Here it is, February 28th. What is typically the last day of February. However, this year, as I’m sure you are aware is a leap year. So we get another day this month, making this year 366 days long.¹ Anyhow, this leaping business of leap year has inspired me to think about frogs.² And thus you get a froggy ThThTh list.
A Few Frogs
leap frog: A game you play by leaping over crouched people. (I can’t really describe it. Go see what Wikipedia says.)
Frogger. A classic 80s arcade game. The goal is to get a frog to hop safely across a road and a river without getting squashed or dunked. You can play online.
Kaeru: This Japanese word means both frog and return, leading to frog charms being carried for luck by travellers.
The Frog Prince. A fairy tale about a princess prince-turned-frog-turned prince. It has some variations I’m less familiar with:
Although in modern versions the transformation is invariably triggered by the princess kissing the frog, in the original Grimm version of the story, the frog’s spell was broken when the princess threw it against a wall in disgust.[1] In other early versions it was sufficient for the frog to spend the night on the princess’s pillow.
The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, a book by Beatrix Potter. Mr. Fisher is a frog who goes fishing for his meal, but after some mishaps, opts to dine on grasshopper.
Frog and Toad. Characters from the series of books (including Frog and Toad are Friends) by Arnold Lobel. They are a frog and a toad. Who are friends.
Kermit the Frog. The beloved Muppet, created by Jim Henson. The orginal version was made from a discarded coat and ping pong balls.
Michigan J. Frog. The singing frog from the classic Warner Brother’s cartoon.
Keroppi Hasunoue. A Sanrio character. (It’s not actually clear to me what he is a character of, beyond toys and other merchandising.)
Froggy, a character in various books by Jonathan London, such as Froggy Gets Dressed.³
The frog scene from the movie Magnolia (1999). It rains frogs. Really big frogs. It gets messy.
Five Little Speckled Frogs. A children’s count-down song:
Five little speckled frogs,
Sitting on a hollow log,
Eating some most delicious bugs,
Yum, Yum.
One 1 frog jumped in the pool,
Where it was nice and cool,
Now there are four 4 speckled frogs,
Glub, glub.
A frog in one’s throat: an expression describing the gurgling and croaking⁴ that people sometimes get when talking with phlegm in the throat.
Crunchy Frog: a Monty Python sketch about a chocolate confection with a dead frog center.
We use only the finest baby frogs, dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in finest-quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope and lovingly frosted with glucose.
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¹ Has anyone else noticed that this is perhaps an unfortunate year to choose for the inaugural year of Blog 365, where people commit to blogging daily for the whole year? But I see they have a planned day off for tomorrow.
² Because they leap.
³ We recently got a different Froggy book for Phoebe from a Scholastic catalog, namely Froggy Eats Out, and were a bit dismayed by the message of this particular one. In it, Froggy behaves like a brat and embarrasses his parents so badly at a nice restaurant that they must leave. They then reward him by going out to a burger joint, like Froggy had originally wanted.
⁴ Or irregular phonation. Which sounds less frog-like than croaking and gurgling.
From time to time, I have been known to do a product review. (Some of you may remember my review of the iPhone, and the followup discussion of the Apple iCup.) I’ve been wanting to share this product for a while, but thought it would be good to wait for the Year of the the Rat celebrations to kick in. So, here it is: a review and demo of the Ikea Rat Launcher.
The Ikea Rat Launcher
This colorful and inexpensive device can launch an Ikea stuffed rat several feet up into the air, way up over a toddler’s head, resulting in a flying rat and a giggling toddler. (Individual results may vary.) Below are some images from our extensive testing of this product in late October of last year.
For the full demonstration, you can watch this video.¹
This ingenious product also doubles as a storage device: rats can be collected and placed in the launcher for later launching. An attractive reptilian cover keeps the rats from escaping.
Warning: this product is not recommended for toddler storage.
While the Launcher appears large enough to accomodate a toddler, attempts at toddler storage may result in the following:²
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¹ Sorry it’s a bit long, at 2:42, but I was too amused by Phoebe’s belly laughter and backwards toddling to cut any of it out.
² This one’s only 15 seconds. You know you want to watch it.
Bear with me. Or, bears with me. Well, not really with me. But on the list. Yes, Themed Things Thursday¹ is coming out of hibernation, as I come crawling out of my work-induced cave of fatigue and grumpitude. And what better way to come out of a cave than being pursued by a whole lot of bears?
Some Bears ²
Winnie-the-Pooh: Pooh has to top any list of bears in my book. The bear from the books by A. A. Milne. (I prefer not to think about the Disneyfied version.)
Gentle Ben: A lesser-known show about a boy and a bear.
Grizzly Man A movie about a man who decided to go and live with bears. Eventually, the bears tired of him. From what I understand, he met a…um…grizzly…end.
Yogi Bear: A cartoon about a bear, smarter than the average bear, so he says. Stole pic-a-nic baskets. Yogi Bear was always allegedly “in the ranger’s hair.” But I don’t believe he ever actually at the ranger. (I watched this show as a kid, but I’m not sure I liked it. I feel like I felt some empathy for Boo-boo Bear, the side-kick.)
Goldilocks and the 3 bears:
The classic fairy tale of breaking and entering. While a family of bears is out for a walk while their porridge cools, a little girl heads into their house where she steals their food and breaks some furniture.
Bear Snores On: A kids’ book (by Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman) about a bear who snoozes through a party in his cave, when various other animals sneak in to get out of the winter storm.
There are a whole bunch of other bear books for kids, several of which are berry-oriented, like Blueberries for Sal, Jamberry, The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry and the Big Hungry Bear.
bear hug: A hug characterized by a real squeezing of the arms, rather than just a symbolic arm-wrapping. As one might imagine it would be like if hugged by a bear. Though without the mauling.
“B is for Basil, assaulted by bears:” A page from The Gashleycrumb Tinies, Edward Gorey’s alphabetic masterpiece.
Fozzie Bear: a muppet who likes to tell bad jokes. (Wocka, wocka, wocka.)
fuzzy wuzzy, a children’s rhyme:
Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear
Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair
Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn’t very Fuzzy, was he.
“Bears Discover Fire:” A Hugo Award-winning short story by Terry Bisson in which bears…discover fire.
Bears are fairly popular mascots for sporting teams, especially brown bears, or Bruins (cf. the Brown University Bruins, UCLA Bruins, the Boston Bruins, or the Chicago Bears. And cf. also “da Bears” sketch from SNL)
teddy bear: A popular type of stuffed animal, named for Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
Gummy Bears: fruit-flavored, brightly-colored, gelatin-based candies shaped like little bears.
¹ Yes, I realize it is now no longer Thursday. But I ran out of time, and I’ve had this draft going for over a week.
Our blueberry-picking excursion of the weekend has me thinking about berries. Mmmmmm, berries.
I love berries. And so do lots of other people. Berries show up muffins, pies and other baked goods. Also in lots of books and folktales, and few songs. Plus a few other places you wouldn’t expect to find berries. Which is how berries ended up in my list of themed things.
Jamberry, by Bruce Degen
A book of a bear, a boy, and many, many berries. Blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries. And silly rhymes.
Quickberry, quackberry
Pick me a blackberrry
Blueberries for Sal, by Robert McCloskey
A picturebook of berry-picking and bears, and mistaken identity.
Blueberry. The name of my stuffed bear I got from my mother for my fourth birthday. I still have him.
Violet, the gum-chewer of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the book by Roald Dahl, and the moviesbased on it) turns into a giant blueberry.
Firefly & Buffy. Maybe Joss Whedon has a thing for strawberries. In Firefly, strawberries are a luxury item and valued commodity. A box of strawberries is what Book uses to convince Kaylee to take him on as a passenger in the pilot episode. In the Buffy Season 6 episode “Wrecked,” the creepy Rack tells Willow “you taste like strawberries.” (I also feel like there was a scene in the bronze at some point where some random dancing person gets briefly turned into a giant strawberry. Am I imagining this?)
Strawberry Shortcake. The doll. The cartoons. The empire. I still remember the commercials for the doll from when I was little. I can still hear the song, with it’s mockable swellness:
Strawberry Shortcake
My she’s looking swell!
Cute little doll
With a strawberry smell.
The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry and the Big Hungry Bear, by Don Wood Another picture book. About a mouse. And a strawberry. Also some mention of a bear.
The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher, by Molly Bang. I don’t actually know this berry-oriented book, though it won a Caldecott Honor medal. I liked the author’s story of struggling to get it published.
The Strawberry Legend. A Cherokee Legend where a woman forgets her anger and remembers her love as she eats some berries. (There’s at least one book version, too.)
The Blackberry Bush, a folktale in the book Stories to Tell to Children by Sara Cone Bryant.
Blackberry . One of the rabbits from Watership Down, by Douglas Adams.
BlackBerry. An electronic device. John had one for a couple of years. He would sometimes throw it when he got email because it would irritate him so much with its onslaught of interruptions.
Blowing a raspberry. Okay, it has nothing to do with berries. It’s when you make a sort of continous spitting noise by sticking your tongue between your lips and blowing, or by blowing through loosely closed lips. I have no idea why it’s called a raspberry.
Knott’s Berry Farm. Not actually a farm, and not so much berry-ish. It’s a large amusement park. But the founder did sell berries.
Frankenberry. A cereal. Berry-flavored. Also a cartoon character from the cereal box and commercials. Has a bit of a cult following. (There also seem to be some other meanings to Frankenberry, as seen on Urban Dictionary, but they seem pretty lame to me.)
Finally, here are a few berry songs that I picked for you:
Raspberry Beret, Prince (Okay, not really about raspberries)
Blueberry Hill, Louis Armstrong (Not really about blueberries)
Strawberry Fields Forever, the Beatles (…nothing is real…)
As some of you know, we are very much a pro-Mac household. Also, John is more than a bit of a technophile. So it shouldn’t come as much surprise that John wanted to get one of the new Apple iPhones as soon as possible. John camped out for most of the afternoon today outside a nearby phone store, and we were lucky enough to get our hands on one of the coveted, ultra-cool, ultra-sleek iPhones.
The iPhone has been awaited with great anticipation for years, long before it was officially announced by Apple. But since Apple released details and images of the iPhone, with its large high-res LCD and touch-pad with multi-touch operating, and versatile phone + camera + video player + music player + internet ready identities, it has been creating quite the buzz.
We were, naturally, quite eager to see whether the iPhone could live up to the hype. Since some of you may not have had a chance to see the iPhone in action yet, aside from in the commercials, we thought we’d share our own experiences and impressions.
When we got ours home, John opened up the box.
As advertised, all he needed to do was plug it into the computer, and go through iTunes in order to activate it.
Also as advertised, the iPhone not only shows images, but it can also function as a music player:
The iPhone is easy to navigate, with handy built-in scrolling features:
While much of the functionality has been very cool, the design of the phone itself is surprisingly clunky: with big plastic buttons, and a screen that’s a bit smaller than we’d hoped. The sound quality of the music is a bit tinny, and somewhat annoying with various boingy and chirping sounds jumping in unexpectedly, and the selection of songs you can listen to is quite limited. While I do like the way the brightly colored lights flash when I push the buttons, I haven’t yet figured out how to dial the phone, as there are only buttons for 1 through 4. Most distressingly, we have already encountered at least three bugs with the iPhone, which are obvious in the image below.¹
Has Apple fallen down in its standards?
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¹ And not just bugs, a frog, a bird and a duck, too.
It’s time for another helping of Themed Things Thursdays. It being vegetable week here, in honor of my first pick-up of my CSA veggies, this Thursday Theme for Things is vegetables. Okay, the list is a bit heavy on the onion bits (with apologies to those who don’t like onions), but you can pick them out.
some vegetables
beans
Jack and the beanstalk, a fairy tale featuring magic beans that grow a towering beanstalk.
corn Children of the Corn (1984) A movie based on a Stephen King story. Horror in the corn fields.
spinach
The cartoon character Popeye (The Sailor Man) gets super-duper strong when he eats a can of spinach. Even has a little song he sings when he gets all juiced up: I’m strong to the finish, ’cause I eats me spinach…
cabbage
The Kids in the Hall offers Cabbage Head, a man with cabbage for hair. (There are also the Cabbage Patch Kids, scrunched-up looking dolls that were all the rage in the 80’s, and that now have their own urban legend.)
pumpkin
Peter Peter pumkin eater. A nursery rhyme. Also a song you can play on the piano using only the black keys.
Peter Peter pumpkin eater
Had a wife and couldn’t keep her
He put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well
peppers Peter Piper A nursery rhyme and tongue twister: “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers”
carrots Bugs Bunny is known for his trademark carrot-munching. But did you know that his carrot-munching was a Clark Gable immitation?
Bugs Bunny’s nonchalant carrot-chewing stance, as explained many years later by Chuck Jones, and again by Friz Freleng, comes from the movie, It Happened One Night, from a scene where the Clark Gable character is leaning against a fence eating carrots more quickly than he is swallowing, giving instructions with his mouth full to the Claudette Colbert character, during the hitch-hiking sequence.
potato
Everybody’s favorite spud has got to be the ever-dignified, interchangeably featured Mr. Potatohead (Apparently, there are many new Potatohead varieties that have sprouted, including the venerable Star Wars Darth Tater
sweet potato
“Sweet Potato,” by Cracker. (Off the album “Kerosene Hat”) A rockin’ romp of a song. Be my sweet potato, I’ll be your honey lamb
yams Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. Yams play a central role in the Nigerian community depicted in this novel. (See? I can get all literary, too.) (By the way, these yams aren’t the same as sweet potatoes, which are often called yams in the US)
turnip
You can’t get blood from a turnip, or “You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip” (You can also find more garden-variety cliches) An expression meaning that it’s not possible to extract something from a source that doesn’t contain that thing.
onion
The Onion (”America’s finest news source”) My own favorite Onion article? This eerily prescient one from January, 2001.
Shrek (2001) An animated movie featuring an ogre who likens himself to an onion:
Shrek: Ogres are like onions. Donkey: They both smell? Shrek: NO! They have LAYERS. There’s more to us underneath. So, ogres are like onions. Donkey: Yeah, but nobody LIKES onions!
The End: Book the Thirteenth, the final installation of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket begins with the following layery, teary-eyed, oniony sentence:
If you have ever peeled an onion, then you know that the first thin, papery layer reveals another thin, papery layer, and that layer reveals another, and another, and before you know it you have hundreds of layers all over the kitchen table and thousands of tears in your eyes, sorry that you ever started peeling in the first place and wishing that you had left the onion alone to wither away on the shelf of the pantry while you went on with your life, even if that meant never again enjoying the complicated and overwhelming taste of this strange and bitter vegetable.
bok choi
Bok Choi Boy, the story of a young lad raised by vegetables to become a legendary leafy-green fighter for truth, justice and better nutrition. (Okay, I made this one up.)
a whole bunch o’ different oversized veggies June 29, 1999 written and illustrated by Caldecott award-winnder David Wiesner. A picturebook featuring gigantic vegetables raining down from the skies. A beatifully illustrated, beautifully absurd book:
Cucumbers circle Kalamazoo. Lima beans loom over Levittown. Artichokes advance on Anchorage.
Check out some of the illustrations on the publisher’s webpage for the book.
We had grand plans for the day: to go to Ikea and buy a kitchen table and an itty-bitty table for Phoebe. It’s a bit of a trek to get there, so that was pretty much the agenda for the day.
We planned to leave home by 10:00 a.m., and were happy to make it out of the house around noon.
Before leaving, I checked the directions online, and they looked pretty straightforward. We’d been there twice before, after all, so I didn’t bother to write them down. As you can guess, things were not as straightforward as I remembered. We didn’t get “lost,” exactly. We just had some difficulty finding what we expected to find. At one point, we drove down a street that looked vaguely familiar and I ever-so-briefly saw the Ikea sign poking its head up above a large building. But the end of the street came, with no sign of Ikea (or sign of the sign, for that matter). So we looped. We explored. We meandered and roamed for a bit. We marvelled at how so large a thing as an Ikea store could be so very thoroughly hidden in a rather small Massachusetts town.
Eventually, I realized that we had a road atlas in the car, and as I attempted to get us back to the main drag, we passed a street sign (an unusual thing to see in many parts of Massachusetts) that said “Ikea Way.” We took this to be a very good sign.
Soon after, we found our hidden prize. It was as if we found that Easter egg, albeit one the size of several city blocks. Our cheaply manufactured blue and yellow pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This felt like accomplishment. It was as if we had completed a quest. I ask you, can one feel such a sense of accomplishment by merely following directions? Pshaw.
(Oh, and we did get a kitchen table. And a table and 2 chairs for Phoebe that are really frickin’ cute, and that John’s already taken over for his laptop. Plus a kitchen clock. And a basket for the laundry room. Oh, and some tongs. And a huge stuffed orca, 2 rats, 4 bats, a crab, a turtle, some finger puppets, a wooden gear toy and really, we did try to show some restraint. We could at least fit all our purchases in the car at the end of the trip. Without even resorting to strapping Phoebe’s car seat to the roof of the car.)
Here’s a list of some bouncing balls I’ve encountered. A list of 5 things of the bouncy ball persuasion. And a whole lot more balls than that. On with the bouncing!
The Sony Bravia commercial. My sister sent me a link to this ad, which I hadn’t seen before. It features a whole lot of bouncing balls, bouncing down a street in San Francisco. And through the wonder of YouTube, I can bounce it to you here.
The making of video is fun to watch, too. You can also read more about it, and see some cool photos. And want to get some balls of your own? Get a bunch of downloads.
Here’s another bouncing ball commercial, this time for a museum in Mexico. Features a pair of balls.
“Follow the bouncing ball.” Old-time TV (and movie?) sing-alongs used to feature a bouncing ball that would bounce along the words displayed on the screen. It’s a bit hard to find examples of this, though I came across a version someone random made and put up on YouTube. Or if you don’t mind being forced to watch an irritating ad, you can sing along with some old TV show themes songs with the help of a bouncing ball.
My favorite balls of all are from the Futurama episode “War is the H-word“. (By the way, this is also the episode where Leela dresses up as a man, and where Fry buys his ham-flavored gum. For “breath as fresh as a spring ham.”) This episode features a planet of bouncing balls. And these fabulous ball-bouncing quotes, from the treaty negotiations with the head of the balls:
We demand bouncing, followed by rolling, followed by rolling of the third type.
and
We cannot condone bouncing of the seventh variety.
and
The Elders tell of a young ball much like you. He bounced three meters in the air. Then he bounced 1.8 meters in the air. Then he bounced four meters in the air. Do I make myself clear?
and let’s not forget when Leela says:
We’re here. I followed the bouncing balls.
This post is being submitted to the //engtech 5 things contest, which strongly advocates bouncing of the 5th variety.
We got back home late, late Wednesday night (or early, early Thursday morning). I had an amazingly wonderful time on my trip, and felt totally decompressed.
Of course, the problem with decompression is the shock of re-entry.
I’m compressed again.
Compression happened pretty quickly. I was hit, knocked down, and run over several times by the realization that I’d gotten no work done at all for over a week. (I managed to read 2 pages of a book I need to read. Does that count?)
Once again, I’m faced with loads of deadlines. Reading for my program requirements. Reading for class. An assignment for class. Stuff for my job. And not a whole lot of time. Rats.
By the way, today marks fourth months of this here blog. And I have a whole bunch of things I meant to write about that I haven’t gotten around to. For example, I have yet to write an “about” page. About me, about this blog, about the term tokens, about about. Maybe I’ll get around to this in the next month or so.
This post also marks my 100th post. Of course, I only wrote 99 of them. The first one was the auto-generated one I got when I signed up for a WordPress blog. And it got so many insightful comments, from a variety of fascinating personages, that I decided to keep it.
Our 
