Animal knotting

Can a snake tie itself into a knot it can't get out of? (Via GeekPress.)

"Life as a tube"

Let us welcome our new snake overlords.

Also

more on the snake that could open doors. (Via Jessamyn.)

Collation

Fifteen ways to file your cats. (Via Becky.)

Also, via Jane Y., knitting for reptiles!

I am having some satisfying work on my essay about minute particulars in life-writing and the novel. Also exercising up a storm and waiting for winter to stop.

Enchanted by a pair of novels and a novella originally recommended by some source now lost in the past of the internet; they are not of the highest literary genre, some people don't like reading stuff like this, but they are the kind of thing I particularly like, and so beautifully done I hardly can stand it! Appealing (gay) characters in fantasy world loosely based on seventeenth-century Holland, some magic but not excessive and narrative based on a crime detection plot rather than something more fantastical - they are absolutely delightful. A collaborative project by Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett: Point of Hopes, Point of Knives, Point of Dreams. Must seek out more of Scott's novels and/or reread novels by Ellen Kushner!

Seeing Parsifal on Wednesday next week at the Met (this was a good teaser, but you may need a New Yorker subscription to access it) and 1 Henry IV on Thursday. Culture, sport, light reading - all good....

Cryptic zoology

Two markedly different book-naming protocols.

Snake tales

Luc Sante's neighbors (via the Dizzies).

Snakes, pies

More on the snake dress (FT site registration required, plus no squeamishness about public self-revelation).

More appealingly, Melton Mowbray's Pie Olympics!

101 snakes

"Ms. Abramovic, however, was quick to mention that the snakes used in her jacket had died of natural causes."

Seizure-detecting snakes

Home from Thanksgiving wanderings. Very weary. But...

... "I don't carry Redrock into the food area because people think it's unsanitary" (FT site registration required).

The snake-and-primate nexus

Snake Detection Theory!