime is One Mime Too Many

It's remarkable how much more often alligators make the news than crocodiles.

Take today for example. I checked the crocodile news after a week of ignoring it, and all I found was one ho-hum item about someone being eaten and another one about a kid gettting bitten after seeking out a crocodile and showing his ass. But gators fill the news every day.

I might as well cover the biting story first. Some kid in the Philippines went to the home of a nut case who had a pet crocodile, and he threw rocks at it until it bit him on the arm. I know what all you older males are thinking as you read that. "Good for the crocodile." This is what happens to unsupervised, snot-nosed yard apes who don't know enough to STAY THE HELL OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE'S YARDS.

By the way, "yard ape" isn't a racial term. Unless trash is a race.

Women will see it differently because they think with their ovaries and want to mommy everyone. They will wonder why the Philippine authorities don't have crocodile social workers to go around to people's houses and train their crocodiles to be vegans and make them watch Oprah. Who, herself, would make a fine meal for a crocodile. Or even a herd of them, depending on the phase of the Oprah Diet Pendulum.

Women will support the parents' lawsuit against the poor deranged crocodile owner, because a) he is male, and b) he did something weird and interesting. I.e., keeping a crocodile. Whenever you do anything that isn't related to shopping, reproduction, or home maintenance, women look at you like you have three heads. Women would be the most boring people imaginable. If they didn't have breasts.

The way I see it, you consent to anything that happens to you when you are in my yard without permission. And I do mean "anything." And you are not excused merely because there is an emergency or because you are delivering the newspaper or if you can't understand the consequences of your actions because you are a cat. So step lively, keep low, and if apprehended, be polite. I have lots of guns, and as I have pointed out in earlier pieces, I know websites where I can order my own crocodiles.

From your standpoint, the world can be divided roughly into three zones. 1. The Safe Zone. This is your house and yard, where you are safe from me unless you run there for sanctuary while carrying an item which belongs to me. 2. The Neutral Zone. This is other people's property, public land, international waters, and foreign countries. Here you are usually safe from me. Moreso if there are witnesses present. 3. The Zone of Certain Death, i.e. my yard. By entering the Zone of Certain Death, you forfeit all expectation of safety and common courtesy, and the right not to be be blasted forcefully by sprinklers connected to a motion sensor.

Learn the Three Zone System, and we will get along fine. Otherwise, have your affairs in order and say hello to my little friend. Jimbo the non-vegan mail-order crocodile.

Stories like this show why God gives kids two arms. Kids do stupid things constantly, and if they really screw up, God wants them to have one arm left. To do chores with.

That about wraps it up for crocodile news. But gators keep making their way into the headlines. This weekend, Florida authorities have decided to shift their focus from rapes, murders, robberies, arson, and hassling minorities to mount a sting--their word--aimed at people who give sandwiches and Ring Dings to alligators.

Thank God. Now we can all sleep soundly at night and leave our front doors unlocked.

Evidently, it works like this. An alligator shows up in your yard, and you and the kids think it's cute, so you toss it a Pop Tart or some equally nutritious item, and soon the alligator starts to think of humans as little pink food trees, and then it gets tired of waiting for the food to fall off by itself. And then you put down your newspaper and look down toward the end of the chaise lounge and see an alligator attached to your foot. To prevent this from happening, the state takes the alligator off in a truck and gives it a lethal injection. Of warm lead. And they write you a ticket.

And this is important enough to take law enforcement officers away from essential work like tasing mimes.

God, I hate a damn mime. I think I'll write a movie about a superhero who kills mimes. I'll call him the Mime Sweeper. "Man in an Imaginary Box"? How about "Man in a Very Real Box at the Bottom of my Swimming Pool"?

I hate Michael Jackson, and he's one coat of whitewash away from being a full-blown mime. He moonwalks, doesn't he? Where do you think he got that?

It's no wonder he's a pedophile. All mimes have that tendency. They're practically the same thing as clowns, and what do clowns do for a living? Work children's birthday parties. Connect the dots, people. That's all the evidence I need. When are we going to have sensible laws mandating the chemical castration of all mimes? I guess when we get done jailing trailer residents for giving alligators food-stamp Butterfingers.

Crusty the alligator is the first victim of the state's bizarre insistence on persecuting gator-feeders while mime batons and mime spike strips gather dust in police station armories. Crusty is eight feet long, and he likes Ho Hos. So now he must die.

Crusty lives in a canal beside Alligator Alley, a road whose very name seems to indicate that he has a right to be there. They were originally going to call it "Huge Rattlesnake Draped Across the Road Alley," but the legislature didn't want to set a bad precedent by telling tourists the truth. People who are apparently even more trifling and idle than I am drive to see Crusty to throw him Hostess pies and Gummy Bears. They're happy. Crusty is happy. But the state is going to croak him anyway, because they know it won't be long before he becomes unable to detect the subtle differences between the human arm and Little Caesar's Crazy Bread.

Fort Lauderdale resident Jeffrey Bush, at the unbelievable age of 43, says he does not deserve the ticket he got for throwing fish "at" Crusty. Says Bush, "I wasn't really trying to feed the dumb animal. I was just throwing stuff at him to get him to move and one of those things happened to be a fish." Good defense, Jeff. So you weren't making a misguided but good-natured attempt to do Crusty a favor. You were trying to bean him for the joy of causing him pain. In Zone 2, the Neutral Zone, no less. The judge is going to be real impressed. I can hear him now. "And let me give you a piece of advice, young man, before you put on your orange vest and spend the next four weekends picking up dog crap in front of the courthouse. The next time you torment an innocent creature for your own sick pleasure, you make goddamn sure it's in Zone 1."

Right now I'm wondering where they'll dispose of Crusty's remains. Because you know a gator fed out on pecan twirls and Long John Silver's is going to be tender and tasty.

I wonder if law enforcement types are going to extend their logic into other areas. For example, will they start ticketing business owners who give police officers free doughnuts? It starts out innocently enough. A guy who owns a Krispy Kreme comps cop lunches so they'll hang around and repel crackheads. Then the first thing you know, a cop gets confused and bites a clerk's arm off. And then Steve Irwin shows up and lures the cop into a van, with a box of bear claws under one arm and a newborn under the other. "Crikey, 'ave a go at THIS beauty! Oi should have brought twins!"

Once again, the authorities are spreading their wisdom. They explain why Crusty has to be executed instead of being relocated to a suitable area such as a lake in downtown Los Angeles or a culvert in Oregon.

Officer Jorge Pino said the alligators can't be relocated once they've been desensitized to humans because they are territorial and it could upset the balance of nature elsewhere.

Also, it means driving all the way to the Everglades instead of to the dump. But I can see what he means. Adding a strange alligator to the careful system of alligator territories and boundaries which is the fetid swamp we call the Everglades would be like carelessly introducing a bunch of Miami Metro cops into a doughnut shop frequented by the Broward Sheriff's Office. During mating season.

Cop mating season is quite a spectacle here in South Florida. The male cops lie on the canal banks, gaping their jaws and making throaty roars in order to attract females. Unfortunately, lady cops being what they so often are, they're generally doing the same thing.

If we keep killing alligators for eating fast food, soon alligators in South Florida will be just like cops. They will always be around, except when you really need one.

Or something.

Anyway, to show my displeasure, I'm boycotting doughnuts. Until about twenty minutes ago.