Okay, this is gonna creep everybody out...

My job in the last 20 years has involved tracking and collecting rattlesnakes, handling many varieties of snakes as well as rodents in education programs, and training dolphins.

If you'll permit me a moment of indelicacy, here's the deal with dolphin penises: they're prehensile. Yep, it means "grasping", as in primate hands, giraffe tongues, and dolphin 'love snakes', as otherwise stogy scientists are prone to say.

Once, when my job description included the improbable task of warning nubile grad students about how to predict the impending amorous advances of our research dolphins, I had the occasion to be part of the following conversation...

p.j.: "...and so, when you become aware that one of the males has an erection, you should swim over to tankside and end the session..."

Grad Student: "What did you say about his penis?"

p.j.: "It's prehensile. You know, grasping."

(Long, thoughtful pause.)

Grad Student: "I don't know whether to puke or propose..."

By the way, I'm off today to a local vivarium to pick up a tarantula which I'll be using in a series of upcoming presentations next month. He'll live in the kitchen next to the Arizona Mountain Kingsnake. Honest. I guess if any Mudcatters are planning a visit to the Bay Area and want to stay, you should probably know this...

pj

p.s. By the way, after 20 years of peacefully working with tigers, killer whales, attack dogs and every species of that which creeps and crawls, I am ABSOLUTELY DEDICATED to the proposition that bees are out to get me. It's completely irrational, and totally irrefutable. They are hideous, malevalent creatures who must be destroyed. We'll figure out some other way to pollinate things. I'll help. Just get rid of the bees!!! AAAAUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!