A Reptile Dysfunction

Is a frog's ass watertight?

My daughter had a bearded dragon who was too stupid to live.

Evolution set this thing’s brain to “zero.” Considering how much loving care he required to prevent him from becoming fertilizer for our garden, I’m amazed such creatures ever made it out of prehistoric times alive.

His diet included live crickets, which had a tendency to escape and hide in every corner of the house then begin chirping up a storm. I had to send the kids out on seek-and-destroy missions to get some peace. Spiky—reptiles with spikes owned by little girls are often named Spiky—had a tendency to go into what the bearded dragon owner’s guide referred to as “a state of semihibernation,” in which they just stop giving a shit about living; they won’t eat or drink and need to be coaxed back to health.

During one such episode, my wife and children were away, and I was left in charge of reptilian convalescence. I had to squirt baby food into his mouth, and like with a human baby, I’m not sure how much got in there. He also needed a bath, not to get clean, but to rehydrate.

Are you familiar with the expression “Is a frog’s ass watertight?”? It’s akin to “Does a bear shit in the woods?” Well, a frog’s backside may indeed keep water from entering, but such is not the case with a bearded dragon. The bath would allow him to soak up water via various avenues, so to speak.

I put him in the tub for a while, and he drank some, then began wigging out, so I took him out and dried him off. It wasn’t long before I noticed there was a problem.

Spiky couldn’t walk.

Normally, he would lift his belly and tail off the ground and trot around, but he couldn’t lift himself. He just flailed his legs and stayed in one spot, suffering some kind of reptile dysfunction. At this point, I recalled junior high school science class teaching us about one of the dumber dinosaurs—the stegosaurus—which was so stupid it needed a second brain in the back to control its hindquarters.

Well, that’s just great, I thought. I drowned his ass brain.

Fortunately, it was temporary. Spiky recovered fine and lived a long life, despite his lack of cognitive capabilities.

Speaking of the stegosaurus, did you know that the T-Rex is closer to us in terms of time passed than it is to the stego? Stegos are from 155 million years ago, and the T-Rex went extinct 66 million years ago. There, that's a prehistoric thing you now know, in case you didn't already know.

Speaking of knowing shit, I know some history shit, and I wrote it down in my sweary history book called On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down and I’d really like it if you bought that mofo.

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