What Kills Us this Week!

I shouldn't really be doing this since fretting about the latest Killer-Thing is a particularly HK-type occupation, and, as you know, we're not in HK at present. We are, in fact, in Australia, traveling around North Queensland, in the very part of world that has, by an enormous margin, the most things that can kill you and in the most horribly painful ways possible - seriously! - but, like Australians themselves, we aren't giving the subject the slightest thought!

Nonetheless, I'll just use this opportunity to thank that person back there in HK - you know who you are - for, very sweetly and with utmost consideration, sending me a list of "Things that Can Kill You in North Queensland" ... a very, very long list indeed ...

And also to thank Jason, also in HK, for sending me this link that you may like to view too:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy_TB6onHVE

Jason, sweetie, it was most thoughtful of you and I'm really being a right ingrate saying this ... but "Get stuffed!"

Later:

Decided that this subject was too good to be so perfunctory about, so here's more:

When talking about things that can kill you horribly I should make it clear that, here in NQ, we're not just talking about such ordinary typical-Australian things like giant crocodiles, sharks, octopus, cassowaries, killer-jellyfish, dingoes, snakes, spiders, killer-disease-carrying mosquitoes, etc, etc, etc! Oh, and not forgetting the sweeping waves of killer epidemics of icky diseases like Ross River Virus, Lymes, Japanese Encephalitis, Dengue, Q-Fever, Barma-Forrest and lots of other things that are so like malaria but are given different names so Australia can say "No! We don't have Malaria here! What are we? Third-world or something!"

We are talking about things that, in other places, don't ordinarily kill you; things like fish and insects and leeches and fleas and ticks and other tiny more-usually-just-annoying things. Oh yeah, and butterflies here are poisonous too and how wrong is that! You know, here, along with the snakes and spiders, everything has the power to not just kill you, but to over-kill you. Seriously! Every toxic thing - and most things are - has between 10 and 100 times the venom to kill a large-sized man.

It's always been a puzzle to me why this should be. Mother Nature isn't known to waste anything so why all this SERIOUSLY SERIOUS OVERKILL??!!!

Although it's always possible that, some time past, all these creatures went into some evolutionary overdrive about which one of them could kill the others worst, but I'm slowly developing an entirely different theory:

See, practically the entire East Coast and Top End of North Queensland is one giant, primordial rainforest that has been around for over 22 million years and has never seen an Extinction Event! This means that this giant mostly-unexplored forest is still full of cyclads - dinosaur food - and other extinct-elsewhere species of plant-life, and therefore, to me, this means that there is no reason to believe that all the creatures that have evolved in the area over the last 22 million years wouldn't still in there somewhere, alive and well, and we don't know about it simply because we just haven't found them.

AND, logically, since everything in the area has between 10 and 100 times the Kill-Venom for a large-sized man, in that primordial forest there has to be creatures that are between 10 and 100 times the size of a large-sized man.

What do you think? Am I on to something here?

There's a reason why I believe they aren't extinct. I myself have seen a mihirang. If you don't know what that is, it's the ancestor of the emu and it looks exactly like a giant, deformed, albino emu on steroids. Everyone I've ever told about this sighting (and there were nine of us who saw it that day) says either of two things: people who don't work in the field of palaeontology say "What crap! They've been extinct for over a million years!", or, if they are palaeontologists, say "You know, there are literally thousands of reported mihirang sightings over the years. We really need to organise an expedition into that rainforest to find out what exactly they do have in there!"

Guess there's something about knowing that everything has 100 times Overkill that seriously deters even the most intrepid!

So there you go! I think there's a world in there that would really interest even the most unintrepid palaeontologist. And since they've recently discovered that New Zealand's tuatara is a winsy little dinosaur instead of the lizard it was categorised as being, it's perfectly possible that NQ is literally rampant with once-thought-extinct species!