Dead fish...

I have, on occasion been known to keep one or two of the nicer looking feeder fish from the fate of becoming my turtle's dinner to keep them in a tank as pets for a while.  These fish are simple little gold fish that have nothing really fancy about them, and are often not very long lived fish.  They are often used at the cheep carnival games as give aways if you manage to get a ping-pong ball into a small fish bowl.

These feeder fish cost about 2-3 dollars a dozen, if that.  At the cheep carnival fish bowl game, it costs about $5 for about 25-30 balls.  Out of that, if you're really lucky, you may get one or two fish.  My wife loves to play this game, and often will spend about 20-30 dollars at a time to get about 4 or 5 fish.  I would love to imagine that this is due to her love of playing the game, but in all honesty she just wants the fish.

Now, I love playing skee-ball and collecting the tickets to get the silly prize when I'm done.  I understand that i could buy the little stuffed crab at the little shop two doors down on the boardwalk for about three bucks, and I played at least $10 worth of skee-ball to collect enough tickets to get the crab, but I like playing skee-ball, and the prize is just a bonus in the end.  But if I just wanted the crab, I would just buy it.  And every time we take home six more fish for 30 bucks, I just grit my teeth and sigh, because it was all about the fish.