Snake eyes, everyone loses.

The above photo shows the aftermath of a fight between a 13' python and a 6' alligator in Florida's Everglades in 2005. Apparently the python swallowed the alligator whole and began to digest it, inspiring the alligator to claw at the insides of the snake. In the end both animals were dead, and as can be seen in the picture above, the hindquarters of the alligator were sticking out of the python. (In case the image is too small to be meaningful: the scaly thing sticking toward the lower-right corner of the picture is the alligator's tail, while the other two points are the ends of the torn-in-half python. This just adds another item to each of two lists: 1. Reasons no one should live in Florida until they are old enough that they can't leave the house; and, 2. Reasons I am not cut out for any kind of wilderness adventure.

Invincible.

Hilariously, Michael Jackson's final studio album was named Invincible. Also hilarious is Michael's melting, whitening, clearly-not-invincible face, shown in its different stages throughout the years in the great morphing video below.

Cats!

Two cat-related stories:

1. The owners of a Kansas zoo allowed their pet golden retriever to raise three white-striped tiger cubs [note: this is the term used in the article I read, though it doesn't really seem right; the animals have black stripes, not white ones] who were abandoned by their mother. The family, seen above, is now being split apart because the cubs have grown large enough that even just playing with the dog the cubs could severely injure her. There are some pretty cute pictures in this slideshow. This MSNBC report includes video:

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2. Riana Van Nieuwenhuizen, an animal sanctuary worker in South Africa, lives "[...] with not one but FOUR orphaned cheetahs, five lions and two tigers. Forty-six-year-old Riana said: 'I love them all. But they're a handful.'" All of the pictures below are shot at her home, where the animals seemingly have free reign.

China Lights Up.

Two bewildering stories relating to tobacco have come out of China recently, and both make me glad to live in the USA:

1. The Gongan county government of central China has ordered civil servants in the area "[...] to puff their way through 230,000 packs of local Hubei-produced cigarettes over the year," or face a fine. Contradictory to the central government's policies intended to curb smoking, this edict is an effort to stem losses of tobacco tax revenue to non-local cigarette producers. The edict has since been put "under study" to determine if it should be in place or not.

2. Tong Liangliang, a two-year old from China, now holds the unofficial record of being the youngest chain-smoker in history. Liangliang (pictured above) was pushed to smoking by his father, who believed that the cigarettes would numb the pain of the boy's hernia until he grew old enough to have an operation for the condition. Liangliang's smoking began about six months ago, but he is already smoking a pack a day and "[...] resists all his father's attempts to take away his only pain killer."