Cobra Queen

Is it me, or are the author profiles getting weirder and weirder? Now here’s Kate White, editor of Cosmopolitan and writer of several enjoyable mystery novels, talking about…her pet stuffed cobra?

Her murderous fantasies, black humor and love of healthy distances all converge in her favorite accessory: a coiled four-foot-long stuffed example of Naja naja (a k a the Indian cobra), rearing its hooded head. Ms. White, an avid explorer, has collected many objects from her travels in Africa and South America, but the cobra was unearthed at Evolution, a natural-history store in SoHo. It cost $159. "My husband almost died when I said I had to have it," she said.

Eighteen inches tall, it sits on her desk at home, a cartoonishly venomous reminder to leave the gravity of work behind. Once terrified of snakes, she overcame her fear in her travels and now faces them down at home. "Snakes seem to follow me everywhere," she said with a sigh.

She observed that publishing’s famed snakes share traits with members of the group Serpentes. "Like real snakes, you never see them coming," she said.

But the cobra – one of nature’s notable practitioners of the form of aggression known as broadside display, in which an animal makes its body as wide and tall as possible – is not as sneaky as some colleagues.

"He’s so straightforward," she said. "You just know he’s in a bad mood." The people who are all smiles are often the most dangerous, she said. If only they had a rattle.

OTOH, that is a mighty fine looking cobra…

(link from Galleycat, who’s back after a long absence)