Blue Meanie is a betta, sometimes called a "Siamese fighting fish." He has just about the worst attitude I have ever seen in any of my pets, and as I've had a lot that's really saying something.

I decided to get a betta after working at my office for a little while and enjoying watching the ones in the vases there swim around (albiet boredly; I'd never keep a fish in a vase). They made me remember Frodo, my first betta. Frodo was the ugliest fish I'd ever seen (and I've seen wild catfish) - pale blue with ragged fins and a warty ol' brown head. I loved him. I gave him a 10-gallon tank and lots of stuff to swim around. One ornament was like this little archway that was hollow and had holes at the top of the two "turrets;" he would stuff his body and fins down these holes and swim around inside the ceramic ornament and then rest with his ugly head poking out, sticking straight up, out of one of the holes. It was the strangest dang thing I'd ever seen. I was afraid he would die inside the ornament but instead I found him one morning, laying in the archway himself, the tiny king of his watery domain, even in death. He was a kickass little fish.

So I went to Walmart (sigh, I know, its "feeding the beast...") and picked out the prettiest blue betta boy they had. Why did he have to be blue? Because I needed him to complement the, like, gallons of gravel I had left over from Gimble! :^P Anyways. I got stuck with this little unholy terror of a fish that wants everyone and everything around him to DIE and die now. He won't eat pellets. I tried like three different kinds. He'd swim to the top, eye the pellet, take one in his mouth, spit it out, whirl around and FLARE at me. After a couple of times of doing that he skipped taking the pellet and spitting it, all I had to do was put a pellet in there and he'd flare pissily at me. I knew then that I had brought Satan home from Walmart.

So he gets gourmet fish foods that cost me like ten bucks a can, and that make the tank messy very fast and necessitate using a feeding ring. The little booger. (I fianlyl did get him to take pellats though. Ha.) It's funny to watch him try to kill Kiwi through the glass every night; too bad for him that Kiwi thinks that everything behind glass is a TV and therefore not real and she doesn't even glance in his direction...

I keep changing it, but that's Meanie's setup as of the day I posted this page. Every pet should have their own private bio-exorcist to keep SPOs (stupid pet owners) away. Oh, and a dragon. Don't mock Meanie's pink girlyman gravel! He'll mess you up!!

Blue Meanie!

Flaring at his mirror

"I flare at you!"