Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis

Unknown

Greetings and salutations, mon amis. I have a simple mission with this page. What is that, you might ask? The answer is no doubt an intriguing one: to accomplish two tasks comprising of: This may come as a bit of a shock, as the two seem to contradict another, don't they? Random, as a rule, cannot make sense, right?
 * 1) being random, and
 * 2) actually making sense.

I hereby introduce a newly founded concept pertaining to randomness known as the Dictionary Postulate. Say you are randomly skimming through a dictionary, blindfolded, using only seven fingers, upside down in a space module, aiming to point your finger down upon a random word. On your first try, the word is "buggered". Now you repeat the entire process again, making sure that your finger lands in the most random place possible. The next word your finger happens to land upon is "buggery". The two words are almost identical in spelling, meaning, and innumerable other aspects, not least of which being grammar. It's almost funny how planned-out it seems. But it isn't. It's random. And if it was random, who are you to question its meaning?

That in mind, I'm setting off to fill up this page with random things that pop into my head (consider it a personal narrative) that actually make sense, are as gramatically correct as I can make them, organized, and perhaps even (shock horror) useful. What madness is this? Marry, there's random method in't.

Of course, I'll probably tend to write about stuff that I like/know about/follow/imagine/watch/stalk/hunt down/eat/eat seconds of/read/form unnecessary postulates about, that being human tendency (although I may not necessarily be human, even though I occasionally display human qualities - I spend too much time down on this little rock) and that might not seem entirely random, but see the Dictionary Postulate, above.

Along the way there will be random appearances from Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis the bizarre armadillo. Why? I don't know why. Simple as that, frankly.

Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Now let's begin.

Herpetoculture: A History
Herpetoculture. Funny old word to start us off, isn't it. So, what the blazes does it mean.

Well, before we answer that let's back up a bit.

For some reason people have always tried to lump together snakes, frogs, lizards, salamanders, turtles, and crocodiles into one big category. Why; I'll never know, because there are important physical and phylogenetic differences. But people do it all the same. This dude Carl von Linne (you may know him as Carolus Linnaeus from such movies as The Man Who Made Taxonomy ) lumped em into a term called herptile. The term is still used today, although often abbreviated as "herp". This causes much amusement when people confuse it with herpes.

So what's herptile? Herptile comes from two words. The first is ἑρπετόν. It's Greek, don't worry. It comes out roughly as herpeton. Basically translates to "creeper". Apparently they didn't know that alligators can really hustle when they need to, and also that the term would quickly become disassociated with animals and onto some stupid video game. The second word is reptile, for obvious reasons.

Anyway, somebody thought herptile was a good name, and so the term herpetology was coined: the study of reptiles and amphibians. The lumping phenomenon continued. I remain depressed because of this, but you don't want to know about me. You want to know about herpetoculture. I'm getting there. Hold your horsepowers.

So herpetology is the study of reptiles and amphibians, and people who do herpetology are herpetologists. Basically, these people go out in the jungle to catch deadly herps, preach to the masses telling them to not make herps extinct, and use snake venom and frog slime to cure cancer. All in all, a pretty cool job, eh?

People, herpetologists or not, have always seemed to like stuffing herps in glass tanks and shoeboxes and keeping them as pets. In the olden days, you'd catch em yourself, and proudly display their cage on the mantle. That all changed in the 1940s, when some guy bred wild-caught corn snakes himself. One of the hatchlings turned out to be a rare albino that was pretty much unobtainable through the wild, and all the other herpkeepers were like MOTHER OF GOD I WANT ONE and so the herp captive breeding business was born.

This new trend became so popular that another dude actually decided to give it a name, drawing inspiration from the name herpetology. And so herpetoculture was born.

Yes, all that text just to define a word that you hadn't heard of before. You should expect a lot of that sort of thing with this page. Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis says so.