You've heard of the goose that laid the golden egg?

Back in Kansas, my Uncle Louie knew that story and, though he knew that was not possible, he liked the idea of renewable resources. So when he was in high school, he read in biology class about certain frogs and lizards being able to re-grow lost legs or tails.

"Hmmm...", said Louie, and set out to see what could be worked out to feed his family. (Louie was not one to hold a steady job.) He messed about in a pond behind his house with various amphibians & lizards, doing random experiments with eggs, severed limbs and odd bits of chemicals he scrounged from the school lab.
Well sir! It just happened that he heard that the local zoo had acquired an alligator, so Louie snuck down there one night and 'acquired' some alligator DNA..(don't ask about the details...it's too graphic for family forums)

Now he went home to his home lab and started mixing stuff in petri dishes....he never would tell everything, but it involved lizard scrapings, alligator ...ummm.. DNA.., something from pond frogs, and various little bits of chemicals he was fond of and which didn't 'seem' toxic when dabbed on the tip of his tongue.

Sounds scary, but Lucky Louie struck gold! He ended up with a beast that layed dozens of eggs, grew rapidly to about 150 lbs, liked water and lived in the pond, Winter & Summer...and with the added feature that a loud noise would cause its tail to fall off...said tail being 92.061% tasty 'meat' which tasted vaguely like frog legs, but kinda 'gamey'.

Those tails would re-grow in just a couple of weeks if you fed the 'frogizlators' on their favorite food, which was, luckily, cheap dog food with peanut-butter mixed in...didn't take a lot, as the metabolism of the frogizlators transformed over 80% into....tail.

Nice huh? Not much waste in the ponds, and what there was stimulated the growth of watercress..(he grew it right IN the pond)..which was a nice salad side dish for deep-fried frogizilator tail.

Louie tested the stuff on his family, and got 'em liking it, and cut the family food bill by 87%, and had big plans to breed frogizilators for awhile, then sell the secret (and maybe give it away to poor countries first) and retire as a hero.

So...why aren't YOU eating frogizlator stew tonight?

Well, Louie didn't count on those easy-come easy-go tails as being both the core benefit and the Achilles heel of the whole enterprise. He was just getting ready to harvest the 1st commercial batch of tails and take 'em to the county fair...(he would lure a frogizlator out of the water with a bait of Alpo and Skippy, then blow up a paper bag and BANG it right over the hungry frogizlator's head....and scoop up the suddenly detached tail, slip it into a commercial sized Glad Bag (usually sent to Scotland for haggis storage), and freeze it till needed.

So, as Louie was getting ready, one of those sudden prarie thunderstorms blew up.... rain, lightning, thunder...and Louie ran for the barn to wait it out.

After 30-40 minutes of wild weather, Louie went back out....and found all 127 on his frogizlators standing nose down in the shallow pond...drowned! That half hour of thunder had caused ALL the tails to drop off and their nose-heavy owners to be unable to come up for air! Not only that, the severed tails were contaminated at the open end and unsalvagable!

Poor Louie had no breeding stock left....and though he tried for a few weeks to recreate the experiment, the closest he came was a strange thing that looked like platypus with scales and smelled like old sweat socks. Not even Louie would try cooking one...and besides, they wanted caviar to eat and cost more to feed than to breed.

All was not lost however, for the time that his family ate frogizilator gave them this strange ability to absorb peanut-butter through the pores and assimilate it totally! Now, food is still cheap at Louie's place, but Thanksgiving dinner is not a pretty sight.