Those Zany Aussies

Here's a good one: 70,000 Australians upset their census by listing their religion as "Jedi" on the forms. You have to give it to them, the Australians are a madcap bunch.

Case in point: last night I was watching one of those crazy Aussie nature-show guys, not Steve the Crocodile Hunter, but another one - I wish I could remember his name. It was some really gripping television, I have to say. This guy was the craziest human being I've ever seen (with all due respect to to Evel Knievel and Farrah Fawcett).

This guy's batting about a big cobra - teasing it - more or less, like he's daring it to bite him. I have to admit, I was rooting for the snake after awhile - which surprised us all and actually did bite the guy (justifiably, I might add, as he did everything but give it noogies in the course of telling the home viewers how deadly it was and what a mongoose might do if it were in his situation). Dude's no mongoose, however, ballsy though he might be and the cobra bites the assclown right on his hand. Of course, now, it's not fun and games anymore - he's all "Okay, I'm bit, the snake bit me, I'm bit over here!" They give him some antivenom and rush him to the hospital (which is forty miles away, of course) and he's laying there in a hospital bed going "No more, never again, that's it - I'm getting too old for this stuff," and I'm thinking "good move, guy - guess you have a little sense about you, at that."

Two hours later, the guy's right back in the desert, playing chicken with the same monstrous cobra and practically juggling this super-venomous Boomslang. Australians, man - they rock.