There comes a time in the life of every young man when a new and alien menace threatens his home, and the only course of action left for him is to boldly step forward and make fun of all the people who are actually trying to help solve the problem. This is that time, and I am that man. What is this terror which so recently has infested Chesterfield County, you ask? You will probably be surprised (or maybe not, if you're just really jaded and cynical by now) to learn that it is none other than an alligator.

Now you might well ask yourself how an alligator got to central Virginia, so have a lot of people, but most of their answers are boring, so I've come up with a few of my own likely scenarios. First, it could in fact not be an alligator at all, but rather a baby Pterodactyl or some kind of Quetzacoatl that was flying over the area when it suddenly lost it's baby wings and plunged down into the murky recesses of Falling Creek Resavoir. It is also thoguht highly possible by experts in the region that it's some elder thing of the ancient world, recently awakened from it's aeon-dead slumber beneath the placid surface of the lake by all the nuclear testing they've been doing next door in Henrico lately. Personally, I think it's really Old Man Slapdeback, dressing up as the legendary Falling Creek Ghost Gator in an attempt to scare Cass Elliot and the Harlem Globe Trotters away from the abandoned taffy factory they recently bought owing to the rumors of pirate gold buried in the caverns beneath it. If this turns out to be true, I'm going to have to paint my van green, teach my dog to talk and recruit a cheerleader, a some nerdy girl with pop-bottle glasses, and a fruity guy to go out and solve this mystery.

Alas, even finding the alligator seems to be beyond the ability of our local authorities. Despite the fact that ever since the dam was broken a couple of years ago the lake is shallow too shallow to drown a midget, the combined genius of the local nimal control people is unequal to the task. Even if they do find it, they've already given up on being able to capture the alligator by themselves, it being all of three feet long.

Assuming they do find it, I think that it's all too likely that this animal will prove altogether too mighty for our city's local guardians to vanquish, neccessitating more desperate measures. Personally, I'd like to see William Shatner build a cannon out of bamboo and costume jewelry to shoot it with, thereby proving once and for all that humans are more highly evolved than the gorn, er, alligators.

What's more, this alligator has spawned additional rumors around town. Someone in Chester claimed to have seen another larger alligator in the river, while I myself glimpsed a small mastadon in the pantry this morning, scurrying amongst the Cheetos.

Well, this one didn't turn out as funny as I had originally planned, but I already wrote it and all, so maybe later tonight if I think of something better, I'll add that too. Meanwhile, you'll probably just have to wait until tomorrow for my insightful and wacky observations into more things in life. Honky Out.