5 things so awesome they could only happen in Texas

As we mentioned on Thursday, Texas' fight for independence from Mexico kicked off with the remarkably gutsy, "Come and take it."

To wit, the leaders of the Texas Revolution were a bunch of line-in-the-sand-drawing chiefs who, in Bowie's case, did things like finish gruesome brawls with asword embedded in his chest. While not all were born in Texas, they are at least partially responsible for setting precedent for the notorious Texan ego.

Here are five insane, ridiculous, and sometimes utterly silly things that could have only happened in Texas.

Biting the snake that poisons you: Let's time travel back to the Wild West of 1996 when a man was bitten on the hand by a coral snake near Encino in the Rio Grande Valley. But Valentin Grimaldo was good at thinking on his feet. Like any reasonable person, he bit off the snake's head and used its skin to create a tourniquet. He hitchhiked into town where they patched him up at the ER, he made a full recovery, and his brother kept the snake's head as a souvenir.

Jesus in cowboy boots: Paris, Texas, may be better known for its cowboy-hat-wearing Eiffel Tower, but that's not the only thing to be given the ol' Lone Star upgrade. Among Evergreen Cemetery's 40,000-plus graves is a monument featuring Jesus wearing high-heel manure kickers. Some dispute the statue's identity, and others think it might have been a final act of blasphemy. Either way, that is not something you're gonna see in Paris, France.

Houston's 'karate clerk' rings 'em up: You might remember this one, seeing that it was not quite a year ago when aspiring mixed martial arts fighter Mayura Dissanayakewas working at a gas station in Houston. Some crooks outside the store pulled up on the store's manager, who was coming back from the bank. Unable to wrench the money from that dude's pretty gutsy hands, they commence giving him a whoopin.' That's where Dissanayake comes in, unleashing the fury of ten thousand retail cashiers. Don't take our word for it: The whole thing was caught on the the store's surveillance video.

Room with a brew: Some might say if John Milkovisch liked beer so much he should have married it. But, seeing as he already had a wife, he decided to do the next best thing: Make a house from it. Between 1968 and his death in 1988 Milkovisch drained more than 50,000 cans of brew and put them to good use, covering his home in glimmering, glittering tabs and flattened aluminum. It was purchased by Houston's Orange Show Center for Visionary Art and opened as a folk-art museum in 2008.

Cops crank engines covered in skulls: Since the days of the Texas Rangers - we're not talking 'Walker' or even Nolan Ryan - Texas has produced some gangbuster Johnny Laws. These days, the Hi-Po cruises in a Dodge Challenger with custom modifications that include skulls painted on the engine bay - and that's to say nothingabout what the engine can do. How? Why? It was donated, apparently, by former Houston Texans player Mario Williams - a controversially licensed peace officer in the state of Texas - who also set up Houston PD with a fleet of Chargers.