Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
From: jperry@oahu.cs.ucla.edu (John Perry)
Subject: The Thing About Cats
Keywords: lions, tigers, bears, oh my
Date: Wed, 08 Jun 94 17:32:33 GMT

Kevin wasn't afraid of tigers.  That isn't to say that if he ever
met a tiger he wouldn't experience fear, but on this particular
trip to Asia, Kevin wasn't afraid of tigers.

     It wasn't that Kevin was a particularly muscular man.  In fact,
he was rather lean, some would even call him scrawny.  His complexion
was pale; not the albino kind of pale, where the skin can't get much
color, nor the greenish pale that one looks between the time when he
throws up and when he starts to feel better.  Rather Kevin's complexion
was the sort of pale one gets from being bathed in the glow of a
monitor rather than the glow of the sun for too long.  Most people
would look at him and think "computer nerd... definitely afraid of
tigers".  They would be wrong, at least on one count.

    Kevin had never met a tiger in the wild, though he had seen them
in the zoo when he was a boy.  That trip had ended when the Orangutan
had urinated quite openly and Kevin had commented that the simian's
organ was even larger than his fathers.  His father wouldn't have
minded so much, except for the fact that they were visiting the zoo
with Kevin's sister Carrie's Girl Scout troup.  Carrie would have
accompanied Kevin on this safari, except for the fact that the
travel agent had assured them that they would see tigers on this trip,
and Carrie was afraid of tigers.  But Kevin wasn't.

     The reason Kevin didn't fear the tigers' vicious claws and gaping maws
was because he had a secret weapon.  It wasn't a gun.  Kevin had never
felt particularly comfortable with guns since the time he shot Carrie
with his Daisy air rifle as a kid.  The paddling his father gave him then
probably hurt worse than the bee-bee that hit Carrie on the other side of
the yard, and Kevin still flinched whenever he picked up a firearm.  No,
it wasn't a gun that gave Kevin his confidence.  Nor was it a knife or
flamethrower or an amazing ability to talk to the animals.  Kevin knew
he had the one thing that tigers feared more than any of those
conventional weapons.

Kevin had the magic socks.