Just been reminded of a story
When I was younger a friend of mine had a pond in his back garden, which contained a lovely ecosystem of freshwater snails, newts, toads, frogs, very small fish, pond skaters, water boatmen, etc etc.
One day whilst very bored we hatched upon a plan to make money fast - we'd catch frogs, newts and snails, and then set up a street stall outside his house to sell them to passers by. A flawless plan, with only a couple of unforeseen flaws.

Firstly was catching them and keeping them alive whilst still being visible to the potential customers. We took literally ALL his mum's jam jars (and emptied 2 out the fridge also) to store our beauties in. This presented 2 problems - getting a frog to stay in a jam jar while trying to screw the lid on (We actually broke one frog's leg doing this), and secondly the problem of catching them fast enough. However, we muscled on and by 4pm we'd got about 15 or so specimens for display. Time to cash in on our delights.

At this point we hit two little snags - firstly, we didn't have a street stall from which to sell our goods. Secondly, businessmen travelling home from work prefer to buy paninis and cups of coffee rather than newts in jars. We didn't sell a single one in the hour we were out there, even considering we halved our prices from £5 to £2.50 within about 20 minutes. In the mean time my friend told me I'd need to give him my share of the money as he had "come up with the idea" and it was "his pond". Cheeky bastard.

Then at 5 his mum came home, and bollocked us both rotten. I was never invited back to play there again. Last I heard he had convinced another friend to give him £12 to join his 'club', the only benefits of which were the usage of his tree house and free lemonade off his mum. Bless.
(The Oscillating Gibbon is eating curried squid, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 11:49, 2 replies)

Bless...
That kid does sound more than a little bit special.

"Click" particularly for the shrewd observation that businessmen "do not want to buy newts in jars."

_{(Now trying to guess who it might have been...)}
(LongJohnBaldry, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 11:55, closed)

Not sure you ever met them
Was a friend of my parents' son
(The Oscillating Gibbon is eating curried squid, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 12:30, closed)