The Last Word

 

Leash burn

 

July 6 – 10, 2015

That about wraps up our Snark Week 2015, but don’t worry, there are plenty of other seemingly adorable animals that want to tear you limb from limb, and we’ll tell you about them next year (if you survive to read about them).

To recap this year’s horror show, we begin with the duck-billed platypus which, according to Erik, is not only venomous but also poisonous — and implicated in all the most intriguing assassinations in history.

Jennifer is intimately familiar with the darkest side of sand fleas — the side that sounds like popcorn and feels like a kid poking you from the next booth at Pizza Hut.

Many of us understand that farming is a hazardous industry, what with all the heavy machinery involved, but Christie reveals the second leading cause of farm injury: The Ferocious Bovine Menace.

A bull in a china shop is nothing compared with the destructive power of a dog in a family home, as Cassie can tell you first hand. Joyous leaping can be just as injurious to bystanders as an intentional attack.

It’s no coincidence that sloth is listed among the deadly sins. Once they were elephant sized, and now all that ruthlessness is condensed into a stealthy mammalian package that doesn’t look at all right.

Image: Jennifer’s nasty case of leash burn.

Snark Week: The Wrath of the Sloth

shutterstock_203659915If there’s a landmass that has them, get off of it now. As you’ll learn in this blog post, the last thing you want to do is find yourself trapped in a confined space with sloths, and I consider a continent a confined space.

For starters, the sloth is the only animal listed as one of the 7 deadly sins. Their slowness may come off as apathy, but it is far more insidious. A three-toed sloth crawling on its belly toward you at a max ground speed of 5 feet per minute will make your hair stand on end. The larger species have claws 5 inches long, which you can right now feel sliding around your throat from behind.

Besides that, they just don’t look right. Chinless with pageboy haircuts, they have a distorted human-like appearance, the stuff of nightmares. Continue reading

Snark Week: Man’s Best Friend?

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Back in the 1970s, Saturday Night Live ran a skit in which Chevy Chase played a very clever land shark. He selected his victims by going door to door. And because no one would in their right mind would open the door for a shark, he pretended to be other, more benign things: a plumber, a flower delivery person, a dolphin.

Land sharks, of course, don’t exist. And even if they did, we wouldn’t bring them into our homes. But a dog in a shark costume? We’d kiss its wee fuzzy wuzzy face off.

But consider this: DOGS ARE JUST AS DANGEROUS AS LAND SHARKS — maybe even more so. Continue reading

Snark week: Killer Cows!

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Apparently there’s some television extravaganza going on this week that makes it seem as if the beach is a scary place where a shark could attack you at any moment. Don’t believe it. You want a dangerous place? I’ll show you a dangerous place. A farm.

It’s not just the little roosters. If you’re worried about being killed by an animal, fear the cow. The most recent CDC statistics show that between 2003 and 2007, at least 108 people were killed in cow-related incidents. The CDC report provides a chart describing some of these incidents, and they’re brutal. Continue reading

Snark Week: Sand, Sea, and Family-Oriented Flesh-Ripping Aliens

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Alien sand flea nicknamed “Old Blue Eyes.” Cuter than it deserves to be.

Some years back, in search of sunshine and sand, my then-boyfriend (now husband) and I packed up the Bronco II and headed down to the Florida Keys (we love punishingly long and mind-numbing drives). We’d brought camping gear because we hadn’t booked anywhere to stay and, more important, we were dirt poor. The fee to pop a tent on the beach was manageable, plus we were still young enough to count Cup-a-Soup and gritty cheese sandwiches as a meal.

The “beach” we ended up on wasn’t quite what we’d had in mind. It was narrow back to front and there was more dried-up greenish black seaweed than sand in any direction. But there it was, and there we were, and we were tired of driving. So we set up camp on the sandiest spot, took a walk, ate a granola bar each, and, having run out of ideas and energy, crawled into bed.

That’s when the many-layered nightmare began. Continue reading

Snark Week: A Silent, Adorable Killer

platypus underwaterI have noticed a disturbing trend on the internets recently. A series of videos, pictures, and posts have portrayed the duck-billed platypus as an adorable, lovable creature. As if it is some cute little bundle of playful, ticklish fun. They’ve even been given a cute little web nickname of “puggle.” In fact, I might go so far as to say the platypus is on the verge of becoming the web’s new hedgehog. This needs to stop and it needs to stop now.

The duck-billed platypus – often called “nature’s mistake” or “holy crap, what is that freaky thing” by scientists – is not a toy, not a pet, and not even remotely safe. You see, platypuses (or “platypi,” as they are called by people who also use the word “octopi”) have a deadly secret. Continue reading

Welcome to Snark Week

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Welcome to the third annual Snark Week! Every year, the Discovery Channel spends a week reminding us how frightening sharks around the world can be. It’s a week of half-truths, embellishment, and occasional outright fabrication. But man, it’s good TV.

But what about all the animals that aren’t sharks? Don’t they want to kill us too? In fact, yes, they do. Pretty much all of them. And thanks to the hard working journalists at LWON, you will learn about five such frightening creatures this week. Are they genuinely dangerous? Sure, why not? Are they interesting? Absolutely. Are they terrifying? Well, they are now.

And just like its namesake, it’s less important that the creatures you learn about are truly dangerous as much as that you feel they are dangerous. Because who needs facts when you have good old fashioned intuition? So sit back, kick up your feet and enjoy Snark Week. Because nothing is as much fun as being frightened by the world around you.

Just when you thought it was safe to say “Awww, how cute…”

The Last Word

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This week Craig waxes poetic and scientific on how wanderlust may (or may not) be etched in our genes.

Cameron plays with fire in her dreams but can’t light one in real life.

Guest poster Naomi Schon and regular LWONer Sally tease out (squeeze out?) the flaws in the breastfeeding-makes-you-skinny promise. (Spoiler: It doesn’t.)

Photographer Steve Smith, who grew up in the Mormon church, shares photos from his new book Waiting out the Latter Days, which he says investigates “the world that did not meet its armageddon.”

And Jessa takes us up a river with a paddle—drawing and cross-drawing masterfully on whitewater but always returning to dip silently into her beloved river of glass.

 

(Photo by Steve Smith)