haircut

Hair grass cut, that is. Hair grass is the short species on the far right. The tank divides a room. This is the back of the tank, not the front.

I killed a thousand snails yesterday and all that remain are remnant escapees. I'm leaving the glass dirty to induce the remaining snails to go there to be siphoned off into the ter-let bowl where they abide obliviously for a few minutes until a tablespoon of bleach does them all in before being flushed. Or else smashed right there in the thank against the glass. Their broken bits attractive to survivors. It is a Thanksgiving season massacre!

I'm tired of these plants. The design is unimaginative. Now that I read seven books on potted terrace plants and garden design I realize it needs a few clusters of broad leave species and more variation generally. There are thousands of plants to choose from, possibly hundreds. Okay fine! Scores of plants to choose from. And we owe it all to Takashi Amano's own curiosity to thank for all these aquatic plants made available.

One of the angelfish died. 

They are a disappointment. I had no idea they would grow this fancy. I did not want that. I didn't even know their type existed. They were displayed as ordinary angelfish. Their fins are ridiculously long, extended by breeding as some goldfish are bred to extremes and some betta Siamese fighting fish too. The practice of breeding for fin length beyond anything remotely natural to extremes of evolutionary effrontery strikes me as an uniquely Asian propensity, but I could be wrong. The angelfish's fins grow fin upon fin so they curl as fingernails do as some human females allow, as obsessives do, so that they self-identify as psychologically disturbed in some way expressed as inability to groom oneself properly. Interviews reveal they are stuck, and among the first questions asked inevitably is, "How do you wipe your own butt?"

Long nails give me the creeps.

Long excessively groomed nails give me double triple quadruple creeps.  

These angelfish are like that. They can still swim, but it exhausts them. They prefer to stick their face in plant clusters and sit there all day allowing the plants to hold them up. Their stabilizing side fins are curled around in multiples, virtually useless as two flagging dish rags. They are lousy feeders. I expected an angelfish to go after its food like a dart, but not these. They bobble around gulping air to draw floating flakes into their mouth as if blind.

Having said all that, they are among the most interesting fish that I've owned.