AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!

This is the most horrifying story I've seen in a while. Snakes--slithery, scary, long, and fat ones--are converging on the Brazilian city of Belem as their nearby forest habitat is being destroyed.

The government's environmental protection agency, Ibama, normally gets 1 or 2 calls a month, but so far this year, they've received twenty-one. One was a 10-ft. anaconda, apparently found in someone's plumbing.

You wouldn't have to ask me twice to leave if this ever happened in Round Rock. I've been traumatized plenty by snakes over the years. We had several come into our yard from the drainage ditch and pasture behind my parents' house. I nearly stepped on a big angry one when I was about 10 (12 feet, at least, and red-eyed, I swear). When I was in high school, my mother found one slithering menacingly around our kitchen floor (and just last year, found one behind her computer desk). A snake once slithered up the 25-ft. pole to my dad's purple martin house and ate all the little birdies and their eggs. Last summer, I resolved to spray my yard every summer with Snake-Away (yes, a real product) after my realtor "joked" that there were snakes hiding in the crawl space under my house. Yes, as you can see by my use of italics, it's been a lifetime of fear for me.

But perhaps the worst scare was what I witnessed on Rescue 911 as a child. A snake had come up through somebody's toilet. I still check before I sit, every single time.