Rabid Vampire Bats

See the map above? See that red circle with a birdlike shadow inside? (it was red in the newspaper) Well that ain't no prayer dove and its definitely not the Gotham City batman beam. You should know that the color red in symbols usually means a warning. So if your as smart as a fifth-grader you should be able to put the characteristics of this symbol together to come of with its meaning; Warning Bats.

That's right, bats with sharp, long incisor teeth that prowl the South American countryside in search of fresh blood. Sounds like a cheesy horror novel or movie, but this is real. Its happening in the continent just south of these United States and could just be a matter of time before they venture north for fresh pickings. Wait, didn't the killer bees take the same route? Another story.

Thanks to the weekly newspaper column, Earthweek: A diary of the planet by Steve Newman, you can read about such natural phenomena as Vampire bat deaths. The scary part isn't the view of these flying mammals swooping down and sinking their incisors into unsuspecting sleeping victims. Oh no, the scary part is when the victim experiences the symptoms of rabies (fever, paralysis and extreme fear of water) and their convulsing bodies become rigid just before death.

Dozens of tribespeople in Venezuela's Orinoco River delta have died over the past year and sixteen of them, mostly children, have been afflicted over the past month by rabid vampire bat bites. Rabies is curable if treated in time but in some of these small villages, who knew that waking up with puncture wounds on the body could mean a one-way ticket to "The Upper Room."

I really need to thank Earthweek for their almost biblical revelations of life on this planet in the 21st century. Personally, I don't think Moses could've come up with such catastrophic earthly occurrences as these. For instance, I've never heard of "Bovine terror," have you? The thought of 150 ornery cows invading villages in search of food just isn't in my bank of reality. But its happening in a small village in southern Spain as I speak. Talk about mad cow disease, this hungry marauding pack of cows are foraging what they want, when they want it and wherever they find it. The villagers seem helpless in driving the beasts away. Gee, sounds like the Oakland Raiders defense of glory days past.

So if you find yourself surfing the web for some revelatory information about this big world of ours, look no further than Earthweek: A diary of the planet. Its information like this found at Earthweek that make my problems here in the United States seem puny.