Hey Geoff, I used to breed them. They are an awesome little lizard.
Umm, I have one, and he is almost 18"... Not really a "little lizard". He is pretty cool though. He eats crickets, meal worms, super worms, and now that he is older, he eats more veggies, like broccolli, corn, carrots, peas. He is an eating machine. We dump in 30 large crickets and it is like watching Godzilla ransack tokyo. I would definitely reccomend frequent handling. Just like any other animal (hamster, snake, guinea pig) the more you handle it, the more used to being handled it will be. I have never heard of mice and what-not being fed to them, but everything my wife and I read (and she used to be the pet-care manager at Petsmart, which is where ours came from) says that by the time they are old enough to be eating that size of prey, they should be eating less of the crickets and worms and such and more veggies. Just my $.02, but we have had ours for about 2 years an he is still going strong.