So Uncle Milton, the bastard, shipped me a bunch of dead ants.

I go out and pop twenty-five bucks on an Uncle Milton's Giant Ant Farm and mail-order a batch of Uncle Milton's Giant Ant Farm ants and they arrive and all but six are dead. Dead, dead, dead. Little curled ant bodies, piled where they dropped out of the tube, between the Giant Ant Farm bridge and the Giant Ant Farm house.

One guy spent his first two hours in the farm crawling out from under a bunch of his buddy's corpses.

I expected industrious workers, a thriving society, the miracle of nature. And I got a few weary undertakers clearing away bodies.

The smiling children on the box should have had their faces twisted in horror.

Uncle Milton's a bastard.

And the next person to sing the Pink Panther theme with "Dead ant" as the lyrics, gets it.

Postscript:

I've heard from Uncle Milton Industries about this EOD and they've asked me to make a couple of clarifications. In fairness to them, it should be noted that I never tried to get the dead ants replaced, because I accidentally spilled the sand from the Farm all over my Newton. Uncle Milton's representative said that if I had just gotten in touch with them -- at either antfarm@ix.netcom.com or http://www.unclemilton.com -- they would have been happy to work out an arrangement for new ants.

But that wouldn't have been as funny.