Sorry, I totally forgot that I had two prizes to give away for the final contest. The first prize was one DVD and one t-shirt to each of ten finalists sent directly by New Line. Those DVDs have recently started arriving, hooray. The second prize, which I never awarded, was as follows:

• One Snakes on a Plane fan prize pack, which includes one original shirt, one additional shirt of your choice, one snakes in the rain umbrella, one snakes in a can, one snakes on a wristband, one different snakes on a wristband and three snakes on a thing tickers (courtesy of the awesome Damnation Inc).

So, I’ve selected the top finalist for this prize. Congratulations Josh:

Having been demoted from first class, I was forced to “grit my teeth”, as the expression goes, and fly in coach. It was a step down, to say the least. In order to distract myself from the morbidly obese man sitting next to me (who was currently sleeping with his mouth open and his fingers encrusted with the remains of the pork rinds that he had been eating earlier), I took out my research papers and began to examine them. As the leading theological scholar specializing in the beginning chapters of Genesis, I was currently looking at the passages that were the foundations of original sin. Perhaps if I discovered that original sin did not exist, or some inconsistencies in the text proved that the story had been tampered with by other writers in the period between its creation and its modern incarnation, I would receive a nominal raise. Cheered by this thought, I set to work.

However, I was disturbed by a shout from my neighbor. I looked to my right and was immediately horrified. It seemed as if he had grown so large that his belly was about to explode, and that his hand, now a bloody stump, had already done so. A bloody circle formed at the bottom of his belly, and grew larger until eventually what was inside him burst out of his stomach and T-shirt: a snake. Perhaps it was the stench of the pork rinds that attracted the snake, or the shiny bag that enclosed them, but the snake had apparently chewed off the man’s hand, crawled through his arm and come out through his stomach. Needless to say, I was horrified, but it was nowhere near the terror I experienced when the snake turned to look at me with its two very shiny eyes. And then, along with what seemed like hundreds of other snakes, it attacked.

You know, I could remark at this point about this strange cosmic karma currently taking place: the unfortunate species punished from the Adam and Eve story, in the end, punishes its preeminent scholar. I could probably spout a philosophical world-view that could be surmised from this tale and bring some sort of resolution to this account of the last minutes of my life. But no, dear reader, I will not. I will, however, say this: after the darkness closed in on me, after the snakes breached the seat cover I had used as a defense for my face and got into my eyes, scratching my corneas, filling up my mouth, their bodies and fangs, venom getting into my nose, contaminating my insides as I clawed at the upright tray table in front of me, hoping to, somehow, get out of having my headstone read “killed due to sheer volume of snakes”, I felt no regrets. A life is a life, and whether you spend it on Biblical study or at the mercy of snakes on a plane, it is what it is.

Thanks to Damnation Inc. for providing such snazzy prizes.