NYC Alligators rule :)

They're everywhere, particularly in the sewers of NYC, a myth that's kinda true as seen in an amazing and amusing NYTimes piece about these denizens lurking in the darkness. Read on if you dare. :)

They are big. They are vicious. Some say they are albinos, because of a lack of sunlight.

They are the alligators that supposedly infest New York City’s sewer system, slithering through the bowels just under the street level, feeding on rats and rubbish and terrorizing sewer workers armed with guns for self-defense.

It gets better. :)

The East Harlem Gator

The seminal New York City sewer-gator event came on Feb. 9, 1935, when some East Harlem teens spied an alligator down a storm drain and then lassoed and hauled it up with a clothesline. After the reptile — roughly eight feet long and 125 pounds — snapped at them, they killed it with their shovels.

“Alligator Found in Uptown Sewer,” read the headline in the The Times. The article speculated that it had escaped from a passing steamer in the East River and had swum into a sewer outflow pipe.

Even better. still :)

In “Alligator,” the 1980 horror-comedy, a baby alligator flushed down the toilet in an unnamed city becomes a gigantic killer mutant gator after feeding on discarded lab rats that were injected with growth hormones.

Yours truly owned one and got it via snail mail for, you guessed it, $1.50. Albert lived about 6 months and got to be almost 3 ft in length whereupon he died a peaceful death after eating hamburger that disagreed with his delicate digestive tract. :)

And so it goes. K. Vonnegut