I love elephant trunk snakes so freaking much. Can you imagine seeing this thick, 6-foot serpentine shape slithering through the murky water, closer and closer and then…
This dorky little puppy dog face pokes out of the water.
I did a little reading and these snakes are actually even cooler than I initially thought.
Look at this happy baby puppy-snake with his fish. (Source)
Based on appearance I had assumed they were constrictors, or at least most closely related to constrictors, but they are actually in the primitive monogeneric family Acrochordidae and are about halfway between colubrids and boas/pythons in terms of evolutionary relationships.
Elephant trunk snakes are the largest fully aquatic snake (they can’t support their own body weight and can hardly move out of the water) and can even be found in brackish water. They can stay underwater for as long as 40 minutes and can undergo supplementary gas exchange through their skin similar to an amphibians (and some turtles).
Their other common name “file snake” comes from the fact that their scales don’t overlap but actually poke out from the skin in sharp pyramid-shapes that help them grasp their fishy prey. In between these scales are sensory tubercles that allow the snakes sense their prey in murky water.
Here’s someone handling an adult. Apparently they have extremely slow metabolisms even for snakes and tend to be very chill and lazy.
The Baron Empain Palace (Qasr el Baron, or The Palais Hindou) is a distinctive and historic mansion in Heliopolis, a suburb northeast of central Cairo, Egypt.
The palace was designed by French architect Alexandre Marcel and decorated by Georges-Louis Claude. Inspired by the Angkor Wat in Cambodia, it was built between 1907 and 1911, in reinforced concrete.
The Palace is located in one of the elite suburbs near the presidential Palace and is founded over a rotating base which rotates the palace to access sun beam in all directions !
it’s sometimes hard to believe rasputin was real. like there’s no non-fucked up part of rasputin’s existence
did he do something problematic i thought he was just russia’s greatest love machine
basic (true) story: fanatical russian monk who has almost never shaved or washed and smells like goats shows up at the russian capital with a creepy look on his beardy face and everyone just assumes he’s a prophet or a saint because he’s got a cult following that believes he can cure illnesses. his stans are sexually obsessed with him and he gets just a fuckton of russian pussy wherever he goes cause apparently he can cure his true believers of illness with god-given dick magic. russia’s queen has him come stay at the palace and sets him up in luxury because she thinks he can cure her son’s haemophilia with the power of russian goat jesus, and they
(allegedly)
become lovers, probably, ‘cause she craves that unwashed goat-scented dick like the rest of his cult which she now
(allegedly)
belongs to.
then the worst assassins in the history of assassinations try to assassinate him, because all of russia is slutshaming the queen he has too much power over the royal family and it’s helping revolutionaries turn people against the royals. so these idiots have him round for tea and cakes which are poisoned with cyanide, but he is magically unaffected by poison they get the dose wrong and he doesn’t die, and then he drinks three glasses of wine, which are also poisoned, and he doesn’t die, so they tell him to look at a crucifix and shoot him in the chest with a revolver when he isn’t looking, and he doesn’t die, but they think he’s dead so one of them dresses in his clothes and gets driven to his apartment to make it look like he’s gone home to hide the crime, and when they come back he gets up and attacks them, so they stab him in the side with a knife, and he doesn’t die, and then he frees himself and runs outside, so they shoot him a few times more, including in the forehead, and they wrap his body up and chuck him in the icy river, and he doesn’t go into the water, so his body is found on the ice the next day. and get this…. he died…. of hypothermia.
additionally, everyone who wasnt in the party of getting rid of rasputin was pretty bummed out when they found him and his miracle dick dead the next day and there was a pretty bangin funeral of which the royal family themselves attended. however after the tsar was overthrown a few month later they exhumed his body and burned it because the new leadership was very adamant about making sure there were no ties left to honor the old monarchy. however this dudes body had never been properly prepped for a cremation which meant that under the extreme heat his tendons and ligaments began to retract and shrink causing his dead body to move and twitch around as if still animate. according to some testimony his body actually sat up straight on the pyre, and at least one spectator fired a gun at the body and another may have allegedly died of shock.
Rasputin was an old god from times before humans
He is like a cleric gone wild
“did rasputin do something problematic” i am going to die
She was one of the first volunteers to come to the cave. She worked to cook meals and provide rest for the soldiers and divers trying to get to the boys.
She has 5 acres of land where she farms rice all on her own since her husband died and she left it shortly after planting to go and give what she could to the rescue effort. She returned home a week later to find her fields flooded by the water being pumped out of the cave system.
From what the article says, it doesn’t seem to have destroyed all her (and almost a dozen other farmers) crops but it was a good portion of them.
This woman is wonderful. She could have seen this as a “no good deed goes unpunished” but she just laughed it off and said it was worth it to save those boys.
