[Sca-cooks] Master A's missing items OT

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Stefan li Rous:
>  THLady Olwen the Odd commented to Adamatius:
>>Just a note to let you know I posted off your missing items yesterday.
>>Hope the stuff gets to you ok!
>
>Some cattails?  :-)
>
>Stefan

Nope. As mentioned previously, I have ample access locally.

No, this has to do with a story Olwen probably heard from Phlip, or 
else I must have posted it to the Cooks' List: it was an amazing tale 
of spontaneous generation and parthenogenesis, or, if you prefer, a 
cat giving birth to fish, based on something that happened a couple 
of years ago.

In addition to the small, 10-gallon tank of goldfish that we keep 
because proper Chinese homes have goldfish near the front door -- 
they have golden armor that deflects bad juju from the home, more or 
less -- we have a larger tank of tropical fish, almost of of which 
are Clown Loaches. We try to keep a minimum of five at any given time.

Considering the size their brains must be, they're pretty amazing 
critters that form schools, break up and reform, socialize, and 
generally act like either A) they appear to be far more sophisticated 
life forms than they are, or B) they're far more sophisticated life 
forms than we give them credit for. They come running to one corner 
of the tank at feeding time, can tell when the person who generally 
feeds them is standing nearby, perform an extremely sluttish water 
ballet to attract the attention of said food-giver, and then 
bald-facedly lie to anyone else who approaches, claiming they have 
not been fed. They nurse each other when they don't feel well, and 
also have an incredibly annoying habit of sleeping in a position that 
is largely indistinguishable from being dead. For whatever reason, 
they don't do that belly-up thing; they get into any crack or 
crevice, and the main difference in what follows depends on whether 
they're asleep or dead. They either wake up and begin to play, or, 
being scaleless tropical fish in warm water, they begin to decay. 
<shrug>

All in all, pretty complex critters, apparently. They also are shaped 
somewhat like bottle-nosed dolphins, swim like them, and have 
distinctive black-and-orange band coloration.

Anyway, at some point we needed to replace one or two we had lost 
from the "herd", and went dutifully to the pet store, where we 
spotted a couple we liked. The kid manning the tropical fish 
department went after them with the little net, and got one, but the 
other was nowhere to be found. He'd vanished completely, until we 
realized he must have gotten inside a small ceramic cat figurine at 
the bottom of the tank -- there was a little pea-sized hole in the 
bottom, and as hard as it was to believe the fish had gotten in 
there, it was even harder to believe he'd be coming out any time soon.

The solution provided by the kid was to give us the cat, and throw in 
another fish for free, just in case, figuring the loach inside the 
cat statue would eventually come out, if it could, and if it got 
hungry enough. The extra, free fish was fairly sickly, and in the end 
would probably prove a fairly meaningless gesture. We brought them 
home, and began the process of introducing the new fish (and the cat) 
to the tank.

I don't remember who it was, but I think I was absently watching the 
fish while talking on the phone, and noting that one of the 
middle-sized fish and the new, healthy one, had decided to keep the 
sickly one swimming each time it wanted to sink to the bottom and 
give up. They reminded me of men trying to keep a drunk person 
walking until the alcohol is metabolized. Finally, all the loaches 
were in on it. We'd been down to four, and we had two more (one 
apparently dying) join the club, all moving in a tight formation to 
save the dying one. So six fish, one presumably still in the cat 
statue. I looked away, looked back, and counted seven fish, all still 
in formation. I assumed the fish inside the cat had come out.

I went about my business, and then there were eight. This was pretty 
strange. I went about my business again, and then there were nine. 
Maybe they were splitting like amoebas? Finally, there were ten, and 
just as I was wondering where the blazes they'd all come from, the 
last fish came out of the cat statue (which was less than three 
inches long). So somehow, we were up to eleven loaches: I could only 
assume we'd come home with seven when we thought we were coming home 
with three. The sickly one, of course, recovered.

So, when I got home last night, I checked the mailbox, and sure 
enough, there was Olwen's package. It contained a small sugar-plate 
bowl with several clown loaches in it. I assume they're sugar plate 
also. Some of them seem to have broken in transit, but enough of them 
made it through intact to figure out what, or rather, who, they are 
;-).

Many thanks, Olwen, for finding our missing loaches! How those 
naughty kids got so far from home is beyond me (at this point, 
nothing surprises me anymore), but I hope you were able to salvage 
the cat statue...

Thanks again! Spouse and Evil Spawn will be thrilled! This time, we 
didn't have the SWAT team from the Department of Homeland Security's 
special SPAM unit come to call (hup hup hup!)...

Adamantius

-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04