Remember the Great Bulk-Shipped Crickets Escape? We’re not the only Extremely On-Line People who appreciated it, per author Christopher Ingraham, reporting for the Washington Post:
For Christmas this year, my family adopted a young bearded dragon lizard as a pet.
Our dragon, whom we named Holly, eats a lot, and the thing she loves to eat most is crickets (typically about 10 a day, in addition to other things like mealworms and vegetables). From the get-go, I knew that keeping an ample supply of crickets on hand would require some planning. We live in a rural area of northwestern Minnesota. The closest pet shop is an hour away, in North Dakota. Restocking our cricket supply would require a time commitment of at least two hours out and back.
By Christmas Day this year, Holly’s cricket supply was running low. I decided to order crickets online, which I had never done before, to save a trip to North Dakota. I bought the crickets from Fluker Farms, one of the more well-established online insect vendors (yes, these exist and there are a lot of them). I decided on a shipment of 250 crickets, which seemed like a reasonable amount for a lizard who is theoretically capable of gobbling up to 50 of them every day…
The package arrived Friday. I anxiously met the FedEx delivery man at the door. He appeared to be relieved to unburden himself of the six-inch-square box emblazoned with the words “Live Insects” and decorated with life-size cricket silhouettes. We exchanged no words. If you’re a FedEx driver, you probably try to avoid conversations with the types of people who order boxes full of insects from the Internet…
Writer Nicole Cliffe took it to a whole new level. For once, it is safe to read the comments, as long as you don’t have anything in your mouth:
in every relationship there is the accidental cricket-releaser person and the where-are-all-these-damn-crickets-coming from person, look in your soul and ask: which am I?
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) December 29, 2018
(I am the cricket-releaser, typing and continuing to ignore the shouts from the kitchen, hoping against hope that only a few crickets escaped when I first opened the box.)
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) December 29, 2018
His passively phrased question is a killer ?
— Justin(LionsAndBees) (@Lions_and_Bees) December 29, 2018
I've been the I'm-gonna-catch-these-goddamn-crickets guy.
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) December 29, 2018
Yeah, that's the origin story for my guy.
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) December 29, 2018
I used to be a “WHERE ARE ALL THESE FUCKING CRICKETS COMING FROM” person who has become a “do you happen to know anything about these crickets?” person pic.twitter.com/96xg9VQ5Me
— Emily Auld Lang Stephens (@emilyorelse) December 29, 2018