Elephant

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Barnes & Noble (Meet the Author)

Yikes. This would be embarrassing.  

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DUI (Whitney Gilman)

This woman is a piece of work.  Watching this video from beginning to end is nearly impossible because of how annoying this woman can be. She is either a seriously entitled narcissist or is mentally unstable without measure. These cops gave her far too many passes. She should be made to watch this video as punish over and over. I hope the judge sees parts of it as well.

If you were able to watch this video in its entirety, let me know. I applaud you.

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Starving the Elephants: The Slaughter of Animals in Wartime Tokyo's Ueno Zoo / the slaughter of animals

Lions being shot

... at first, it was decided for the Army Veterinary School to take responsibility and proceed with measures concerning only the elephants, who were to be used as reference material. They decided to try to use potatoes injected with potassium cyanide and injections with strychnine nitrate. However, the elephant(s?) soon noticed which potatoes were poisoned and threw them back. Even though the injection was made behind the ears, where the skin is the thinnest, the needle broke and thus the objective could not be attained. Therefore, the Army Veterinary School said that they would withdraw. For the zoo there remained only the method of stopping to feed, i.e., starving them.

August 17: a North Manchurian brown bear and an Asian black bear (Japanese) were poisoned (the poison, strychnine nitrate, was provided by the Army Veterinary School and was mixed into the food);
August 18: a lion, a leopard, and an Asian black bear (Korean) were poisoned;
August 19: a North Manchurian brown bear was given poison, then the coup de grâce was delivered with a lance;
August 21: an Asian black bear (Korean) was given poison, then stabbed; another Asian black bear (Japanese) had not been fed for three days already and was strangled with a rope while sleeping;⁷
August 22: two lions were poisoned, the tiger and the cheetah were killed (no further information is provided);
August 24: a polar bear died, presumably of starvation;
August 26: a black leopard and a leopard were poisoned; the head of the rattlesnake was pierced with wire, then a heated wire was tied around the neck and pulled, but the snake did not die until the next morning, after 16 hours, when a thin cord was used around the neck;
August 27: the head of the python, who had been fed two rabbits not even a week ago,⁸ was cut off and she died after a while; the sun bear was poisoned; a black leopard and a leopard were strangled with wire rope;
August 29: a polar bear, who had not yet died of starvation, was strangled with a wire; an American bison was roped and killed by blows to the head from a pickaxe and a hammer;
September 1: the second American bison was killed in the same way as the first;
September 11: a leopard cub, who had only been born in March, was poisoned.

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Read more here.

Correlation

The strong correlation between chocolate eating and Nobel Prize having.

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Casas Típicas da Costa Nova (Portugal)

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I want the yellow house!

Beer for baby

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Japanese bidet settings

Notice the imagery for rear and front. The middle image shows a rear view of a butt and the last one shows a tsunami up someone's butt. 
 

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If anyone runs into more amusing graphics created to help a user (tourist/foreigner) understand a sign or button, please send it/them along.

I am always interested in posting photos or videos created by my readers. (Group hug.)

Maritan rice

Martian dirt may have all the necessary nutrients for growing rice, one of humankind’s most important foods, planetary scientist Abhilash Ramachandran reported March 13 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. However, the plant may need a bit of help to survive amid perchlorate, a chemical that can be toxic to plants and has been detected on Mars’ surface.

Read more here. 

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Footwear

 #FB00846

Geeky insults

 Once you forgive yourself truly, these people won't bother you. Half of us are only here to put people down. I'm sure outside of here it doesn't even come up

Sing the abstract to your cat, watch their nine lives evaporate as they slowly melt in to the chair

You know, you are a classic example of the inverse ratio between the size of the mouth and the size of the brain.

— The Doctor, Doctor Who

Why, you stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking… Nerf herder! — Princess Leia, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

If you spend word for word with me, I shall make your wit bankrupt.

— Thurio, The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare

[You're] a girl with as much talent for disguise as a giraffe in dark glasses trying to get into a polar-bears-only club.

— Blackadder, Blackadder Goes Forth

You clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous junk!

— The Wizard, The Wizard of Oz

You're about as much use as a condom machine in the Vatican.

— Rimmer, Red Dwarf

[He] may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.

— Groucho Marx as Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup

I'll explain and I'll use small words so that you'll be sure to understand, you warthog-faced buffoon.

— Westley (The Dread Pirate Roberts), The Princess Bride

Don't look now, but there's one man too many in this room and I think it's you.

— Groucho Marx as Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup

I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.

— French Guard, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Well if it isn't fat stinking billygoat billyboy. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip-oil? Come get some in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou!

— Alex DeLarge, A Clockwork Orange

You are a sad strange little man, and you have my pity.

— Buzz Lightyear, Toy Story

To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! I've known sheep that could outwit you. I've worn dresses with higher IQs.

— Wanda, A Fish Called Wanda

Your heart is full of unwashed socks. Your soul is full of gunk ...The three words that best describe you are as follows, and I quote, "Stink, stank, stunk!"

— How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (TV version)

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

— Oscar Wilde

Freaking idiot.

— Napoleon, Napoleon Dynamite

You bowl like your momma. Unless of course she bowls well, in which case you bowl nothing like her.

— Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory

Shut up, Big-booty, you coward. You are the weakest individual I ever know.

— Doctor Emilio Lizardo/Lord John Whorfin, Buckaroo Banzai, Across the 8th Dimension

Well, I'll tell you something that should be of vital interest to you. That you, sir, are a NITWIT!

— The Doctor, Doctor Who

I didn't mean to say that the Enterprise [or your car/van/truck/RV] should be hauling garbage. I meant to say that it should be hauled away as garbage!

— Korax, Star Trek - "The Trouble With Tribbles"

Don't get uncool and heavy on me now.

— Neil, The Young Ones

Your brain's so minute that if a hungry cannibal cracked your head open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.

— Blackadder, Blackadder Goes Forth

I'm trying to thank you, you pointed-eared hobgoblin!

— Dr. Leonard McCoy, Star Trek

I think... no, I am positive... that you are the most unattractive man I have ever met in my entire life. In the short time we've been together, you have demonstrated every loathsome characteristic of the male personality and even discovered a few new ones. You are physically repulsive, intellectually retarded, you're morally reprehensible, vulgar, insensitive, selfish, stupid, you have no taste, a lousy sense of humor and you smell. You're not even interesting enough to make me sick.

— Alexandra Medford, The Witches of Eastwick

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.

— Oscar Wilde

You would bore the leggings off a village idiot.

— Blackadder, The Black Adder

Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous pervert!

— Monty Python's Flying Circus

Smeg head.

— Lister, Red Dwarf

Well, of course, this is just the sort of blinkered philistine ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage. You sit there on your loathsome spotty behinds squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker's cuss for the struggling artist. You excrement, you whining hypocritical toadies with your colour TV sets and your Tony Jacklin golf clubs and your bleeding masonic secret handshakes. You wouldn't let me join, would you, you blackballing bastards. Well I wouldn't become a Freemason if you went down on your stinking knees and begged me.

— Monty Python's Flying Circus

You are a fart factory, slug-slimed sack of rat guts in cat vomit. A cheesy scab picked pimple squeezing finger bandage. A week old maggot burger with everything on it and flies on the side.

— Rufio, Hook

What are you, a captain in the innuendo squad?

— Micky, Doctor Who

Out. For. A. Walk… Bitch.

— Spike, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

You are about one bit short of a byte.

—Anonymous

I do desire we may be better strangers.

— Orlando, As You Like It by William Shakespeare

#FB00845

Digit widget

formerlyflightsuit has an uncanny knack for knowing the weird stuff I like.  

B's digit widget is still installed and he'll keep it on until it's time for his next surgery, which will probably be some time in April. 

I want to emphasize that this video was created and narrated by our own lovable Froglandian denizen, formerlyflightsuit.

I left a comment on "Big Fluff's" video. As always, my numbered comments are painfully lame in every way.

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One-hit wonder

Jerrold Samuels (May 3, 1938 – March 10, 2023) was an American singer, songwriter and record producer. Under the pseudonym Napoleon XIV, he achieved one-hit wonder status with the Top 5 hit novelty song "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" in 1966.

 #FB00843

Wire grill brush warning

Click link below not photo

 https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2023/02/23/tiktok-doctor-mystery-diagnosis-grill-brush-orig-cprog-dp.cnn?dicbo=v2-s1zak4j&hpt=ob_blogfooterold

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1880 Census

 

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Japan’s Population Crisis

Japan has the world’s most rapidly declining population. Last year less than 800,000 babies were born, resulting in a rapid decline that experts hadn’t predicted until 2030.

Japan has reached an historical turning point. In eight years time it’s believed the number of women of child bearing age will fall to a point where population decline cannot be reversed. 

Read more here.

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Shortage of women in the Faroe Islands

There's a shortage of women in the Faroe Islands. So local men are increasingly seeking wives from further away - Thailand and the Philippines in particular. But what's it like for the brides who swap the tropics for this windswept archipelago?

Read more here.

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Méret Oppenheim (Swiss, 1913–1985)

Object

A Woman’s Work: Surrealist Artist Meret Oppenheim

In 1924, with the West on the mend after World War I, French poet André Breton unleashed a manifesto of a brand-new revolution: the artistic, intellectual, and literary movement known as Surrealism. From this point, until the end of World War II, the artists, writers, and intellectuals who joined Breton sought to creatively undermine what they viewed as postwar society’s excessive rationality and oppressive order. They accomplished this by producing work generated not out of the conscious—that cerebral, rule-bound part of the mind—but by tapping into the unconscious, its desiring, dreaming, irrational portion. “Beloved imagination,” Breton wrote in his manifesto, “what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.”

Women were largely regarded as the subjects and muses of the men who dominated Surrealism, among them Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, and René Magritte. So, it is notable that painter and sculptor Meret Oppenheim (German-Swiss, 1913–1985) made a place for herself as one of Surrealism’s central artists and produced some of its most powerful works. In 1932, she moved to Paris, the center of the movement, and was soon participating actively in their meetings and exhibitions. By 1936, she had her first solo exhibition. Assuming she, like her artistic peers, must be male, critics and admirers of her work often mistakenly referred to her as “Mr. Oppenheim.”

The artist possessed a wry wit and was keenly aware of how women were regarded by both the Surrealists and society. Suffused with humor, eroticism, and menacing darkness, her work reflected her critical explorations of female sexuality, identity, and exploitation. Oppenheim became known for her assemblages, sculptural works in which she brought everyday, often domestic, items into disturbing and humorous juxtaposition. For the Surrealists, such objects served to crack the veneer of civilized society, revealing the sexual, psychological, and emotional drives burning just beneath the surface.

A Sensational Teacup: Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936)

It began with a joke over lunch. In 1936, Meret Oppenheim was at a Paris café with Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso, who noticed the fur-lined, polished metal bracelet she was wearing and joked that anything could be covered with fur. “Even this cup and saucer,” Oppenheim replied and, carrying the merriment further, called out, “Waiter, a little more fur!” Her devilish imagination duly sparked, the artist went to a department store not long after this meal, bought a white teacup, saucer, and spoon, wrapped them in the speckled tan fur of a Chinese gazelle, and titled this ensemble Object. In doing so, she transformed items traditionally associated with decorum and feminine refinement into a confounding Surrealist sculpture. Object exemplifies the poet and founder of Surrealism André Breton’s argument that mundane things presented in unexpected ways had the power to challenge reason, to urge the inhibited and uninitiated (that is, the rest of society) to connect to their subconscious—whether they were ready for it or, more likely, not.

While Oppenheim was not the only artist bringing everyday things into unlikely alliance in the 1930s, her fur-covered teacup is considered to be among the quintessential Surrealist objects. It caused a sensation when it was introduced to the public in 1936, first in Paris, at the inaugural exhibition of Surrealist objects organized by Breton, and then in New York, at The Museum of Modern Art’s show Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism. “The fur-lined-cup school of art,” ran a headline of the day, capturing the mixture of bemusement, offense, shock, and fascination Object provoked. Though many viewers could not comprehend how or why it constituted a work of art, by 1946, The Museum of Modern Art acquired the work.

“Art […] has to do with spirit, not with decoration,” Oppenheim once wrote, and a work as small and economical as Object has such outsized spirit because fur combined with a teacup evokes such a surprising mix of messages and associations. The fur may remind viewers of wild animals and nature, while the teacup could suggest manners and civilization. With its pelt, the teacup becomes soft, rounded, and highly tactile. It seems attractive to the touch, if not, on the other hand, to the taste: Imagine drinking from it, and the physical sensation of wet fur filling the mouth.

 Source here.

#FB00838

Email and photos from "Frog Applause" reader (madbutnotcrazy)

 Hello Teresa,

I'm glad you love my birds, they mean a lot to me. 

We have 6 adult birds, ranging in age from 6 years down to 1, and 7 babies currently in nests (6 and 1 with different parents).

One of our birds is more tame, she is Koko and is 18 months old.

We are hoping to tame a few of the babies when they are 4 weeks old (this weekend). This will involve feeding them 3 times per day using a liquid formula.

Our birds are all kakarikis (NZ parakeets). They are slightly bigger than budgies. If you look on Youtube for videos of baby kakarikis being fed it is cuteness overload.

I am sending you a couple of pictures of our adults (you can use them if you wish). The yellow bird is our oldest, she is 6.5 years, her name is Pikachu. There is also a photo of a pied male Pepe (5 yo), posing with a budgie for size comparison. 

The other pied bird is our friendliest, Koko (1.5 years old). 

And as a bonus I have included a picture of our wild rainbow lorikeets. There are 3 and they come to our garden every day for fresh pears (I am spending a fortune on pears!).

#FB00837

Forvo

Teresa Burritt (Happy_in_Missouri)

https://forvo.com/user/Happy_in_Missouri/

(I've mentioned before that I was fearful of people

making fun of my Missouri accent.)

Rotifer:

https://forvo.com/user/Rotifer/

One reader emailed me with this comment:

"...the registration process won't cooperate.  I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong; it asks for basic information but won't accept my input."

Has anyone else encountered a problem registering? Email me if you have any advice to pass on.

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Dorothea Tanning

 'La Truite au bleu' ('Poached Trout') (1952)

Dorothea Tanning with Max Ernst

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Tibetan sky burials

Sky burials (or celestial burials, as they are also called) are the burial rites of choice for the Tibetans. After a member of the community has died, the body is cut into pieces by a Burial Master, and then taken to a selected site, usually in an area of high elevation. This is because the corpse is then supposed to be eaten by vultures, who tend to congregate at higher altitudes. After the vultures have consumed the body, the belief is that they take the body away to heavens where the soul of the deceased person remains until they are ready for their next reincarnation. This practice is believed to have been practiced for as many as 11,000 years, but there is little written evidence, or physical evidence, due to the fact that the remains are ingested by the vultures or other animals.

More here.

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Paul Klee

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Essays by Tom Jones

cartoonist unknown

"I have always promised myself, whatever I write, I would try to never use the word “woke”.

“Woke” is such an infuriatingly handy word, though: the floating signifier du jour, a groupword for groupthink. This unchallenged cliche cutting a swath through the western world denotes in a neat, four-letter package the agglomeration of progressive utopianism, urbanite consensus, virtuous grandstanding and intimidating radicalism. Never tempted by moderation, by dignity or by restraint, the movement is the perpetual censor of the morals of the people, ably performing the role of enemies, judges and executioners to those who do not offer cultural fealty, its merit loudly celebrated by the doubtful evidence of its own applause.

Then the word itself became boomer bait, used by TV presenters in a frothing rage to condemn The Latest Thing You Should Be Outraged About. They expect the accusation enough to be proof of guilt. Being used and abused like this, the definition becomes obscure, a floating signifier for uninformed raging."

Read more here.

Another essay about English pubs here.

"It’s often said that you don’t realise what you’ve got until it’s gone. As more and more pubs ring their final last orders, more and more people are realising what an integral, irreplaceable part of Britain’s cultural heritage they are. The portrait of the nation Orwell conjured in “England Your England” wouldn’t have been believable, never mind complete, without “the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs”. Each one is as different as the forty-six million souls that comprised the England Orwell wrote of, a fragment — but a characteristic fragment — of the English scene. "

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