If I had an alligator

If I had an alligator, which I'm not likely to do in the near future, I'd want it to look like this.

When you  see something white which is normally some other colour, you automatically think "albino". But no! My research tells me these are leucistic alligators, which means they have blue eyes (and the rest of them is ivory, not pure white). Big difference.

Leucistics are rare - I keep finding different stats on this, but one source said there are "only 12 of them in the world". I don't get this. Have they mucked and gumbooted through all the swamps of Louisiana in search of these "swamp ghosts"? Who knows how many are lurking under rotten logs, waiting to attack? The logic is that something like this would stand out like neon and wouldn't survive a predator's attack. But wouldn't an alligator be pretty handy at self-defense? What natural enemies does it have? It has survived for hundreds of millions of years without having to evolve at all. So does it matter if a handful of them look like the Pillsbury Doughboy?

Maybe it would. A white alligator hide might make tasty material for a Fendi bag. One of those purses that costs as much as the down payment on a car.

These guys are frightening, ugly and beautiful at the same time. While looking for appropriate images to make an animation (above), I found some beauties. Or uglies. 

The blue eyes seem to peer at us with some kind of expression, but they don't. This creature's brain has just one setting: FOOD. (Well, two, but the other one isn't turned on all the time.) It looks at you as if you were food, which you are. If you have a pulse, if you have warm blood - or cold blood - you're food. Do we have some primeval memory of being eaten alive by some prehistoric version of this thing? Imagine how big they were back then, given that everything was on a ridiculous scale.

This one creeps me out majorly. It's either jumping up in the air in a ballet-leap, or underwater. How would anyone get such a shot without being eaten?

Don't ever think it's smiling. It's not smiling. It is jaws on legs. It is hissing and death-roll, and then, digestion.

These three look almost poetical, except they're not. Once more I doubt the "only 12 in the world" statistic. Who runs around in the forest trying to find these? There must be more of them. Here's an extra one just lying around, basking on someone's dock.

My brothers had an old stuffed alligator (crocodile?) with cotton batting in it (the cotton batting spewing out of its stomach and having to be shoved back in). It was a real alligator, or it had been, the skin tanned like leather. I never knew where it came from. The boys played Tarzan with it, and claimed that if you turned the alligator (or crocodile) over on its back and rubbed its tummy, it would relax and become extremely docile. This is a legend along the lines of taming a bird by putting salt on its tail.

So the swamp ghost, the White Bite, the leucistic Fendi bag of Louisiana isn't a myth. Its only real enemy is humankind, which means it will probably be wiped out in short order, along with everything else.

That is the meanest face I have ever seen.

POST-SCRIPT. I never knew what I was getting into when I looked up alligator bags. I assumed they might top out at, say, $10,000.00.

But no. I found this in a post about The Five Most Expensive Purses In The World:

The Chanel “Diamond Forever” Classic Handbag – $261,000

Next on our list is the The Chanel “Diamond Forever” Classic Handbag for a little more than a quarter of a million. It’s limited edition and it’s incrusted with 334 diamonds, white gold hardware and white alligator skin. And that’s only №4!

The description does not specify if this is from an authentic leucistic alligator, or just some old garden variety Wally Gator from a golf course in Florida who had a dye job. One would think the scarcity of the variety would preclude making it into bags, even for a quarter of a million dollars. Might it be that hideous vinyl stuff we had in the '60s, which would get so hot and melty in the sun?

Lunch

I've seen this before. YOU'VE seen this before. But you've got to see it again.

Christ on a cracker! This is huge

Blasted bloody HELL

Lack of proficiency on this blasted bloody machine makes me feel miserable, embarrassed and even afraid. And it happens regularly. I click on "something", usually to try to make things better, to solve a specific problem, and nine other problems suddenly pop up. My well-meaning but SLOW SLOW husband comes into my office and hunts and pecks for two hours, then tells me, "I can't resolve the problem." I sit down and find each problem now has at least three more problems. They have grown organically, and soon will take over the already-hectic garden of my mind.

And oh, DON'T go on a "help" site, for you'll get stupid useless wads of information from "users" telling you all sorts of Byzantine, acrobatic ways of NOT solving the problem. All done in gobble-eze, so you feel even more stupid. It's like being seven years old and standing on the playground and EVERYONE else has learned a secret language except you, and the reason you haven't learned the secret language is:

(a) they don't want you to, and/or

(b) you're incredibly stupid.

So I flail around, speaking broken English and gesticulating madly while others speak fluent "whatever", going so fast I can't pick up even the gist.

The ultimate solution is calling my son, a techie by trade who has never yet been defeated by any sort of computer problem (including the time years ago when the screen was swirling like something out of The Time Tunnel. He looked at it for a half-second, said "oh, that's the bananasplitzonefurtwangler," hit a key, and all was resolved.)

But this time, some of the problems at least were things I blundered into myself. Soon my ankle was caught in a rope, and the more I pulled the tighter it got, and the stupider I looked. I put my own name down as a follower, completely by mistake, and now I can't get out of it, though I can block any other follower on my modest list. I can't post YouTube videos, and I can't post links to articles in papers and magazines. It just doesn't work, though the appropriate box comes up.

Dead boxes get me, dead icons, little dead arrows, things that are supposed to "click" and just sit there mocking you. (Oh, there's Margaret. Qulahgoinagzapadoodlefromfromjaggajagaboo.)

I wasn't born for this, except that email was a breaktkhrough and an energy-saver from the 15-page letters I used to hand-write. Manuscripts, yes, they became a lot more manageable, no more whiteout or carbon paper (yes, I do remember carbon paper, and even Gestetner stencils with correcting fluid like nail polish). And etc. etc. etc. The internet flung open a door to millions of other doors, and I revel in learning from it. Yes. All that is good. But the price seems to be my self-esteem. I feel like such a bloody idiot for not KNOWING all this stuff, for making blunders that seem to be permanently stuck in Krazy Glue. For hitting keys I, ohGodforgiveme, NEVER meant to hit, so can I pleaseplease get out of this thing now??

The answer is no. I have no gadgets, barely have a thing that passes as a cell phone, don't WANT to "tweet" (and why are all these gadgets given such appallingly stupid names? What's a "skype" anyway, and COULD the name be any uglier?). My husband has a kindle or whatever it is, kindling? He reads off of it. He's ahead of me in some ways, not being so afraid. But I stumble, blunder, and feel humiliated when I make something go wrong or come up against a blind wall.

Though I suddenly can't attach YouTube videos or links, which I could easily do before, and which are the bread and body of this blog, allofasudden a couple of my gifs seem to work (?). I can't remember them ever working before. It seems like an illusion, frankly, and I know by the time I post this, they will have stopped, remembering who they are, or maybe who they belong to.

My tool bar for the internet has disappeared, and now I can't do anything. All this came about because I dared to run an innocuous-looking Windows update on my hopelessly dated computer, a Lugblunk from the early '40s. (I bought it used from the Twilight Zone Museum of Failed Technology.)

I ran this update because I could no longer play audio clips from my kiddie record site, the one I rhapsodized about a few posts ago. They just stopped. When I ran the update, they started again, along with a zillion obnoxious pop-ups for things I didn't want. When I tried to get rid of them, everything fell apart.

Oh, I know I should delete this useless rant, I am in a bad mood, very bad, because every problem I try to solve spawns so many more (worse) problems. This takes me back to the very beginning of email and search engines (I used one called Jeeves: whatever happened to it?). I couldn't and didn't catch on to anything, so I don't know how I got this far. And I don't know how I developed such a deep dread of missteps. Maybe I think it'll all be taken away from me (especially all my novel manuscripts: poof! Fifteen years of work, gone.)

If the gifs work, you'll be seeing a lot of them. But I doubt it. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away (e. g. my YouTube/all my other links), but mostly taketh away and dumps into the "hopelessly irretrievable" bin so that only a techie who never gets out of the house (the one who works for the cops, along with Criswell the psychic) can pull it back from certain oblivion.