🚀 go-pugleaf

tonyp wrote:
> 
> Adam Kippes <adam.kippes@pobox.com> wrote in article
> <3660cf39.7481253@vnntp.ma.ultranet.com>...
> > In <73mhom$ffn$2@news1.rmi.net>, "Dan D." <dand@rmi.net> wrote:
> >
> > > ->Time for a war.  The easiest way to halve the number of hungry people
> in
> > > ->the world is to kill them.
> >
> > > ... and feed them to the remaining half.
> >
> > Isn't there an old joke about a money making scam based on something like
> > that principle?
> >
> 
> Soylent Green aside, this reminds me of a prospectus allegedly put out by
> some promoter in the Midwest last century, when for some reason there was a
> demand for cat fur.  The proposed company was going to start a cat ranch.
> To feed the cats, they were going to start a rat ranch next door.  The rats
> were to be fed the cat carcasses.  Thus "we feed the rats to the cats, and
> the cats to the rats, and we get the pelts for free."
> 
> Don't ask me where or when this bit of trivia stuck itself like a piece of
> lint to the cobwebs of my memory, but I'm not making it up.  Also, don't
> ask me what the flaw in this scheme was :)

This reminds me of a story I was writing once (still unfinished)... the really
odd part about this is that I sorta gave up on this piece, and moved to
Austin, and one of the guys at the shelter let me know that there really was
such a place, which caused me to bust out laughing so hard that I damn-near
got committed...

Um meanwhile back at the Snake Ranch and Venom Depository...

(from "Snake Ranch Blues" copyright 1992, by _moi_, all rights reserved, and
1998 by TJH Internet SP (TJH4), all rights reserved...)

...the Microwave oven peeped, and she withdrew the now frost-free reptile
fragment from within. The slit-pupilled eyes which had glistened crystalline
beneath ice condensed from the air by the chill now seemed to harbor a dully
vengeful glare. The rattlesnake castanets (she wrapped the snout of a second
snakehead with a rubberband and threw it into the microwave oven, punched
digits, and listened to the hum of thawing murder) had been thrown into a
beaker of liquid nitrogen at the moment of severance from their lashing
serpentine bodies. The bodies had gone into the packing mill, destined for
the tables of Chinese gourmets whose fondness for pickled rattler had made
possible her sideline in the side-product of the international gourmet
canned-viper trade. She had her own little business, yes indeed she did.

Nothing was wasted when she harvested the lowly rattlers. She momentarily
imagined some dozing viper, lazily sunning itself on the warm surface of
some desert rock, starting to coil frantically as the sound of a footfall
was conducted from rock through its lower jaw, trying to sight the intruder
through its fogged-over eyes (this one she was now thawing had the
characteristic loosened eyelids of a soon-to-shed snake) suddenly feeling
the noose slipping about its neck, coiling frantically about the snakestick
that hoisted it into a burlap bag... to be jostled about in its own little
burlap prison inside the larger rubberized canvas bag that contained other
venomous reptiles... memory supplied images of many snakes such as this one
being teased and milked for their venom, which produced antivenin, which
was mostly used to inoculate those who milked snakes of their venom. Kind of
circular, but the raw venom commanded a fair price, and the Chinese had
strange tastes in salads, and so she was able to finally get off of the state
welfare rolls.

Unemployment had been exhausted years ago, and besides, with so many good
people going around jobless, few opportunities existed for someone who had
once been confined to a mental hospital for playing with scorpions. But the
Snake Ranch and Venom Repository (tm) had been willing to hire anyone at all
who was willing to sit around all day hacking the heads off of rattlers.

Amazingly enough, the lowly rattlesnake turned out to be a fairly economic
source of protein. You could throw trash waste that nothing else would eat
in a lot with a big, three-foot tall glass wall around it, and let a lot of
rodents loose, and the rodents would convert vegetable waste into rodentflesh,
and the snakes would eat the rodents, and for some reason, though the Chinese
gourmets had to understand this, they found the snakes to be eminently
palatable.

She had been hired when these foreign investors had come from abroad with
their mad scheme for turning rattlesnakes into international exchange. She
didn't even worry about the absurdity of her employment, as the money was
really not bad at all. Besides, she sort of liked her job. Her position was 
literally to be the head whacker, slamming a machete through the necks of
thrashing snakes. Gustavo or Fredo took turns snagging snakes out of what
amounted to a huge trashcan, one pinning the snake with a snakestick, the
other hooking the snakenoose around the neck of the hissing, rattling snake.
They'd drag the snagged serpent onto the worktable, position it just so,
and whack. Off came the heads. Usually they fell into a basket, and gaped in
their immemorial fashion. What else could you expect a rattlesnake head to
do except to sit there and gape? All a dead snake head could possibly hope
for was a chance to latch on to whatever it was that had separated its head
from its body.
  
 ... ... ... ... ...



> --
> Tony Prentakis
> Consumer of time, occupier of space, producer of Z-stages
> "How can I know what I think until I hear what I have to say?"

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