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The
Great Cricket Famine of 2005
By Bill Zahren
(Posted 3/24/05)
I buy crickets. With real money. I pay 8 cents
a cricket. If people back in my little hometown -- tony Lake
Park, Iowa, population 1000 -- heard I actually pay money
for live crickets, they'd go up side my head with a boat oar.
It would probably make the in the hometown paper:
"Former Lake Park resident moves to big city, buys crickets."
Well, the reason I buy small crickets (and crickets
come in two sizes, just for your records) is that I own a
lizard.
(Insert the sound of me getting smacked again
with a boat oar again here.)
The pet count at the Zahren household now stands
at four. Our 75-pound, mixed-breed, dog and alpha pet, Chester;
female guinea pigs Penny and Patches (they're such sows!);
and now Buddy the lizard.
If we can just go back a couple of months, I
can tell you why I blame the whole tragedy on the American
educational system. It all started when my daughter Jena's
third-grade class got some lizards as part of their lifecycle
studies. You know, using live animals to illustrate the lifecycle.
Sounds innocent.
But I just bet those sneaky devils at Petco
or Petsmart or somewhere like that put the schools up to the
whole lizard thing. It's brilliant, and I'll tell you why:
After the "unit" on "lifecycles" was "over,"
the teacher decided to "give away" the lizards. They had about
five of them or so. So every kid who wanted a lizard put his
or her name in a drawing. And, joy of joys, my youngest daughter's
name was selected. She brought the lizard home and named it
Buddy.
Buddy is an "anole." Which is a little bitty
kind of lizard. I wanted to name him Chuck (get it? Chuck
Anole? HAR!). Buddy's retail value is $7.
Well you just can't keep a lizard in a shoebox,
chief. It's not right. The thing will have a crappy quality
of life and then die. I'd open the box one day and find a
petrified Buddy. My daughter will be bawling and pissed and
the lizard will stalk me in my dreams like the beating heart
that drives the guy insane in Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale
Heart.
So, the responsible thing to do (and I have
RESPONSIBLE stamped on my massive forehead) is to get Buddy
a "habitat" which is pet-store speak for "something that starts
a massive cash harvest." So I got the approved glass lizard
case. I got the cover that included both the heating light
and the full-spectrum white light. (The white light bulb alone
cost $27.) I got the fake wood thing to put inside the "habitat."
About $100 later, the $7 lizard was quite comfortable. All
this is why I think Petco puts the schools up to it. They
KNOW the teachers will give the lizards away, which will touch
off a flurry of suburban spending. Diabolical.
But it gets better. Buddy only eats live crickets.
He turns his snout up at dead crickets. So I go to the pet
store once a week and buy 20 live crickets. The pet store
people are starting to recognize me. I bet they call me Cricket
Boy behind my back. Nothing more emasculating than standing
in line to pay $1.75 for an bag filled with air and 20 small
crickets.
This crazy scene got even kookier a few weeks
ago when I went to the pet store only to find they were out
of crickets. I went to another pet store and they too were
out of crickets. The pet store people told me there was a
cricket shortage. A cricket famine in the land, if you will.
They expected a shipment of crickets in the next few days.
I imagined a giant cricket plantation somewhere,
working double shift to meet demand. Little male cricket studs
on the job, impregnating the females who each laid 87,912
legs, each of them worth about a nickel to the cricket farmer.
"Come on, Sparky, put your back into it. There are millions
of hungry lizards out there!"
The shortage went on for a week. I started looking
like one of those forlorn guys in the black-and-white Dust
Bowl-era newsreels as I desperately trying to scrape up enough
crickets to feed the lizard. I kept Buddy alive by managing
to find places where they could find just enough crickets
to get by. The whole time Chester was looking at me like,
"Just open the lid to the cage and I'll solve your problem."
There was some cold weather, the cricket seller
said, and that was killing the crickets in transit. Tragic,
really. Similar to the way cold weather kills oranges on the
trees in Florida, I assume. I'm shocked it wasn't on the national
evening news.
We've survived the scare for now, but the supply
lines are still pretty tenuous. I'll be going to the store
tomorrow to get another week's worth. Let's hope my cricket
shipment has come in.
(Insert boat oar smack here.)
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©2005 Bill Zahren
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