Headline of the Day

"66 vials of antivenin later, boy bitten by rattler is OK."

Yeeks. That was in Newberry, Florida. The snake was an Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake, which is now dead, and will be made into a wallet for the boy as a memento of the encouter.

The story theorizes that the recent tropical storm that passed through North Florida caused the snakes of the area to move to higher ground to escape flooding, which probably led to the encounter. The bite in this case was a legitimate one, meaning that it was purely an accident, and not the result of trying to capture, kill or otherwise tease the snake.

When I was a boy growing up in Melrose, Florida, the local hardware store had a rattlesnake skin mounted on a board at the back of the store, the skin was about 6' long. President Teddy Roosevelt used to pay a bounty on rattlesnakes over a certain length, I seem to recall reading, possibly in Marjorie Rawlings' book Cross Creek.