"I just started punching it in the head as hard as I could. And he had let go and and then grabbed me again. And the second time that he let go and grabbed me..."

"... he had drug me underneath the water. And he like shook my leg around.... Whenever he let go, I had started running up. And I had gotten up out of the water."

From "Florida teen saves herself from alligator that dragged her underwater: ‘I just started punching'" (NY Post).

"The fact that he was bitten by an alligator significantly and continued on his rampage was shocking...."

Said Grady Judd, sheriff of Polk County, Florida, quoted in "Bitten by Alligator, Man Is Killed After Charging at Deputies, Sheriff Says/The authorities say that Timothy Schulz, 42, of Mulberry, Fla., swam across an alligator-filled lake before a violent encounter with deputies in the neighborhood" (NYT).

"Sheriff Judd also said that Mr. Schulz had a lengthy criminal history, which he described as 'meth arrest, meth arrest, meth arrest, meth arrest, meth arrest.'... At 7:43 a.m., a resident in a Polk County neighborhood called the sheriff’s office to say that a man was in a lake known to have alligators in it, and that the man was treading water near one of the broad-snouted reptiles.... 'It’s a long swim,' Sheriff Judd said. 'And he was gator-bitten along the way.'"

I note the phrase "one of the broad-snouted reptiles," which I believe is an example of the "second mention" problem in writing. The writer feels a need to avoid repetition of a word — here, "alligator" — and comes up with a variation. The example I gave in the old post at that link was of a woman who'd written "small house" and, on second mention, wrote "petite edifice."

The writer of that alligator article — had it gone on longer and required further struggle to escape the terrible (word) "alligator" — could have told us more about how the drug-addled man — the substance-impaired individual — tangled with the jawsome beast, the toothy predator, the swamp monster.

Sadly, the man is dead, an individual fatally shot by officers, a person deceased in a police encounter, a male victim of law enforcement action, a citizen killed in officer-involved incident....

"[I]n about 2.5 feet of water '... their canoe passed over a large alligator.' The alligator then 'thrashed and tipped the canoe over'..."

"... throwing the couple into the water. 'She ended up on top of the alligator in the water and was bitten'.... The gator, which the authorities said was 11 feet 4 inches long, pulled her underwater. Ms. Diekema’s body was later recovered from the water.... [A]lligator trappers... captured two alligators on Tuesday evening. One was more than 11 feet long.... The second gator was approximately 10 to 11 feet long...."

More information about that alligator attack we were talking about yesterday, in "Alligator Kills Woman After Flipping Her Canoe in Florida, Officials Say/The woman was paddling with her husband in shallow water on Tuesday when they passed over a large alligator that thrashed and tipped over their boat, the authorities said" (NYT).

We're told that the husband "attempted to intervene."

I can't imagine canoeing in such shallow water and passing over an animal that size, dipping the oar into that. I presume the water was murky. Perhaps the alligator looked like rocks or a log, but it seems inadvisable to pass that closely even over inanimate objects. 

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: Is it advisable to canoe in water that is only 2.5 feet deep? Answer: No. I don't think the alligator was the aggressor — sad though it is that the woman died.

"Gator grabbed her out of the canoe. He tried to fight the gator off. We're at the last place he saw her. He left the paddle here where he last saw her at."

Said the cop quoted in "Alligator attacks, kills woman canoeing with her husband on lake in Florida: 'He tried to fight the gator off'" (CBS News).

"I did everything by the book the whole time. They changed the rules, and I should be grandfathered in. I shouldn’t have to abide by them."

Said Tony Cavallaro, quoted in "Authorities Seize Alligator Being Held Illegally in Home Near Buffalo/The alligator, Albert Edward, had been with his owner for 34 years" (NYT).

He was 11 feet long, 750 pounds heavy and 34 years old, and until this week, he lived in a pool house attached to his owner’s home in Hamburg, N.Y., about 13 miles south of Buffalo.

The [New York State Department of Environmental Conservation] said that Albert’s owner, Tony Cavallaro, had a license for the alligator, but it expired in 2021. In an interview, Mr. Cavallaro, 64, said that while visitors to his home did sometimes take pictures with Albert, they never swam with him or rode him. Instead, they would briefly get in the water for a quick photo with the animal, often when he was sleeping, Mr. Cavallaro said.

Cavallaro bought Albert as a newborn and believes "the poor thing loves me."

I'm interested in the law here, the always enticing notion that the law doesn't apply to you. Cavallaro also seems to believe that the law of nature — the dangerousness of alligators — does not apply to Albert.

But what's missing from this article is any mention of the comic strip that was once central to our culture: Pogo. There's an alligator named Albert, and you don't cite Pogo?

ADDED: The Wikipedia article linked above describes Albert Alligator as "An exuberant, dimwitted, irascible, and egotistical alligator."

"Attacks are more common near bodies of water and when a person is accompanied by a pet...."

Said Jay Butfiloski, the furbearer and alligator program coordinator in South Carolina's Natural Resources Department, quoted in "Alligator Kills 69-Year-Old Woman in South Carolina/The deadly attack in Hilton Head Island was the second fatal alligator attack in Beaufort County, S.C., in less than a year, the authorities said" (NYT).

The woman... was found at the edge of a lagoon in Spanish Wells, a residential community in Hilton Head Island. She had left her home around 7 a.m. to walk her dogs, and relatives went looking for her when the dogs returned without her....

You may think your dog will protect you from dangers when you're out on a walk, but Butfiloski implies that the dog attracts the attack — in this case, from an alligator.

Just a couple days ago we were talking about an incident in which a dog running into the forest attracted a bear attack. There, the human being survived, and we learned that the woman intervened in the bear/dog fight. She punched the bear and got bitten. I asked "if a bear were going after your dog, would you intervene?"

Who knows what happened in that Hilton Head incident, but if a 9-and-a-half-foot alligator were going after your dog, would you intervene?

"He’s a very special gator, but I wouldn’t recommend that anyone get one. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you will get bit."

Said Joie Henney, quoted in "His emotional support animal is an alligator. They sleep in the same bed. ‘When he turns his nose toward you, that means he expects a kiss,’ Joie Henney said" (Washington Post). 

It isn’t common for people to want alligators as pets, though... “When they get to three feet, nobody wants them,” Henney said. “They can bite and they’re extremely hard to handle.” Wildlife experts agree: Alligators generally don’t make good pets, and they’re illegal to own in many states. The animals can also be deadly.... 

“The jaw pressure from an alligator’s bite force is incredibly strong, and their powerful tails can whip you,” said Raul Diaz, a herpetologist and evolutionary development biologist who teaches at California State University at Los Angeles. They are also predators who are hardwired to believe that other creatures want to eat them, so they are defensive early on, he said... 

Henney now takes his gator to swim parties, football games, and to schools and summer camps for educational presentations about reptiles. WallyGator does not have a harness around his mouth, but he has never bitten anyone, Henney said.

The alligator is "registered," we're told, as an "emotional support animal," but registered with what? Something called the "U.S. Service Animals website." But this isn't a service animal! There's a photo of the registration card, but the card doesn't name any organization. The caption declares that the card "show[s] he's a registered emotional support animal."

I'm going to print out a card that says I'm a "Registered Opponent of Emotional Support Animals." It will show that I'm a registered opponent of emotional support animals.

The Washington Post article is festooned with embedded posts from Henney's Instagram account and other photos by Joie Henney, including photos of him taking the alligator to assisted living homes to be petted by frail old ladies. Like this:

Henney says "An alligator isn’t going to attack you for no reason," but I don't like the touch of your hand and I'm hungry are reasons.

This is one of the stupidest articles I've ever seen in The Washington Post. I see the commenters over there agree with me. ("A 69 year old owner getting older and more frail by the year, and a 7 year old alligator getting bigger and stronger by the year. What could go wrong?")

Just 5 TikToks to amuse you. Let me know what you like.

1. I'll get that overpriced pastry with my long fingers. 

2. Underwater photography in the Everglades, complete with inert alligator.

3. Gimme a kiss? Okay!

4. Acting out the personality of various social media platforms.

5. The Story of the Wisdom Tooth.

Beasts of Wisconsin.

1. There are 24,000 bears in Wisconsin: "The DNR said in 1989 there were only about 9,000 black bears in the state. Now the population is up to 24,000. 'Our bear population has been steadily increasing and expanding southward'...."

2. They found an alligator in Long Lake in Fond du Lac County. 

3. We spotted 6 foxes romping together in our neighbor's lawn just before sunrise the other day. They were very active, even trying to run up a tree. The next day, same time and place, I saw them again. At what point do you say, now, there are too many foxes?

4. Seen today in great numbers: very tiny toads/frogs (about a half inch long), extremely nervous chipmunks, rabbits (doing their best to look like rocks), turkeys.

What's the difference?

It's interesting, the differences that matter to people, the endless quest to distinguish alligators from crocodiles and psychopaths from sociopaths, but what I wanted to know was the difference between vandalism and terrorism. 

"Captain is part of the governor's family and for your nameless ill-informed source to imply they've been trying to give him away is untrue."

"Someone offered to watch him for a few days while the transition was ongoing but for that to be weaponized and morph from a game of telephone into the pages of your paper is absurd — now excuse us we're preparing for a major storm."

Said a spokesman for Andrew Cuomo, quoted in "Cuomo's dog Captain left at mansion after governor departed" (Times Union). 

The dog is "a high-strung mix of shepherd, Siberian and malamute" who "has nipped a few people since Cuomo adopted him in 2018." 

These politicians and their fake dogs.

ADDED: Wikipedia has a nice list of all the Presidents "pets." I put pets in quotes because they're all animals but not all pets. Included on the list are horses used in battle and silkworms, whose silk was spun by Louisa Adams, the wife of John Quincy Adams. 

Quincy Adams also had an alligator — "Said to have belonged to Marquis de Lafayette and housed for two months in the East Room." Emphasis on "said." Andrew Jackson kept fighting cocks. Thomas Jefferson had 2 grizzly bear cubs — a gift from Captain Zebulon Pike:

"The picture of a plastic box containing a joint is a nice bit of stoner fun, but it also evokes the glass-cube sculptures of Larry Bell, another of the artists whose work Hopper..."

"... and Hayward collected (and whom Hopper photographed). A neon Motel Alaska sign, with a glowing index finger illuminating a nocturnal streetscape, echoes a Duchampian credo that Hopper was fond of, that the artist of the future will 'point his finger at something and say it’s art.' Pointing fingers recur in the tender image of two hands—one an adult’s, one a toddler’s—hovering over a mud puddle, a moving study of Hayward and Marin."

From "Dennis Hopper's Quiet Vision of Nineteen-Sixties Hollywood" in The New Yorker.

"Hayward" is Brooke Hayward, Dennis Hopper's first wife. "Marin" is the daughter of Hayward and Hopper, and she is the "energetic steward of [Hopper's] photographic legacy." I'll say! Getting a New Yorker article with sentences like those quoted above is kickass stewardship.

I looked up Brooke Hayward in Wikipedia. Oddly (and speaking of photographs), the only photograph of her there includes Groucho Marx:



It's a really nice photograph of Groucho too. He and Hayward starred in "The Hold Out" on General Electric Theater (on TV in 1961). It was a serious dramatic role for Groucho, and the look on his face is not Groucho being Groucho (and thinking the serious thought, this is a seriously beautiful woman) but playing the part of a man who (according to the caption) "disapproves of his teenage daughter's (Hayward) marriage." She's quite beautiful, but nothing about her says "teenager." In fact, the actress was 24. Today, you could be 54 and look like that.

Speaking of artist-name-dropping sentences in The New Yorker and wives named Brooke, I was continuing to read "The Art of Dying/I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that?" by Peter Schjeldahl, and I came across what I will declare the best really long sentence I have read in the 16-year history of writing this blog:

I went back to college in Minnesota for a year, dropped out for good, returned to the Jersey City job for three months, unwisely married, spent an impoverished and largely useless year in Paris, had a life-changing encounter with a painting by Piero della Francesca in Italy, another with works by Andy Warhol in Paris, returned to New York, freelanced, stumbled into the art world, got a divorce, which, while uncontested, entailed a solo trip to a dusty courthouse in Juárez, Mexico, past a kid saying, “Hey, hippie, wanna screw my sister?,” to receive a spectacular document with a gold seal and a red ribbon from a judge as rotund and taciturn as an Olmec idol.

The unwise marriage was not to the wife named Brooke. She arrived later. Like Hopper's Brooke, Schjeldahl's Brooke was an actress. We're told she quit acting after her best line in a movie was edited out, perhaps because Sean Connery thought it was stealing the scene from him. The line was about how nonsmokers were "in the hospital dying of nothing."

“According to an excerpt, the president privately suggested to aides that soldiers shoot migrants in the legs, but he was told it would be illegal.”

BBC reports on the book, “Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration” (written by NYT reporters and published by the NYT):

Mr Trump suggested other extreme measures, according to the book.

"Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh," reads the extract.

Assuming — only for the sake of argument —  that the unnamed interviewees got these facts right, I would still need to have a feeling for the kind of brainstorming that was going on. This could have been lightweight banter or some way of getting to useful ideas by first loosening up and just saying every crazy thing you could think of, as if you were pitching movie ideas. Trump might have talked about a snake pit or an alligator moat, but how did he talk about it? Context is everything here, the rest is just feeding ideation.

ADDED: Trump reacted to this report in his press conference today. He denied it all and made fun of how stupid it was. He mistakenly identified the reporters as being from The Washington Post.

"Millions and millions of animals are killed on roads in the US every year. This is 99% ignored."

"Why are people surprised that there are animals on the roads? Perhaps this whole car/road system should be replaced. Cars are horrible killing machines of people and their fellow creatures, and a main reason for the massive environmental destruction in our country."

A comment on "Mom, 2 children die after striking alligator on South Carolina interstate, authorities say" (WaPo).

A 10-year-old girl escaped from an 8'9"-long alligator that was gripping her leg by prying its mouth open.

She's got the puncture wounds to prove the alligator was biting her, but there's some doubt about the prying-open-the-mouth part:

The expert in animal bites, Dr. Gregory M. Erickson, a professor of anatomy and paleobiology at Florida State University, said that it was “very unlikely” that the girl had managed to pry the creature’s jaws open in the way the official account described.

“If that alligator wanted to hold on, not much could have stopped it,” he said.

He said it was more likely the animal could not find a good purchase on the girl’s leg, allowing her to get away from it more easily.

Dr. Erickson, who has studied the bite force of various members of the animal kingdom, found that crocodiles and alligators have the strongest bites of any known animal.

But fight anyway:

“The more fight a person puts up, it’s more likely that animals are not going to press the attack,” he said....

You can't win the fight, but you may cause the animal to choose not to fight.

And hooray for the little girl, for her brute force or her persuasive power. 

It's too late to rescue the man from the gator, but the fight to rescue his memory from the punchline goes on.

"Tommie Woodward yelled, 'Fuck that gator!' just before he was killed by one in Texas, and his death instantly became a national joke. For his family, grieving means having to rescue the person from the punchline."

Family, you are just reminding me of a punchline I had already forgotten. I had no memory anymore of your foolish son either.

The linked article — at Buzzfeed — is really long. I scrolled all the way down for you and snagged the last 2 paragraphs, which suggest why Buzzfeed decided to dive this deep:

Back at Burkart’s Marina, standing on the pier, near where his brother spent his final moments, Brian shares how a combination of fatalism and faith help him mourn. “Losing somebody ain’t easy, but what’s done is done,” he says. “Ain’t nothing I can do about it, can’t take it back.” He takes a deep breath. “Tommie just got to go home. I look forward to the day I get to go. One day I will get to see my brother again.”

For now, he will settle for the nights when he sees Tommie in his dreams. It doesn’t happen often, and there’s no hidden meaning, nothing to analyze. What Brian sees in his dreams and what it means is pretty overt. The same scenario plays out each time. Once Tommie appears, Brian stops whatever he’s doing. He then looks at his brother, smiles, and says, “Man, it’s good to see ya.”

There's a yearning for family and religion, and, sometimes, when you can't get it, you can nevertheless get some warmth from an ironic distance.

"There was a 'no swimming' sign. I thought it must be because the water wasn't clean enough and/or there was no on duty lifeguard."

"It never occurred to me until reading this story that I needed to be concerned about alligators. I am not from Florida and it never occurred to me. If I had been alerted to the danger by Disney, I would not have let my kids play on the shore. I am sure these parents would not have either."

Comment on "Divers Find Body of Toddler Snatched by Alligator at Disney Resort" by a person who stayed at Disney World recently with 2 little kids who "loved the beach there." ("They made sand castles, ran up and down the shore, pulled sea grass from the water and stuck their toes into the lagoon with the dozens of other children doing the same thing.") Somebody else says "Why put anything approximating a beach on it when the resort is well aware that it is murky, impossible to keep alligators out and your customer base is mostly families with small children?" And: "Wading is not swimming. If the danger was alligators, the sign should say so. You don't get no swimming signs in Lake Michigan when the danger is rip currents, the sign tells you there are rip currents. How can you expect some folks from Nebraska, hundreds of miles from Florida, to understand that no swimming really means you might be attacked by an alligator?"

"We determined that this child was playing at the edge of the water, probably about a foot or so into the water, when this alligator came up and attacked the child."

"The father did his best, tried to rescue the child, however to no avail. A struggle did ensue and the father has some sort of minor lacerations to his arm, so he was able to get over there fairly quickly. You know how a father who witnesses this must have felt. It is tragic, it is heartbreaking, there’s no other way to say it. We’re just going to keep searching and searching and searching."

At Disney World in Orlando, Florida.

"Scientists at Harvard University found that melting glaciers have caused the length of a day to increase by one millisecond over the past one hundred years..."

"... a Florida police department published photos of nine unidentified, unconscious women on Facebook in an attempt to solicit information. 'We’re not sure if they’re even alive,' said the police chief. A survey of U.S. special-operations personnel found that 64 percent of male respondents believe women are not mentally tough enough to serve in commando units.... A Norwegian study found that men have a better sense of direction than women, and a Florida man who was running from the police waded into a lake and was eaten by an alligator.... China’s top religious-affairs official accused the Dalai Lama of sympathizing with the Islamic State.... a Canadian woman drove an ailing beaver 250 miles so the animal could receive medical care.... A Kentucky homeless shelter banned women in order to prevent sexual relations between patrons. 'It takes two to do that,' said the director. 'We are not biased or prejudice whatsoever.'"

All from the Harper's Weekly Review, which has links for everything.

"Someone shouted a warning and he said blank the alligators."

"Whether it's a speed limit sign on a freeway, a fireworks message, whatever, heed the warning sign, follow that because a failure to heed that can result in a terrible tragedy for your family."

That's first fatal alligator attack in Texas ever.

ADDED: Here's Wikipedia's "List of fatal alligator attacks in the United States by decade," which says, "This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it." That last phrase is ominously ambiguous, suggesting that you, like the recently departed Tommie Woodward, could expand the list by ignoring a "No Swimming/Alligators" sign. All but one of the other attacks happened in Florida, including this one that happened, of all days, on September 11, 2001:

Robert Steele, 81, male ...Attacked by an alligator while walking his dog on a trail between two wetland areas near the J.N. "Ding" Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel, Florida. Steele bled to death after his leg was bitten off below the knee.

How strange it must have been for families who lost loved ones on 9/11 to causes of death other than the terrorist attacks. From a contemporaneous news article:

Ellen Steele, 81, thought her husband was drowning in the canal when she heard his screams. She pulled him as far up the canal's bank as she could before calling 911. "We live among alligators. We protect them. They have never attacked us before," she said.

America is immersed in its disbelief: We didn't expect the terrorists to attack. And Ellen Steele has her vastly smaller but not entirely dissimilar shock: They have never attacked us before.

Wildlife officials spotted the alligator less than an hour later and shot it in the head. "We saw it surface on the other bank with the leg in his mouth," said [Sanibel Police Cmdr. Bill] Tomlinson.

We spotted bin Laden 10 years later and shot him in the head.

I was considering making some humor out of al Qaeda/al Ligator, but I'll just give you this little clip of the time "Curb Your Enthusiasm" made humor out of the predicament of losing a loved one on 9/11 but not to the terrorist attacks: