Serpent-Time
Inspired by both my love for snakes and my partiality to UK comedy entertainment, I've written "Serpent-Time", a snake-focused comedy lecture in the style of the BBC Radio 4 show The Unbelievable Truth.
There are several truths nestled within lies and jokes in the essay below. To play at home, read the essay and "buzz in" for an answer as you encounter a claim that you believe is true. (For the best experience, find some friends - assuming you have any - and choose a "host" to read the lecture out loud for the players.) Then, tally your scores - you gain a point for correctly identifying a truth, and you lose a point for claiming that a lie is a truth, just like in the radio show.
The rules in greater detail are included at the bottom of the page, but put simply:
- Gain a point for a correct guess, and lose a point for an incorrect guess
- Truths must be factual and provable
- Truths can be complete sentences, or clauses in an otherwise untrue sentence
- The current maximum score is 12
Or, if you're feeling lazy, you can skip ahead to my answer key.
lecture... start!
Everyone knows that snakes first appeared in the Garden of Eden. The modern snake is the product of a large number of convergent evolutions, resulting in the modern mammal-snake, lizard-snake, crayfish-snake, worm-snake, amoeba-snake, and creationist snake, which denies the origins of all of them.
Some other notable snakes include the cat snake, called Pantherophis; the water snake, called Hydrophis; the fat snake, called Crassophis; and the shat snake, which is known as Cacophis - or more commonly as the crowned snake, since it isn't quite done on the toilet yet. I think we'll need the air freshener for this one.
Snakes have seven fingers, three eyes, four lungs, no teeth; a movable heart, a wandering soul, a diesel engine, and an instinctive preference for Russian literature. They reproduce by way of a two-headed penis-like instrument in males, which they use like a tuning fork on the female's body, locating their partner's reproductive opening by hitting middle C.
Meanwhile, there are snake species with no scales or eyes. There are also rattlesnakes without rattles, and some boas lack stomachs - instead digesting their prey using the power of truth and friendship.
Snakes display a wide range of body shapes - the legged snake resembles a lizard, and the hoop snake rolls around like a cartwheel and lassos its prey. Cobras use their hoods like sails when swimming. Sidewinders learned to sidewind to tolerate the burning temperatures of the desert sand. The longest snake in Earth's history was the Titanoboa, which measured 42 feet long, until it hit an iceberg and sank. The smallest snake, called Micrurus, was microscopic, and only discovered through close examination of prehistoric amber.
As their name suggests, egg-eating snakes consume nothing but small mammals. Meanwhile, the primary diet of mud snakes is mud, and fox snakes hunt foxes. Snakes have been caught eating unusual things, like eggplants, computer mice, pipe cleaners, and caramel apples. Asian vine snakes are epicureans, selecting only the delectable eyes of their prey as meals, from which they also get all of their water.
Some snakes have unusual ways of attracting prey. The spider-tailed horned viper has an arachnid-like extension on its tail that it uses as a lure. Grass snakes rub pieces of grass together to attract their primary prey item, crickets. Saw-scaled vipers use their rough scales to wrap themselves around thin trees and break them, sending bird nests crashing to the ground. And sand boas eject small amounts of sand from a pocket in their mouths, firing at moths and locusts like a sniper.
All snakes are poisonous, and none are truly venomous, except for the tiger keelback, which is both. Coral snakes and harmless milksnakes can be differentiated by the common rhyme, "If red and black and yellow are shown, and you don't know what's found in your zone... please leave it the hell alone."
Dangerous snakes aren't heartless, though; mother rattlesnakes lay square eggs to keep them from rolling out of their nests. Once the babies hatch, the rattlesnake mums then leave their young with a babysitter while they go out on a celebratory postpartum girls' night at a local bar.
Snakes and humans have a perfectly affable relationship, and humans are known to act completely rationally around snakes. Absolutely no unnecessary injuries and deaths occur on either side.
Snakes have been spotted in Antarctica, in my pants, and on the Space Shuttle Endeavour - as a mysterious snake-shaped UFO floating by in the vacuum of space that is almost certainly evidence for extraterrestrial serpentine life.
Pope's pit viper was named because a breeding pair were once owned by John Paul II. Stiletto snakes were named because Christian Louboutin, the French fashion designer, found one in his trademark red-bottom shoes. Abraham Lincoln was fond of copperheads, so much so that posthumously, he became one. Herpers, people who look for snakes and other reptiles in their natural habitats, frequently contract herpes in the field, which they treat by wiping their genitals on the nearest patch of stinging nettles, a cure known as "natural acupuncture".
Any snake enthusiast can easily romance a new snake friend with cheesy pick-up lines, such as: "Call me a gopher snake because I could go for your snake any day of the week", "You must be a Russell's viper because you give me a hell of an erection", and "My anaconda don't want none unless you provide explicit verbal consent to look at your buns, hun".
If you are willing to coexist with slithering friends, snakes can be helpful in your backyard by providing an organic extension to your garden hose, and consuming ticks, which are just as trendy among snakes as popping bubble tea is among college students.
And that's the end of rhzartist's lecture!
Besides the number of truths contained in this lecture (12, currently), the rules follow those of the radio show.
Truths must be complete sentences or complete clauses (with a subject and a main verb). The entire sentence does not need to be true.
- For example, "The king cobra, from India, ..." is factual, but not a fact for the purposes of this lecture, since there is no verb.
- Meanwhile, "Threadsnakes, traditionally used with bone needles to weave clothes by the Beja people of Sudan..." would be eligible to be a fact... if it were true.
Truths must be factual and provable, not value-based. Claiming something is the best, greatest, or most important by subjective metrics does not count as a fact.
A fact, for the purposes of this lecture, is considered true if it appears in peer-reviewed literature, a reputable news source (as defined arbitrarily by the author), or (in the case of claimed folktales and urban legends, or understudied but probable assertions) online with corroboration.
The maximum possible score, with all guesses correct and none incorrect, is 12. Technically, there is no minimum score, but a score below -10 is what I would consider solidly embarrassing.
Some example scores are:
- rhza's partner's score: 7, quite respectable. Says: "The garter snake once cohabitated with a now-extinct species, the stocking snake." [citation needed]
Send me an email with another true, but unlikely-sounding snake fact not featured in this lecture (or hell, whatever you want - anything but your pipesnake), how you'd like to be referred, and your score, and get it featured on the site! No cheating please!
Other notes:
I used common names for the most part, since I'm writing this for snake nerds and non-snake nerds alike (people who are not nerds, nerds who are not snake nerds, nerds who are not snakes, snakes who are nerds, etc.). I've included binomial nomenclature where relevant in the notes.
Ideally, this lecture is somewhat funny, but I am not a professional comedy writer. If you have criticism that isn't constructive, why not keep it to yourssssssself?
The original format is taken from The Unbelievable Truth on BBC Radio 4, created by Graeme Garden and Jon Naismith, and hosted by David Mitchell. No copyright infringement, and only a little offense, is intended by the author rhzartist.
There are already lectures featuring snakes on the radio show, from contestants Sindhu Vee and Lucy Porter. I have done my best not to repeat facts and jokes from those episodes.
Contact me with comments or constructive feedback:
Twitter,
Instagram,
Reddit,
Email
Do not use content without my consent. Support new and local artists! Last updated 19 October 2024
|
