Pet python
called
Monty
A PET python in Australia needed some emergency care after it swallowed an entire beach towel, according to Sky News.
A video posted on social media by Sydney's Small Animal Specialist Hospital showed how vets saved the pet, named Monty. The 3m 18-year-old female jungle carpet python was given anaesthesia and scanned to find the towel, the hospital wrote on Facebook.
Dr Olivia Clarke of the hospital's avian and exotics department then sent forceps in through an endoscope to grab the towel and pull it.
She had to keep on pulling and pulling and pulling, But eventually the entire towel emerged. Both snake and towel are now doing well.
"Monty was discharged from hospital the same day and her owner reports she is back to her happy, hungry self," the hospital wrote on Facebook.
A happy, charming little account, to be sure. But what is a "jungle carpet python"? Are carpets part of its diet? Did Monty mistake the beach towel for a carpet? We're not told.
Monty Python again
YOU'LL note that the abovementioned pet python is named Monty, in spite of being female. That illustrates the pervasiveness of the Monty Python culture throughout so much of the world. A real python just has to be called Monty, whether male or female.
It comes of course from the British TV show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, a throwing together of hilariously zany sketches that were also very very clever.
Only the other evening a Pom and I were lamenting the sad decline of British humour from those heights to today's coarse vulgarity and complete lack of subtlety.
The high comedy days began really with The Goon Show (radio), which ran for years with Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Seccombe and others, the script only incidental, lots of ad-libbing.
There were some great TV duos – Morecambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies – classy and very funny.
Monty Python took it up another notch with John Cleese Michael Palin and others - slightly naughty but oh so subtle and clever.
When I worked in England in the early 70s, most pubs didn't have TV. They would empty on Monty Python evenings as everyone went home to watch.
Consider The Philosophers' Song, sung in the philosophy faculty of the University of Wallamaloo, Australia, by a group of academics in slouch hats and khaki, sitting in a wooden shed.
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel.
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist,
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away,
Half a crate of whisky every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
And Hobbes was fond of his dram.
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart,
'I drink, therefore I am.'
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed,
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed.
Marvellous stuff, remembered today in the naming of pet pythons.
Tailpiece
Librarian: "Did you enjoy this book"
Borrower: "I found it a little dull. But that raunchy letter somebody left in it as a bookmark – that was sensational!"
Last word
Those whom the gods would destroy, they first call promising. - Cyril Connolly
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