Blinking at Tigers!

The closing of relationships and the opening of doors, The starting of hostilities and the ending of wars Zebegniev Tries...

Blinking at Tigers. (in memory of Franco)

Lets face it, people that don't blink are either paralyzed from the lids down (or up, I suppose), or they're psychotic. Sure, Hitch-Hikers Guide fans may argue the point that Ford Prefect didn't blink, but hey, he was psychotic. _ __ ___ ____ _____ ______ ________ ______ _____ ____ ___ __ _ Anyway, that's not the point. If someone sits in a bar, fully unblinking from opening to closing time, the barman will have the willies. When he locks up at night, he's going to be checking every crevice of the bar, looking over his shoulder as he locks up and leaves. Why? You let slip for one micro-second, you blink, and the madman will slip from nowhere and have you. Blood-soaked pavement, psycho's gone in another instant. _ __ ___ ____ _____ ______ ________ ______ _____ ____ ___ __ _ Thats not the point either, really. The point is, if you can train yourself to do so, you can appear to be psychotic to, and scare the hell out of everyone. The only problem with this is that the actual process of training yourself to not blink at will is likely to send you, ahem, psychotic. It is done thusly:


	Sit in front of a mirror. Stare closely into your reflections eyes. If the reflection blinks, you drop your feet into the ready-prepeared bowl of water at your feet, that is wired to the mains. If you cannot bring yourself to do this, get your optician to prescribe you some sand-paper contact lenses, grainy side out. This way, whenever you blink, the inside of your eye-lids get torn up. This method is perfect, and necessary once passing the mirror stage, when practicing out and about. I fail to see why it drives so many to the brink of sanity and beyond to spasms of sheer unnecessary violence.

But to make people really burst their colostomy bags, they need to know (or believe) that the unblinking one has finally decided to attack \ has snapped \ has selected a target. This is done by, at the moment such things become true or you wish them to appear so, you start to blink. Maybe slowly at first, maybe not, but you must result in blinking at such a rate that it appears to be painful.
This has the effect of 'breaking the ice', as it were, on the situation, allowing you to stop your stony stance and lay into them with a meat-cleaver.

That's fine for humans. But what of the animal kingdom? To make this a fair experiment, we must go back to our animalistic roots - the plains (or the palins, the only place Michael hasn't been. 'Dune to Dune' would be a good title).
So, we decided to try out this method on some Siberian Tigers. In this experiment I had the aid of my good student Franco.
Franco has been taking tuition from me for some time, but the most notable breakthrough in his learning's came at the completion of his mirror-therapy, whereupon he head-butted the mirror to shards because his reflection was getting leery. He proceeded to eat the fragments of glass, kicking his feet merrily in the electrifying water. Franco went on to the work-shop to fashion his own pair of contact lenses, but we had to restrain him. After calming him down somewhat, we noticed that in this state his blinking had ceased entirely, and we had to make him angry to get an eye-lid response. Perfect conditioning.

_ __ ___ ____ _____ ______ ________ ______ _____ ____ ___ __ _

After many days of tracking, we chanced upon a Siberian Tiger that had recently fed, so we took it in turns to out-stare her as she tried to sleep off her meal over the next few days. Naturally, she began to get a little annoyed. Pet cat-owners will doubtless know it is impossible to hold your cats gaze, as they will avert their eyes and head. This is because they like you. Cats stare at each other when they are thinking of starting a fight \ playing \ eating \ humping \ wanting attention. This goes for the Siberian Tiger too, but she is unlikely to be distracted by a ping-pong ball and a tin of Felix.

The Siberian Tigress took three days before we managed to get an adverse response, due to her recent feed. This was good for us, as we got to see how much stick we could give her before she would shift her belly and do something other than growl blood-curdlingly and sit somewhere else.
By dusk of the third day, we had clearly disturbed her with our constant staring, especially seeing since midday both myself and Franco were staring simultaneously, just a little to either side of her so she couldn't quite so both of us at the same time.
All this excitement had probably given her indigestion, but she was s hungry we could her her stomach over the constant low growls.

Just before the light started to fade, we blinked. One slow, deliberate blink in perfect unison. Then apeshit blinking, followed by one single step towards her, blinking all the while, shifting our arms into a forward fighting stance, bending the knee slightly.
Felicity, as the film-crew had named her, leapt forward from a sitting position with lightening speed, paws and claws out-stretched, screaming her head off, flying straight to Franco's throat. Her paws landed on his chest, knocking him to the ground under her. The impact meant that Felicity's claws penetrated Franco's chest and raked down to his stomach as she held her footing firm. This mattered very little as no sooner were they down then Felicity stuck her head down and chewed straight through Franco's neck.

I was so surprised I fell down behind a handy piece of thick shrub, and watched in dire fascination as she cornered the film crew in their own jeep, and took them down one or two at a time.

Gorged as she was, she left me alone as I took a wide 1/4 mile circle round from my convenient shrub to the jeep, which was 50 meters away as the vulture flies. Of course, I didn't want to risk my life when I had to write this fascinating event up, for Franco if no-one else (I didn't actually know the film crew personally, and they had called Franco and I "F***ing Mad" from the outset. Well, they were wrong. They were dead and I still lived, so what basis could they build from?).

So the obvious conclusion is: Don't do it to Tigers. Sure, they're intimidated, but then they tend to kill and maim those that intimidate them, just as they do in opposing packs.

You should grow a beard A beard to tell a thousand stories never told before A beard to tell you tales, whilst the fireplace roars