Back when we were college age, one of us, Zeb, had a pet piranha. Zeb called it Pete. We were all excited because we all thought of scenes like in James Bond movies where Blofeld or whoever would toss an ex-cow, or enemy, or inefficient henchman into a pool of piranha and it’d look like the water was boiling for a few seconds and you’d pull out some pretty clean-looking bones.

On a night of a get-together, Zeb went out and bought a few goldfish as “feeders”. The plan was for each of us to place bets on which fish would be first to have a bite taken out of it by Pete. This fish would be the “winner”.

There were two issues with this. One was that Pete didn’t seem very interested in the goldfish. All of the fish swam around each other not seeming to be aware of the others. On top of that, Pete didn’t seem to be particularly hungry. By the time the shindig was over, all of the goldfish were unmolested.

A few days later, Zeb reported that one of the goldfish had some bites taken out of its dorsal fin.

This brought up the second issue: Whose fish was the “winner”? They’re goldfish! How were we supposed to tell them apart?

As blood-sports go, this was very disappointing.

We’d never been so let down by the inaccuracy of James Bond movies.