I absolutely LOVE Samuel L. Jackson, not because he's the greatest actor (that would be Forrest Whittaker), but because he's the coolest - him and John Travolta (they were unbelievable in Pulp Fiction!)

There are a lot of great actors, but Sam L is my favorite, so I have his ill-fated movie, Snakes on a Plane on my television while I'm typing this. But I can't watch a  movie about snakes. I hate snakes!

It all started when I moved to Texas to live with my grandmother the year I turned seven and had to ride home on the bus with my older cousins, Pat and Phyllis, when Grandma had a teacher's meeting after school.

They told me they were going to turn over a rock and find a snake that would chase me. I thought they were just teasing, but they turned over a rock and there was a black racer!

The two of them took off running, leaving me there by myself. I started running, too, then looked back and saw the snake making "S" moves down the road behind me! I've never gotten that image out of my mind.

There were many other encounters with snakes during the eleven years I lived on the family ranch: one squeezed through a hole in a window in the living room and crawled down a sofa where my uncle sat (he casually picked it up, broke its neck and threw it outside), another chased mice into the house and was caught going across the dining room floor trying to catch them; another was hiding in a cabinet in the bathroom when I went in to get a wash basin for my uncle who was barbecuing in the back yard and I ran back outside without ever touching the floor; I had to wait while walking to my aunt's house "up the road" while a snake crossed the road, stretching all the way across it; I heard singing while walking under a tree, looked up thinking it was a bird, then looked down and saw a snake standing on its tail whistling - didn't touch the road when I ran home that time either; I nearly walked on a Copperhead on the way to my aunt's house once; snakes were always in the road dead or trying to cross when we drove to church Sundays in the spring and summer; everyone ran out of church one Sunday while I was playing a hymn on the piano without bothering to tell me a snake was coming from under the piano and again I was able to run away without touching the floor or the ground; my grandmother's foot swell once from a snake bite and she never knew she was bitten; and two incidents I wrote about before about my brother dragging the pond to catch frogs for me to dissect and getting a tire full of Water Moccasins instead, and finding the snake in the hen house where I gathered eggs and being forced to kill it by my rugged, Amazon-like grandmother.

I also flunked a botany course in college because we had to collect 100 vascular aquatic plants and, since only 60 were found near my Oklahoma college, I had to go on an overnight field trip to a swampy part of the state to collect the other 40.

Well, that swamp was full of snakes, so I stood in the road by a dead snake at least six foot long and watched my classmates gather their speciments. Right after that I changed my major from biology to English!

So, Sam L, love you, but this movie with all these snakes sucks and I'm changing the channel to Spike to watch the insides of dead bodies on CSI.

 Samuel L. Jackson, the coolest actor around, snakes or no snakes!