This turtle says...yow!

Oh, I do love me some cute turtle photos. Alligator snapping turtles - found also in my part of the world - are rarely cute, and they can take off a finger, as well as eat whole ducklings and frogs and stuff, but I thank the New York Times for giving us a turtle "yow!" on the front page.

My mind immediately jumps to the massive alligator snappers we had in Southern Illinois, which were positively primeval and could get very big, like make-a-circle-with-your-arms-and-imagine-a-turtle-shell-filling-that-space big. They have the reputation for being mean, squinty-eyed and pug-nosed, and they eat ducklings (dude!). But they're impressive miniature dinosaurs. And then, I leapfrog to aged amphibians more generally, and Kolz and I's island adventure in Zanzibar to the exclusive resort cum tortoise sanctuary cum perilous snorkeling dive, which he blogged about (and yes, he is still posting, but BigLaw takes up his time pretty well...). These are nice, placid, mchicha-eating tanks...though the one looking askance looks like Voldemort.

We had box turtles from the woods as found pets (for a few hours at most) when I was a kid - they'd always end up snuggled under the closest heat-producing applicance, which could be a challenge in returning them to the wild. And Joe's story of the magic perennial desert tortoise in his Arizona backyard is one of my favorites. It would come back when the weather got warm enough.

Most of you know I'm snake-aphobic, but I do wonder, with all this free associating, why turtles have the monopoly on cute and cool when it comes to non-furry creatures. No one dislikes turtles and tortoises - (do they? turtle-haters, speak now) - they make nice pets, they're interesting endangered species, and apparently, they're built to outlive all of us. You wouldn't expect to see a sleeve turtle, but wouldn't that be nice? Or would it just be boring?

Clearly grading IDs from my undergrads is making my brain fire a bit strangely...but this was a nice little diversion in an otherwise diversion-less day.