And the Devil Laughed (Summer 2008)

I have always had affinity for and attraction to--an obsession, really--little animals. Ever since I was a small child, I've chased them around and caught them and wanted to keep them as pets. My mother still swears I should've been a veterinarian (instead of a bum, which is what I am), and my fascination with wildlife, especially frogs, continues to this day.

I have a small menagerie that I feed and take care of, which I think I've mentioned before. Well, it was a very sunny day today outside, so I took my cold-blooded pets outside to let them enjoy the warmth of nature.

But warmth was probably an understatement. The searing heat of the day, is more accurate, and when I went to retrieve my container of beasties, I found they had baked in the sun, even though there was water in with them.

My salamander, which I caught in 2006, my frog which I caught in 2007, my toad (bought from a store last year), and one of my turtles were all casualties of the day.

I've had pets die on me many, many (many, many) times, so it shouldn't have come as such a shock, but it did. You don't know gross until you've seen a firebelly toad roasted to nearly black, or a salamander swollen up to twice its size.I am reminded of poor Michael Palin's character in A FISH CALLED WANDA, who so loves animals, and yet inadvertently causes their deaths throughout the film. It's funny in the film, but slightly less so when it keeps happening to animals in my care.

I will not be surprised if all my dead pets are in Hell right now, waiting for me to arrive.

What will be waiting for you?

Rish "Froglover" Outfield

And the Devil Laughed (Spring)

Something recently happened to me that was certainly a qualifier for Stupid Thing of the Week, but the more I thought about it, the more head-shaking it got. Thankfully, it's not nearly as Holocaust-level as MEET THE SPARTANS being a hit, but I'm going to cite it as my second post calling attention to the devil having a laugh.

I bid on things from time to time on eBay--as should any geek worth his salt--but I suppose I'm not always as detail-oriented as ought to be.* I'll try in the future not to let it happen again, but I placed my bid and went about my business.

A day or two later, I got the requisite email telling me I'd won the item, but when I checked the auction out, it sold for a heck of a lot more than I had intended on paying. I did the math in my head and figured my max bid had probably been $13.00, or maybe the extra-lucky $13.13, but there I was, the high bidder, at way over that.

So, I consulted my sneakie we-bid-so-you-don't-have-to site, and to my, well, displeasure, I saw that it had entered my maximum bid as . . . wait for it . . . $1313.00. Yeah, just about a thousand dollars over my max bid.

I think somebody told me what my options were in a situation like this, but it was hard to hear them over the Satanic laughter echoing off my walls.

Rish "Big Spender" Outfield

*Another example was a pretty-damn-close-to-fraudulent listing I bid on and won about a month ago. When the item arrived, I didn't even know what auction it had been from, but I figured it out soon enough. I had thought I was bidding on something other than what I received . . . but sure enough, in the item's description, they stated that the item wasn't the one in the accompanying photo, but was very much like it. Arrrgh.

And The Devil Laughed I

28 January 2008

Today, I'd like to start a new segment here at Rish's Ramblings. I'm going to call it, "And The Devil Laughed." I'll do a little drawing and stick it on here every time I post one (which may be just this once), maybe changing it up every time.
Today's ATDL is the news that the sub-moronic movie parody MEET THE SPARTANS (by the Rhodes scholars who brought you EPIC MOVIE and DATE MOVIE) was the number one movie in America over the weekend, earning more than eighteen million dollars from shamelessly stupid, really depressing moviegoers.

With that, we're one step closer to Armageddon, and rightly so.