[814] in Humor
HUMOR? Exotic Trips Abroad
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Tue Apr 11 08:56:22 1995
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 11 Apr 1995 08:53:55 EDT
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Sun, 09 Apr 1995 23:20:52 +0000 (GMT)
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN@aries.colorado.edu>
From: bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
(From "Amazon Adventure," by Redmond O'Hanlon, in Granta, No. 20.)
Having spent two months traveling in the primary rain forests of
Borneo, I thought that a four month journey in the country between the
Orinoco River in Venezuela and the Amazon in Brazil would pose no
particular problem.
There are no leeches that go for you in the Amazon jungles, an absence
which would represent, I felt, a great improvement on life in Borneo.
But there are many of the same amoebic and bacillary dysenteries,
yellow and blackwater and dengue fevers, malaria, cholera, typhoid,
rabies, hepatitis, and tuberculosis -- plus one or two very special
extras.
There is Chagas's disease, for instance, carried by various species of
assassin bugs that bite you on the face or neck and then, gorged,
defecate next to the puncture. When you scratch the itch that
results, you rub the droppings and their cargo of protozoa into your
bloodstream; between one and twenty years later you begin to die from
an illness whose symptoms are at first like malaria and later like
AIDS. Then there is onchocerciasis, river blindness, transmitted by
blackfly and caused by worms which migrate to the eyeball. And
leishmaniasis, which is a bit like leprosy and is produced by a
parasite carried by sand flies (it infects 80 percent of the Brazilian
troops on maneuvers in the jungle in the rainy season); unless treated
quickly, it eats away the warm extremeties. And then there is the odd
exotic, like the fever which erupted in the state of Pava in the
1960's and killed seventy-one people, including the research unit sent
in to identify it.
The big animals are supposed to be much friendlier than you might
imagine. The jaguar kills you with a bite to the head, but only in
exceptional circumstances. Two vipers, the fer-de-lance (up to seven
and a half feet long) and the bushmaster (up to twelve feet, the
largest in the world), kill you only if you step on them. The
anaconda is known to tighten its grip only when you breathe out; the
electric eel can deliver its 640 volts only before breakfast; the
piranha rips you to bits only if you are already bleeding; and the
giant catfish merely has a penchant for taking off your feet at the
ankle as you do the crawl.
The smaller animals are, on the whole, much more annoying: mosquitos,
blackfly, tapir fly, chiggers, ticks, scabies-producing Tunga pentrans
and Dermatobia hominis, and the human botfly, whose larvae bore into
the skin, eat modest amounts of you for forty days, and emerge as
inch-long maggots.
But it was the candiru, the toothpick fish -- a tiny catfish adapted for
a parasitic life in the gills and cloacae of bigger fish -- which swam
most persistently into my dreams on troubled nights.
In Borneo, when staying in the longhouses, I learned that going down
to the river in the early morning is the polite thing to do--you know
you are swimming in the socially correct patch of muddy river when the
fish nuzzle your pants, wanting you to take them down and produce
their breakfast. In the Amazon, on the other hand, should you have
had too much to drink, say, and inadvertantly urinate as you swim, any
homeless candiru, attracted by the smell, will take you for a big fish
and swim excitedly up your stream of uric acid, enter your urethra
like a worm into its burrow, and, raising its gill cover, stick out a
set of retrorse spines. Nothing can be done. The pain, apparently,
is spectacular.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From @mc.lcs.mit.edu:GZT.SHIBUMI@OZ.AI.MIT.EDU Fri Feb 5 18:57:20 1988
Date: 5 Feb 1988 21:46:29-EST
From: GZT.SHIBUMI@OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@mit-ccc
Date: Fri 5 Feb 88 21:34:09-EST
From: "Arvid P. Sjosberg" <GZT.SHIBUMI@oz.ai.mit.edu>
To: info-cobol@ccc.mit.edu
Message-Id: <12372438431.34.GZT.SHIBUMI@OZ.AI.MIT.EDU>
I had read the exact description of Amazonian fauna we've read on info-cobol
in a fancy travel journal (with some foreign-sounding one-syllable name)
available in the better bookstores around here. We are all lucky in that
either Harper's or Ray Hirschfeld had stopped short of the description of
the necessary surgical treatment for a candiru-fish attack on the male
anatomy.
A danger closer to home. Large schools of bluefish inhabit the shore
areas of Boston during the early fall. These fish will bite off and eat
any human body part that dangles or wiggles. When one catches a bluefish
by hook and line, one dares not remove the hook with one's fingers. (The
bait and hooks, by the way, have to be made into a special rig to enable
one to hook the fish when it could simply bite off the hook and bait from
the leader.) James Hersey's book *Blues* claims that bluefish go into
a feeding frenzy once they get a little food in them, and that they have
been known to strip the toes off of surfers.
- -------
