Snake!!!
This evening I opened the front door to discover a three-foot rattler slithering around on the porch. I promptly ran out the back door to the neighbors and "helped" Tony and his kids off the sucker.
Speaking of deaths, today the Austin American-Statesman's XLent weekly tabloid officially died, though it was replaced with something very similar but wit a different name. Truthfully it was an acknowledgment that what had been the XL had actually been dead for a good while. I was a grad student and part-time copy editor when meetings were held that resulted in the new Gen-X concoction that was part the same old entertainment tabloid and part a pseudo-zine. A few years later I was an assistant entertainment editor at the Statesman and writing a lot of creative personal essays that appeared in the XL. It was a brief period when creativity was encouraged at the Statesman. I'm sorry to see it go as the Statesman and newspapers everywhere squirm like that snake on a knife blade.
