Watch out for snails.

Really.

UPDATE, February 12, 2009. I'm coming back to this post while adding the "mollusks" tag to things, and I see that the 2 links it contained are dead. Reading one URL, I can see that there were some "giant snails." I guess they were pretty damned big or at least quite numerous. Something amazed me 5 years ago. At least I still have this record of having once been amazed... by a mollusk.

UPDATE, August 4, 2024. I'm coming back to this post while adding another new tag — "snails." Would I have started this tag if I'd realized I had a "mollusk" tag I could have used? No, but I'm continuing with this slow — get it? — process anyway because I experienced a tiny bloggish delight while writing a post about marginalia — the first topic of discussion in the history of this blog — then clicking on the "marginalia" tag and discovering a cool old post with snails. This made me want to create a "snails" tag, because the previous post had quoted this, from the writer Elias Canetti:

"After the rain, he went out in search of snails. He talked to them; they did not creep away from him. He held them in his hand, observed them and laid them to the side where no bird could see them. When he died, all the snails from the neighborhood came together to form his funeral cortege."