My father's fer-de-lance story

[muckefuck]

(For those of you who don't know what a fer-de-lance is, it's the most venomous snake of the Americas. [Cue one of my Australian readers saying: {Crocodile Dundee voice} "Huh, huh. Thet's not a vinimis sneyk." {whips taipan out of trousers} "Neuw thet's a vinimis sneyk!"])

My father was a member of the Papal Volunteers (basically, a Catholic Peace Corps--Catholics have to have their own version of everything). Late one night, when he was living in Stann Creek, British Honduras [now Dangriga, Belize], he and two of his friends encountred a fer-de-lance. One of them killed it with a machete. Carl Burns, an Iowa farmboy, wanted to save the skin, but he didn't want to do the skinning in the middle of the night. Since this is the tropics, they knew the flesh would get pretty rank and nasty before morning, so they stowed the corpse in the kerosene-powered refrigerator.

Of course, no one warned the cook. A blood-curdling scream at the crack of dawn alerted them to this oversight. She was ready to quit on the spot, but they managed to convince her to stay by promising never to do something like that again.

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Auf einem amerikanischen nicht, da das Land damals eine britische Kolonie war. Du hättest erstaunliches Glück: Grossbritannien hat die Todesstrafe erst 1965 abgeschafft--eventuell nicht vor den Morden, aber sicher vor Deiner Bestrafung!

[nibadi.livejournal.com]

Meinst du nicht, man hätte mich wegen Verübung eines Kapitalverbrechens an amerikanischen Bürgern an die USA ausgeliefert und der amerikanischen Gerichtsbarkeit überstellt?

Aber wie bereits gesagt, die Wahrscheinlichkeit, das ich einem Infarkt - Herz oder Hirn oder beides - erlegen wäre, ist sehr viel höher als dass mir physische Reserven für den Racheakt geblieben wären.