Playing with reptiles

The three weeks since I last posted a blog entry have been entirely swallowed up by interminable hours of dreary shift work in the heat, and a move to new barracks where we just now got internet installed. The best things I have done in the past three weeks are:

- I read a few books in Spanish.
- I bought an airplane ticket to Santiago, Chile, for when this deployment is over (I am planning to be in Chile from early November until January).
- I put an eighteen inch “Dhub dhub” lizard in the commander’s desk.

“Dhub dhub” (or “Dhub,”) is the Arabic name of a sort of whiptail lizard that is extremely common around here. Its genus name, I guess, is Uromastyx sp. It is a pretty impressive lizard that is completely harmless. In fact, it lives rather like a tortoise, eating vegetation, drinking little or no water, sleeping and hibernating in burrows, living a long time and growing slowly. Rather unlike tortoise, however, Dhub lizard are very fast runners, and hard to catch. Some of us have been able to outrun them, but I haven’t caught one yet since I am not much of a sprinter. This one was caught by an undisclosed friend, and I took this picture after we fashioned a little leash for it out of parachute cord, and tied it off to my couch (yes, I have a couch!).

After dark, I managed to sneak into the commander’s area , remove some pens and supplies from his desk drawer, and replace them with the lizard. Sadly, the command post’s air conditioner is a true blast freezer, chilling the tent to a quasi-arctic 60 degrees F (it is eighty degrees F inside my room right now, and about 118 degrees F outside). This caused the lizard to go into hibernation inside the desk, so when the commander opened it the lizard didn’t leap out. The effect was still quite worth the effort – according to people who were there at the time, the commander almost fell backwards over his chair in fright. Here is another Dhub lizard – this time a baby that is being kept as a pet by a friend:

Speaking of reptiles… I think this is the Arabian sand boa Eryx jakayari. We caught it at night, in the desert. Its eyes and nostrils are located on top of its head, so it can lay buried in the sand and still be able to see and hear, like an alligator in water. Also like an alligator, it will wait for a prey to come by, and emerge at the last split second to pounce. Since it is a boa, it will then crush its prey like a constrictor, and swallow it whole. When we caught it, it got scared and coughed up a half-digested young gerbil. It is a very fast little creature that kept trying to get away from me, but after a few minutes of harassing it so I could get its picture it calmed down and I could just hold it in my hand.



As always, I have been reading the news. As you probably have heard, seen and read, there are a lot of tragic events in this region of the world and others. However, they managed to be trumped in my mind by the idiotic Fatwa of a Kuwaiti cleric.

Doctor Ezzat Attiya (yes, I am talking about a guy who has studied for many, many years) has recently put out a religious edict saying that in order for a woman to work in a place where there are men, she must breastfeed the men. Yes, that’s right! According to this highly trained genius, if a woman breastfeeds a man, he will become her son in the eyes of God, and the man will stop having sexual thoughts about her. And no, he didn’t say that breast pumps were authorized for that purpose by Allah. In my neophyte opinion, that shows precious little knowledge of the male psyche and a worryingly low opinion of his deity’s intelligence. More worrying: the guy is in effect a government employee, because his university is part of a mosque, and all Kuwaiti Sunni mosques fall under the ministry of Awqaf and Islamic affairs. It is kind of funny to ponder some problematic scenarios, such as: what about royal family women who are government ministers? What about women who cannot produce breast milk? What if a woman ends up marrying a coworker after he has been declared her son?