Inspector Clouseau, to innkeeper: I thought you zaid your dogue does not baht!
Innkeeper: Zat is not ma dogue.
(Katherine Frey For The Washington Post)
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We were just sitting here eating the rest of the seven-layer dip and then the next thing we know Madison started screaming from the other side of the yard and running around.
That irritating Australian man on cable TV, Steve whoseywhachit, who keeps daring animals to bite him, and you just wish they would already. Repeatedly, on the face and arms.
Finally, "Moby-Dick": What is it, really, but one long story about getting revenge for a very bad bite? Call me Ishmael. Get me some Bactine.
"Bitten: True Medical Stories of Bites and Stings" is a new book by Pamela Nagami, a doctor of internal medicine who teaches at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. It's a horrible, wonderful litany of bitey-bite-bite stories.
She opens with a 90-year-old woman in a Houston chronic-care facility, unable to move. Attendants walk in and find her in bed, covered with fire ants, thousands of them, biting her. She dies.
Then we read about necrotic arachnidism -- death from spider bite, delivered in the night -- but don't worry about death: You've got days before that happens. Then there's a man in the ocean, emerging from the water wrapped in a large, translucent man o' war, which leaves him with painful welts. A family ferret escapes from its cage and chews off 40 percent of both ears on an infant girl.
I love this book.
"This book is for informational purposes only," Nagami writes right at the beginning. "It is not intended to take the place of individualized medical advice. . . . Readers are advised to consult a physician or other qualified health professional regarding treatment of bites or before acting on any of the information in this book."
In other words, this book is really only about enjoying other people's bites and doing whatever you can to never get bitten.
Nagami writes in an utterly fascinating, clinical voice. There is hardly a word of sympathy. Just bite story after bite story after bite story: "A 20-year-old woman in Sweden had kept a donkey as a companion for her horse for some time. . . . It turned violent and clamped its jaws firmly on her thumb, refusing to let go." (Later, tetanus. Then later, pus.)
She's got stories about bats, lab monkeys and even that Komodo dragon that bit the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, who was at the time married to the actress Sharon Stone, who was horrified: "So he went in and started petting the dragon," Stone recalled in a celebrity interview, which Nagami quotes. "The thing has a long, skinny, forked tongue with yellow stripes. It started staring out at Phil's shoes. The zookeepers said, 'I'm sure he thinks it's the white rats that we feed him. You'd probably be better off without your shoes.' "
I must speak to this Dr. Nagami.
