This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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August 2005
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Cinema: War of the Worlds

imageTo distract ourselves from the events earlier, and also because we had promised Amy we would the weekend before and hadn’t, we went to the movies Saturday afternoon. I really wanted to go to the penguin movie but War of the Worlds was the one we had promised Amy the week before. And she wanted to see either that or Must Love Dogs. Brandy and I were less in the mood for that. So War of the Worlds it was.

As for the movie itself… well, lots of things got blown up, lots of people got killed. Pretty much what you would expect. The main characters were for the most part pretty stupid though. Strange things from space are systematically destroying all the major cities in the world. So when you miraculously escape the New York area, where do you try to get to? That’s right, Boston! Cause of course that will be fine! And in the meantime, try to stick close to the large congregations of refugees fleeing on highways and major roads. Head for the middle of the woods as far away from civilization as possible and try to camp out? No, never even consider that… And then the ending… not the part that everybody knows from the book, but the part they made up for this version… What they found when they got to the end of their journey should not be what they found. And we’ll leave it at that.

Worth watching? Eh, sure. Once. But I probably could have waited to see it on DVD. It didn’t need the whole extra theater thing. At least we went to the matenee… matanee… matanay… manatee… oh, whatever. The cheap afternoon showing.

…And Death

imageJust as the tadpoles have been turning into frogs and all of that going well… Brandy found Heracles was no longer with us. Heracles is the big guy in the picture. His un-named friend had died last year. Both had been with Brandy for many years. And Heracles had made friends with Icarus (the new guy). You can see how much the liked each other in the picture. Icarus followed Heracles all the time and imitated him.

Heracles had seemed fine, so once again this was a bit sudden. He was fine… and then he wasn’t.

We had a brief ceremony and buried him in the back yard. Poor guy.

But then, a little later, we found that in the other tank… oh, background. The litte fish in Brandy’s tank (not the plecos) started having babies a couple months ago. The tank got so full of babies that we got a second tank and moved about half in there. For that tank we got two more baby plecos. One was an albino that died after just a few weeks. The second looked a lot like Icarus (the baby in the tank with Heracles).

So anyway, a few hours after we found Heracles, we noticed that the one left in the new tank was nowhere to be seen. That isn’t entirely unusual, as he had been known to hide in his castle for days at a time. But then Brandy saw… a clump of snails eating something. After a bit of looking we determined that it had to have been the pleco. He was almost gone. And we couldn’t take him out, because we would have gotten snails too.

This all happend on Saturday. It was a sad day.

Life

imageA few days ago, Kelly asked for an update on the frogs. And I was about to comply that very day, but then she said she needed more pictures, so I was delayed several days. Even then though, I didn’t get any good new pictures, so here is a picture I actually took a few weeks ago but didn’t use on the blog at the time. It is of a tad-frog that has its legs, but hasn’t lost the tail yet.

Anyway, the update. At any given moment there are two or three newly minted mini-frogs emerging from the tank. They tend to stick around the tank for a day or so. Perhaps two. But no more than that. Then they hop away.

A few don’t make it. I’ve seen a few that obviously died half way through the transition. Newly formed legs. Tail still there. Apperantly this is normal. Metamorphosis is a traumatic experience, and quite simply not all of them can make it through. But it appears most are making it. The ones that don’t… well, they are eaten by the others.

Meanwhile, in one of the tanks there are now hundreds of new tiny tadpoles. Now, I’m fairly certain tadpoles are too young to reproduce, so it isn’t that they are breeding in my tanks, but rather a full grown frog couple decided the tanks were a good place to make more. So more are on their way yet.

Brandy says once we have a screen the tadpoles have to live outside of it. :-( Oh well.

Every day though, new baby frogs working their ways out of the tank and off to the wide world.

It is a nice thing.