Now for a bit of comic relief. The houndfish or needlefish swims in warm waters from the Gulf of Mexico all the way across to Thailand and Tahiti. It is a schooling fish and one that ranges in size from a half pound variety (the needlefish) all the way to specimens of houndfish in excess of 20lbs.

These fish would be considered a bit innocuous if they didn't happen to kill more people each year than shark attacks combined. And it's not that they mean to, it's simply a death by misadventure. Take the houndfish for instance. It has a long impaling beak on it that swipes through schools of smaller prey as it makes dashes through schools of fish at speeds of over fifty miles an hour. Now you take some fat miami beach tourist running around in the warm waters with a shitload of bling hanging off his trunks and what do you think this pea-brained missle is going to think?

Obviously, that's a school of fish. And so lured by the flash of bling, this phantasm ball of the ocean swims at 50mph straight into the well tanned guts of some Italian businessman and gets stuck in this poor fucker's short ribs like a wriggling dart.

Now there's this old man trying to struggle out of the water with a flailing fish stuck in his chest and you know, this has got to be funny to everyone laying around on the beach, but not for these two. The meeting of houndfish and man ends in inevitable tragedy as the fish struggles enough to force it's stilleto like beak to break off at the jaw. Bobbitted by the old mans guts, it spins down to die on the sandy bottom, of embarassment no doubt, and the old man struggles to the beach, spitting blood, with an amazed and desperate look on his face, his lips trying to mouth out 'look what happened to me'.

It's predation, sure, but it's a confused sort, with neither of the players involved getting any bennies.

Now if you think a big houndfish is pretty bad, try dealing with a swarm of needlefish. Yes, a swarm -- they travel in schools and more than that, they're a type of 'flying fish', ones that use their pectoral fins as wings to escape predation from bluefish and houndfish and what not. In escaping, the schools launch out of the water at fifty miles an hour and glide for up to a quarter mile. Sometimes, these smack into a fishing boat like a volley of arrows and boy, can you imagine the surprise of watching some poor schmuck whirling around with a little fish stuck deep into his cranium in the middle of nowhere while the rest of the school writhe around with emasculated faces, maybe now their last shocked thoughts being that the big fish got them after all as they toss their cowardly fish blood all over the decks, the deadly weapons still stuck in the side of the boat, and dance along with the spastic twitching of the unfortunate fisherman thumping out his death throes on the non-slip rubberized deck of his Boston Whaler.

I guess it's irony. Again, not really predation, just a comedy made by the shocked surprise that can only come when humans gets slapped by the idiot hand of mother nature.

So this week, chaos, in the form of a houndfish is the official predator of the week until May 10, 2006.