Read Online I'll Mature When I'm Dead by Dave Barry - Free Book Online Page B

bucket—on a downtown Miami street, where it lay for hours before the authorities removed it. It attracted some attention, but not as much as if it had been lying on a street in, say, Des Moines. The Herald quoted a local resident as saying: “It was a relief that it was a shark. When I first saw it, I thought it was a body because of all the shootings that have been going on. I was surprised and happy because of my concern for human life.”
    So this was actually a feel-good story, Miami-style: Against all odds, it wasn’t a human body! Still, the fact remains that—this bears repeating—there was a live shark on the Metromover. And had it been a little more alive, there is a very real possibility that it could actually have bitten somebody. We could have had a shark attack on a commuter train! Wouldn’t that have been great ?
    No, wait, I mean: Wouldn’t that have been tragic? Yes it would, which is why I’m recommending that you exercise caution when boarding public transportation, and by “exercise caution” I mean “carry a speargun.”
    You should also watch out when you leave public transportation, because then you will be in one of the most dangerous areas in all of South Florida, namely: outdoors. We have a lot of extreme wildlife here. Over the years I have personally encountered, just in my neighborhood, several alligators, hundreds of poison toads, mutant, heavily armored five-inch grasshoppers that cannot be killed with a hammer, irate, hissing, needle-toothed lizards the size of Chihuahuas, and huge spiders that appear to be wearing the pelts of raccoons. I have also had numerous sphincter-disrupting encounters with snakes, including one that, when I noticed it, was coiled up approximately six inches away from me on my office desk , which is how my office chair came to have a stain.
    We also have a growing population of unwelcome out-of-town wildlife species that have come here and clearly intend to stay. Two invasive species in particular have caused serious concern: Burmese pythons, and New Yorkers.
    The New Yorkers have been coming for years, which is weird because pretty much all they do once they get to Florida is bitch about how everything here sucks compared to the earthly paradise that is New York. They continue to root, loudly, for the Jets, the Knicks, the Mets, and the Yankees; they never stop declaring, loudly, that in New York the restaurants are better, the stores are nicer, the people are smarter, the public transportation is free of sharks, etc.
    The Burmese pythons are less obnoxious, but just as alarming in their own way. These are snakes that started out as pets of Miami residents, until one day these residents stopped smoking crack and said, “Jesus H. Christ! We’re living with a giant snake!” So they let the pythons go, and a lot of them ended up out in the Everglades, which is basically Las Vegas for pythons. They’ve been engaging in wild python reproductive sex out there for years; wildlife biologists estimate that there are now more than one hundred thousand of them. They can grow to be longer than twenty feet, and they don’t have any natural enemies, so they’re eating all the other Everglades animals. The wildlife authorities are desperately trying to figure out what to do about this. My preference would be to use tactical nuclear weapons, but this would never fly with the wildlife community, which regards the Everglades as a precious ecosystem, even though to the naked civilian eye it is a giant festering stinkhole of rotting muck.
    The more ecological alternative would be to introduce some kind of predator that would counteract the pythons. The question is, what kind of creature would be able to hold its own against these monstrous snakes? The obvious answer, which I’m sure has already occurred to you, is: New Yorkers. You’d take a batch of them out to the dead center of the Everglades and release them, and they’d immediately start complaining, loudly, about