Today...

... I saw a frog. 2, actually. Not sure if the other pic — of a frog inside an old springhouse — came out.

"Before we set up a watch in my village of Little Melton, about 90 per cent of toads were being squashed to death at our crossings."

"Now it's down to about 10 per cent.... On a warm, wet night they can all come out at once... I was the only person scheduled to patrol that night, and there I was frantically trying to place as many as possible in the bucket to take to the pond, while phoning for patrol reinforcements and trying not to tread on any toads myself."

Toad patrol, in England, home of Toad of Toad Hall.



ADDED: From pre-Althouse+Meade days:

Meade said...
Great buzz!

Maguro said...
Ugh...hate those $#%^*! Japanese Beetles!

Meade said...
Here, Maguro, I feed them to a toad.

Ann Althouse said...
That toad video is fascinating. I watched it 3 times. The speed is amusing, as is the subtly satisfied look on the toad's face. He's not that pleased. But he's pleased. You can tell.

Meade said...
Yes, Japanese Beetles are $#%^ers. They devour roses. No roses, no hortporn. No hortporn, and all I'm left with is my monochromatic imagination. That toad has become so addicted to Japanese Beetles, he waits at the greenhouse door every morning for me to bring him his fix. Every day he leaves a toad turd the size of your pinky finger with recognizable Japanese Beetle exoskeletons in them. I feed the turds to the roses and the cycle is oh so satisfyingly complete....

AND: Later, Althouse and Meade, having found each other, go searching for something — it was morels — and find a toad.

"All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions."

"In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it."

The hostage-takers manifesto.

ADDED: The guy seems pretty clearly crazy, and I hope no one dies and he gets the help he needs, because this manifesto — PDF —  is hilarious, but if anyone dies, it might be wrong to laugh.

Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.

Of course, the Squirrels. That's such a childish list of animals, and not just because of "Froggies." These are the animals in a children's picture book or Noah's Ark toy.

The humans? The planet does not need humans. You MUST KNOW the human population is behind all the pollution and problems in the world....

I disagree. Around my city, geese are crapping everything up. I notice that no birds got on Lee's list of favored creatures.

These are the demands and sayings of Lee.

How religion-y, and yet he hates religion:

Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! 

He hates everything that human beings have produced. It's all filth. Even the ideas. He gets his ideas from a gorilla:

The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other's inventive ideas.

Here's the book. A gorilla tells us what to do. Example from the pages cited:

We could pension off our teachers, close schools, and open up the city to our children. Let them learn anything they want. We could take that risk....

Quinn has been hyped by Oprah Winfrey: Here's an Oprah interview with  Quinn:

WINFREY: You say that y--hundreds of years from now, children will look back on our society and call us monsters. Why?

Mr. QUINN: I think so. Yeah, because we're g--we're--we continue to take and take and take and consume and consume and consume everything in sight. And in 100 years, if--if there are still people around to think about it, we're going to look back and say, `My God, these were terribly greedy people. What kind of people were they? They were hard to understand, who had no thought for us, for the future of--of the human race.'

WINFREY: How are we monsters? In what ways are we devouring the world?...

ADDED: The man was killed. The hostages all survived.

[T]he suspect had "metalic canisters" strapped to his chest and back. When Lee was struck by police bullets, one of the canisters "popped." Police have not confirmed if the canisters were a bomb, but Manger said the "device may have gone off" when he was shot.

On the Glacial Drumlin Trail...

... east of Madison, beginning in Cottage Grove, we biked for about 18 miles today.



I like an overcast sky with photographable clouds.



But I don't want to hear thunder. This is how it looked just before a big downpour.



We sought shelter in the library in Deerfield. I read the Utne Reader (after Meade handed it to me) and Meade read the Mayo Clinic Newsletter until the librarian said she was closing in a minute. The worst of the rain was over, and we pedaled back over the trail, dodging chipmunks and frogs and one dark brown rabbit.

Was Art Nouveau "the clumsy process of trying to 'dress up' the inorganic forms of modern construction in the false clothing of the natural world"?

That's what Walter Benjamin thought.

If Benjamin was right about Art Nouveau in general, then Jean Carriès was a dissenter from the movement who refused to play along with the lie. Carriès did not carry the prettifying gene. He had an eye for the monstrous, for the contortions of nature and its abnormalities. If Carriès accepted the idea that the modern city is an extension of the natural world, he did so with the proviso that the extension was a malignant tumor.

The dissent from the lie looked like this:

"A thousand years ago, popular birth control methods in the Western world included spitting into the mouth of a frog, eating bees and wearing the testicles of a weasel."

Actually, all those things work.

What are we looking for?

What are we finding?



A toad.



AND: Before there was Althouse + Meade, there was Meade + toad.

At the Frog Marsh Café...

... you can sing that song late into the night.

ADDED: Listening to that song: