Here are a couple of tangled tales for you. The picture to the left (They removed the picture) appeared with a LiveScience.com article on a 200 yard long stretch of trail in Lake Tawakoni State Park in Northern Texas that is enveloped in spider webs. Some entomologists are calling this potentially a once in a lifetime event, while one killjoy is saying he sees them every couple of years.

“At first, it was so white it looked like fairyland,” said Donna Garde, superintendent of the park about 45 miles east of Dallas. “Now it’s filled with so many mosquitoes that it’s turned a little brown. There are times you can literally hear the screech of millions of mosquitoes caught in those webs.”

The next tale comes to us from Dortmund, Germany, via The Sun tabloid out of Britain…Mark Voegel loved reptiles and insects. He loved them so much that he had over 200 of them in his small apartment, many of them running free that were quite dangerous and even deadly. Most notably for our purposes was his pet black widow “Bettina.” Bettina bit and killed Mark, and the other critters proceeded to eat and infest his body over the next 7-14 days before he was discovered by police when neighbors complained of a foul odor…

Police broke in to Mark Voegel’s apartment to find spider Bettina along with 200 others, several snakes, a gecko lizard called Helmut and several thousand termites had gorged on his body.

Police spokesman said: “It was like a horror movie. His corpse was over the sofa.

“Giant webs draped him, spiders were all over him. They were coming out of his nose and his mouth.

“There was everything there one could imagine in the world of reptiles.

“Larger pieces of flesh torn off by the lizards were scooped up and taken back to the webs of tarantulas and other bird-eating spiders.”

One thing I was curious about… The article describes Mark as a loner, which is how the media diplomatically calls someone crazy and friendless. Yet somehow the police knew the names of the animals that were eating him. Even if the tanks were labeled how would they know who went where if most were loose in the apartment.

I suggest someone tack this story to the a few of the trees in Lake Tawakoni State Park.

– Prof. Gruntsplatter