About the gopher and the fishes

For a very long time I have featured the cute little gopher (hamster?) at the top right-hand side of my blog page. A. Bowman is the developer (click on the aBowman on the top right of the animation to see his Web site) and has done a really good job of creating a very entertaining feature that bloggers can use for no charge.

One problem I have with the gopher’s water bottle is that when he drinks, no bubbles appear and rise to the top. Every water bottle I have ever seen has bubbles rising when drunk from (and I’ve seen a gazillion of them, having fed tons of chinchillas in my adolescent years). Maybe it isn’t water in that bottle. Maybe it’s helium. Inhaling a lungful of helium gives you a very high-pitched squeaky voice. Maybe that’s why we can’t hear gophers talk.

As an aside, you can buy helium for inflating party balloons. Do you know how to tell when a canister of helium is empty? It gets heavier.

Think about it.

Down the page a bit is the little blue pool with a bunch of fish swimming around. Click and you deposit some fish food, and they go for it. What I like to do is click ten times rapidly in one spot to get the fish to converge on it. My hope is that with such frenzied activity one or more of the fish will inadvertently get bitten and start to bleed. That will really pump up the frenzied behavior and we’ll get some real entertainment. But somehow they avoid biting each other, so we just see the dull pseudo-frenzy of semi-ravenous fish. Mr. Bowman has disappointed me.

I’ll have to write to him with my complaints. I hope he’s not a pacifist vegan but a red-blooded comedian.