Salt and corrosion

Strolling through the shopping centre to get to the supermarket today, I passed a couple of school holiday activities. In one empty shop a group of Tibetan monks were making a sand mandala. They've been there for the past couple of weeks and the mandala now takes up nearly the whole shop floor. It's not a very big shop, but still, that's a lot of coloured sand. They normally have a couple of onlookers; it's a nice diversion for passersby. Today, though, there wasn't anyone watching as I went past, and I found out why when I turned the corner.

Set up in between the Wendy's and Muffin Break outlets was a small stage, from which a man in an Irwin-esque khaki shorts and shirt ensemble was telling a large group of children, parents and assorted stickybeaks like me about the taipan: 'There are two types of taipan. There's the inland taipan, that's the deadliest snake in the world. This here is the coastal taipan,'- he lifted a long brown snake from a box to delightedly horrified 'oohs' from the goggle-eyed kids in the front row - 'and it's only the second deadliest snake in the world.'

I left after that, passing a large glass box containing three scorpions. I thought, wouldn't it be fun to see them running around the supermarket? So I let them out. (I didn't really.)

Googling to find that picture of a taipan I linked to above, I discovered that the man was wrong on two counts: there are three types of taipan (the third species was discovered only recently) and the coastal taipan is only the third deadliest snake in the world (the eastern brown snake - guess what colour it is! - takes the silver medal). So, pah... not very scary at all.