Gasp!

I first heard about NPR's Wait, Wait. . .Don't Tell Me from Julie. She downloads it to her Ipod and listens to it while she walks the dog. She says that sometimes she laughs out loud and hopes other people walking along don't think she's nuts.

I thought about that as I was listening to The August 11, 2007 broadcast. The guest was Dr. Kevin Fitzgerald, of Animal Planet's "Emergency Vets: Interns" and he reported the following bit of nonsense. I have seldom laughed so hard in my life. It was so unexpected and told in such a droll voice. Follow the link and listen for yourself. Picture Julie walking Genevieve and the reactions other pedestrians might have to her reaction.

Dr. Fitzgerald reported that a man brought him a tarantula, and although he knows that a good vet isn't afraid of a patient, big spiders creep him out since they move funny, and it is worse when they have hair. He avoided the temptation to demand a phone book and squash the thing, but he was uncomfortable with it. When he asked what was wrong with the spider, he was told that he wasn't acting like himself -- he hadn't eaten for a couple of weeks and one of his legs had fallen off. Fitzgerald said that in his experience, when a spider's legs started to fall off, it was pretty sick. He referred the man to the Museum of Natural History to see Dr. Lick.

Before long, he got a call from Dr. Lick, "Did you send me this man with the big-assed spider? And did you tell him that in your experience when their legs start to fall off they are pretty sick? Well, if you had taken the time to examine him, you would have seen that he was, in fact, dead."

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