Lending credence to some viral show-and-tell presentations we've seen in the past -- the mouse caught in a printer cartridge, for example, and the snake in the computer -- Australia's Gold Coast Bulletin reports that a Lismore couple investigating the cause of a printer jam found a three-foot-long brown tree snake stuck inside.

Brown tree snakes are poisonous, don't you know.

They managed to prod the reptile out of the printer, the Bulletin says, but Denis and Marie Matthews are pretty sure it's still lurking somewhere in their home office. Now would be the time to call Pest Control.

Read more: Snake Caught Up in Printer Queue

A gallery of odd and arresting viral images -- some real, some fake, some persistently enigmatic -- as circulated on the Internets. Start here...

An email currently making the rounds informs us that the country in which a potentially hazardous product was made can easily be determined by deciphering the first three digits of its bar code. Unfortunately, the tip is more misleading than helpful.

There is a type of bar code that contains country-specific information, but it's most commonly used outside the U.S.  And instead of revealing where the product is actually made, it indicates what country the bar code itself was issued in.

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Today is known as "Black Friday" by U.S. retailers, who named it that, allegedly, because the day after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year and the point at which most retail businesses begin making a profit (i.e., they're "in the black" for the year).

Would that it were true.

Black Friday is a major shopping event to be sure, with so many retailers launching holiday promotions and offering jaw-dropping mark-downs on that day, but in terms of real spending the last Saturday before Christmas always outshines the last Friday in November.

It turns out that the term originated back in the 1960s with members of the Philadelphia Police Department, who dubbed the day "Black Friday" because of all the traffic problems caused by bargain hunters swarming downtown stores. It didn't assume its positive (and mythical) connotation until a decade or so later when it was co-opted by the retail industry and the national media, both of which persist in referring to Black Friday as a "tradition."

Read more: Black Friday