These little guys should replace those annoying tortoises

These little guys put a whole new meaning to the word "slow". They only move about an inch per day. Comcast should get rid of those obnoxious tortoises and sign on a couple of them to do the high speed internet commercials. Munchkins, I think, is a better name for them than sea grapes. If I'm understanding the article correctly they roll by taking in food on one side of their marble sized bodies and eliminating waste products out the other side.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081203190030.htm

Research is clearly needed to figure out how to keep them alive in captivity. And the article doesn't address whether they can be trained to do tricks. It also says nothing about whether they're affectionate. Finally, it doesn't get into the fascinating subject, always thoroughly addressed on the Science Channel and National Geographic Channel nature shows, of how and when they get it on to make new little munchkins. Do the males fight for territory or mates? Do they roll around together for a couple of months to get to know one another? Do they mate for life or is it bump and go?

Talk about a great potential pet! At an inch a day it would take them a week just to go from one end to the other of a small tank. Put in a few little walls and you could make a maze in a five gallon tank that would take them months to fully explore. And they can't eat much, so they would be cheap to feed. I wonder if their shells are tough enough to resist scratching and gumming by, say, a feisty little Xenopus.

Sanatoga Ridge, figs and the frog.

This afternoon we visited Delores W up in the Sanatoga Ridge Community. Delores moved into her new garden apartment a couple of weeks ago. As it turned out Delores was just returning to her apartment with Debra when we walked over after touring the rest of the development for while. Linda and I have been wanting to see her new place; and today happened to be an open house for the community, so we took the opportunity to walk around.

We saw one bedroom and two bedroom models in the detached housing blocks. While we were in the two bedroom model we were approached by a couple of residents who wanted to share how much they've liked the place since moving there a couple of years ago. And then a surprise; when we mentioned that we were also planning to visit Delores it turned out that their daughter recommended Sanatoga Ridge to Delores when they met at Corropolese in Limerick. It's a small world.

While we were talking to those folks the lady who lives next door to the model unit, Peggy, walked over and offered to show us her unit. She has the type of unit that has a garage, none of which were available and open for the tour. Peggy said she was also very pleased with her decision to move there eighteen months ago. She has her place filled with an amazing collection of hand made colonial style furniture.

All in all we liked the Garden Apartment building where Delores' unit is the best. The apartments are on both sides of a wide corridor that runs down the middle of the two long buildings. Then the buildings are connected by an even wider bridge on the second level. The bridge is a gathering area with a TV and tables for eating and assembling jigsaw puzzles and such. A very nice design touch. All in all a very nice place, and Delores' apartment, on the ground floor is also very nice, with two bedrooms, a combination kitchen, dining and sitting area, and an outside patio.

Linda just came in from a walk bringing the small fig I've been letting get ripe on the tree. It will be the last fig of the year unless we get some unusually warm weather over the next week. There are still a number of smallish figs on there but I don't imagine they'll get ripe. I'm surprised that this one got ripe. I have to start bundling up that fig tree to be wrapped, I'm planning to use old belts that I have upstairs. I haven't worn a few of those belts for years.

In other news - I changed the frog's water yesterday, so he's angry at me today and he's sulking under his rocks. He always sulks and hides for a few days after I change the water; which isn't surprising because it can't be a very dignified procedure from his point of view. At least this time there were no major hitches. He stayed nicely stuck to the sink basin by surface tension, able to slide around, but not able to get any leverage to jump out, while I cleaned out the tank and refilled it with fresh water.

He pulled his calm and complacent act when I picked him up out of the sink; but I wasn't fooled. I had him well in control when he started scratching and struggling; and I got him into the tank with no trouble. He hasn't escaped for years and yet he still plays his little games, always hopeful of turning the return to the tank into a real battle. From my side I remember all too well that time when I neglected to close the lid of the toilet and then had a hell of a time getting him out of there. Since then I never take him out of the tank without the toilet lid and the door to the bathroom closed.

He may also be sulking in there because I rebuilt the rocks into the cave pattern they were in before he went berserk a couple of weeks ago and shoved them every which way. If he objected to the arrangement, it's the first time he has since I started building a sort of cave with the rocks over twenty years ago. Maybe he was just sleeping and had a bad dream that he was being attacked. If so, he surely slayed his dream attacker. The two biggest rocks in there weigh at least five times what he does; but he was shoving them around like they were nothing.

Do your part against CO2 emissions

Again this evening, when Linda and I went on our walk, we saw heedless neighbors walking environmentally destructive pets. I'm talking about fast living mammals that consume and digest huge volumes of food and exhale great gouts of CO2 into the atmosphere because of their need to maintain their warm body temperature. What's worse is that they require meat for their food, and raising animals for meat is also tremendously damaging to the environment. And That's not counting all the fuel necessary to move the dozens of pounds of food that even the smallest of those dogs require each year from the slaughterhouses to the packing houses and then to the supermarkets and finally to all the Collegeville homes.

All in all, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the average Collegeville dog generates more CO2 than the average poor villager in India or China does. If you want to be green you should get rid of those mangy mutts, and get rid of the cats too. And the birds. Birds burn up even more food per pound of weight than mammals do.

I'm feeling especially self-righteous about this right now, because I was just reminded of just how virtuously green my own pet is. I just opened a new 1.94 ounce container of Reptomin Floating Food Sticks and realized that this is only the third or fourth container of food sticks I've needed to buy since we adopted him 22 years ago as a tadpole. The pet store that sold me the last container I bought is now out of business, which isn't surprising because I think that old container of about 2,500 food sticks set me back $2.50 or so - something like one-tenth of a cent per little food stick. The new container cost $3.29. I hope my pet appreciates that it's now costing me about one-sixth of a cent per day to keep him in vittles.

For those of you who are new to this blog I should point out that my pet is not brown or white or black like those yappy dogs our neighbors were walking. My pet is green; and he's green both ways. He's literally green like a mottled faded leaf. And he's figuratively green enough to give Al Gore the kind of woody he gets when he meditates long and hard on Sheryl Crow's commitment to the health of the planet. Which gives me a chance to suggest that you watch this short video that gives one possible explanation of Sheryl's sanitary methodology, so to speak.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkemqYRjcek&feature=related

Now that you're back from the video, I can get to the real point of this blog entry, which is to give a hearty endorsement to Tetra, the company that makes Reptomin Floating Food Sticks out of fish meal, wheat starch, dried yeast, corn flour, shrimp meal, wheat gluten, potato protein, dehulled soybean meal, soybean oil and a long list of other stuff with chemical names. Assuming he doesn't sneak out of his bowl at night to shag other food, my frog has been eating nothing but Tetra's product for at least ten years, and at this point he may be among the oldest of his species on the face of the earth at 22 or so years old. If you're reading this Tetra, you should be aware that my frog is available to do endorsements or commercials concerning the excellence of your product and the truthfulness of your advertising on the container. Reptomin is indeed a "highly nutritious diet."

Which brings me to the fact that the battle for truth has temporarily swung in favor of the forces of good. For a long time the forces of evil on wikipedia insisted that frogs like mine live only a few years even after I tried to reason with them. So I began waging guerilla war against them for control of the African Clawed Frog entry and the related Xenopus entry. The wikipedia article on African Clawed Frogs now says quite reasonably that they usually live from 5 to 15 years and that some can live to 30 years. And the Xenopus article restricts itself to scientific nomenclature and doesn't mention life spans. So peace reigns, at least for now, in one of the little corners of wikipedia that I watch over.

But peace doesn't reign in San Francisco. Someone in San Francisco apparently had the same idea as a certain person around here who wanted to put my frog in the pond to live out a summer of liberty and then perish in the cold of winter. Fortunately I wouldn't hear of it or they might be writing terror inducing articles like this about a pond in Collegeville.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,258519,00.html

A word on recent slurs aimed at my frog

Two guest have recently alleged that my frog has been gaining weight. I'm pleased to report that I've reviewed his pictures of three years or so ago and can report that he is as svelte as ever, or at least as svelte as he was three years ago.

Such comments are tempting me to give him the hop of the house as a test of his athleticism, but I'm resisting. The last time he was decidedly uncooperative about returning to his bowl. And I've slowed down a bit in the ten years of so since the last time.

If he should somehow become released to hop free and I can't catch him before Linda gets home it will not be good. Must resist!

Responsibilities and territories

Responsibilities in life can sometimes extend long past what you expect. Take the example of my frog.

It all started when we bought Alex an African tadpole in about 1986. In the course of events the tadpole morphed into a frog and we put it into a former terrarium bowl filled halfway with water. At that time we thought it would appreciate a dry spot to sit on so we also put a few rocks into the bowl with one of them extending above the surface of the water. Somewhere in there we also decided that he would like some company in his bowl so Alex caught a tadpole about his size from our pond and put him in the bowl. Big mistake. He tolerated the tadpole for a couple of days and then ate half of him in one night and the other half the next day. Amazingly he didn't seem any bigger after eating that tadpole than before. So we bought a couple of large snails at the pet store figuring that their shells would protect them. Another mistake, the vicious little beast managed to pry the snails off the glass of the bowl and he ate them too.

After that we left him in solitary confinement which seemed to suit him until one day we found the piece of window screen covering the bowl knocked off and the frog gone. I figured we would eventually find his mummified body somewhere behind the furniture but a couple of evenings later I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye and eventually recaptured the thing after it had done several impressive broad jumps around the living room. He must have been quietly doing isometrics in his little tank in preparation for his escape because his jumps were about six feet long and about three feet high, pretty amazing since he's only about three inches long.

Meanwhile Alex also morphed, first into a high schooler and then into a college student living away from home, so I ended up as the frog's only protector and caretaker in a home where the other adult sometimes talked of putting him out on the ice in the winter. . .

So here I am, still caring for a twenty year old frog that was supposed to have a life span of a few years. But there have been compensations for my effort for efforts. For one thing the frog is a nearly perfect pet. He lives a quiet contemplative life in his bowl for days at a time unless I get forgetful of him for too long, in which case he splashes and jumps around when he sees me walking past to remind me to feed him. I choose to believe that he's appreciative when I give him a couple of pellets at such times, especially on those occasions when I can tempt him to take a pellet directly from between my fingers. Part of me suspects that he's actually trying to eat my fingers when he gums them and that he would happily eat me if he could somehow drag me into the tank, but who can say what's going on in the mind of a frog.

Another compensation for caring for the frog is that I've attained a small measure of immortality due to something I noticed in 2006 on Wikipedia when I was trying to identify exactly what kind of frog he is. I learned that in the hood he's an "African Clawed Frog" but in polite company he's more properly addressed as a Xenopus Laevis.

But I also discovered that Wikipedia falsely thought he should have long been dead because it said that his lifespan is only a few years.

So I corrected the Wikipedia article by adding an entry about "Xenopus as a Pet" and found that some wikipedians are as combative as my frog. A couple of them leaped at and dismembered my new entry the way my frog dismembered that tadpole. I put it back with a couple of more or less respectful comments about their ancestry and anti-scientific attitudes, and they promptly took it down again. So I waited a few months, as patiently as my frog, and put it back up on the site again, this time with some fake links to nonexistent sources which apparently confused them for a while because it lasted a few weeks before they took it down again. As I write this wikipedia lacks the full fruit of my wisdom, but I've won to a certain extent. The "Xenopus" entry now recognizes that the frog is sometimes kept as a pet, except when it escapes in a place with a climate like San Francisco where it is busily eating all the laid back California frogs it can get its claws on. And the "African Clawed Frog" entry recognizes that the little devils can live for up to thirty years.

For now both I and my frog will accept those concessions. But I'll be back at Wikipedia to fight again once my frog passes thirty years old in 2016.