Pushing up the daisies: fans of Monty Python's dead parrot sketch will like this story from US lawyer and ?blogger Marcel Strigberger. A client came to see him having bought two ferrets from a local pet shop, which came with a 15-day guarantee. Sadly, both 'joined the choir invisible' within two days of coming home, much to the client's disappointment. He returned the little beasts to the pet shop manager - officially titled the 'small pet specialty manager' - who said he would be in touch. Whether there was any Pythonesque ?shouting and banging of the furry creatures on the table we can only imagine, but two days later a letter arrived claiming that the dearly departed ferrets had been examined by a vet, who had determined that they had died of stress - and so the guarantee was void. Just goes to show that sometimes real life can be - almost - as strange as fiction.