I could not possibly have less to say today. No, not even if I tried. So I won’t.
Won’t try to say less, of course. Besides, Sarah’s “Marx is dead” post yesterday was so thoroughly brilliant that anything that follows it is bound to be a letdown.
However, I did stumble onto a very interesting frog, which is so puffed up that when I first saw the picture I thought maybe someone had exaggerated his features with PhotoShop:
While it’s being called a “bump toad,” contrary to humor sites, it’s actually a frog of the the Breviceps genus, commonly known as the Rain Frog.
The Wiki picture is good too!
The various Breviceps beasties are in a group called microhylid frogs which burrow underground in the desert:
The species of the genus Breviceps are burrowing frogs found in the arid regions of Africa. Some of their species will even lay their eggs under ground.
When it rains, they come out.
And if you think they’re weird, some critters are even weirder. For a couple of days, Drudge linked this picture — of a man who looks like he would burrow in the underground desert and lay eggs, if he could get away with it!
Speaking of burrowing, there’s a very strange female critter in Pennsylvania who for reasons known only to her, went into a store’s freezer room and refused to come out. Police were called, and they arrested her for having peed on $500.00 worth of baked goods.
As detailed in a probable cause affidavit, State Police troopers were summoned to the grocery store at about 5:00 AM. A clerk explained that Harkness, pictured at right, had entered the walk-in freezer and that she “could not get her to leave.” At one point, workers asked a woman who had accompanied Harkness to the store to help “get the defendant to come out of the freezer.”
When a Country Fair employee opened the freezer door, Harkness’s friend asked her “if she had gone pee in the freezer.” Harkness replied, “Yes, I did.”
Upon investigation, Trooper Robert Baldwin discovered “what appeared to be frozen liquid in the freezer floor and splatters of a frozen liquid on several boxes containing food.” According to the affidavit and a criminal complaint, the damaged baked goods included packaged cookies ($248), bagels ($36), and 2-bite cakes ($224).
No explanation why, which means unless we “blame the culture,” we have little choice but to conclude she’s crazy or trashy.
Discussing the Pennsylvania peeer (in conjunction with a YouTube rampage at Denny’s that Drudge had linked — which brought thousands of astonishingly angry commenters who blame everything from “Cultural Marxism” to “Tea Baggers”), an interesting question arose.
“What is wrong with these people?”
Plenty is wrong, and clearly they have to be either mentally ill or just complete trash or both. Yet there have always been trashy and mentally ill people. The problem is that now they are being regularly and constantly immortalized on line, and it has a cumulative effect, so it appears that their numbers are much larger than they are.
Repetition makes questionable premises seem more and more true:
In several experiments, Mr Rucker and Mr Dubois planted rumours among undergraduates. They found that with each repetition, scepticism diminished. The rumours themselves did not change; only the likelihood that the students would believe them. These findings were published in a report called “The Failure to Transmit Certainty”.
It reminds me of gruesome pit bull attacks. Every year a few people in our nation of 300 million are maimed and/or killed by dogs described as “pit bulls.” (As far as whether fact checkers have examined the pedigrees to determine how true the descriptions are, I don’t know.) But because of the Internet and vindictive web sites, it is made to look like huge. The stories and pictures never go away and are repeated and recycled endlessly. More and more people start to think that there is a “growing” and “urgent” “crisis” and something must be done. Every time I read about another one, I cringe in fear of “the people,” (few of whom see dogs as arms) and I worry that they might get all stirred up and get that “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH” going in such a way as to incite grandstanding local politicians to pass laws which would kill Coco. When people are in hysteria mode, they don’t take kindly to rational arguments.
There are advantages to living in burrows.
Comments
2 responses to “all croaked up”
I’d say the frog and the Lybian psychopath are twins separated at birth, but it would be mean to a poor little frog who just looks ugly.
As for posts — I have so many swirling around in my head right now, I can’t land on one. I suspect it’s either fever or the fact the world is going mad. Or both.
For the record I’m an absolutely traditional female in one thing: I like security and being able to foresee what the immediate future will bring. The current insanity has me very jumpy.
And — you knew I could bring this on topic, right? — I think it’s causing the more unstable among us to crack. Yeah, the nuts we’ll always have with us, but I expect the free-floating tension to result in a “Silly Season” to end all silly seasons over the next few days or weeks.
Maybe she was trying to find Bunny Lebowski?
“She peed on the cookies, Dude? They really tied the room together.”
And I have to give you points for creativity with “peeer.” Had you gone with the obvious past tense it would have appeared you were writing about a British Lord. Personally I would have gone with “pisser” although that might imply an Australian level of intoxication.