The Frog Bog Pontification from the pond. It's funny. Except when it's not. But it usually is. Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 0 0 7 1626

Articles from The Frog Bog

My Name is Zenoa Nehemiah, And I Will Be Eaten By A Shark 2007-08-17 08:16:11 This is disturbing.  I surfed on over to The Ironic Catholic a couple of days ago, and she had one of those “What kind of (fill in the blank) are you?” thingies.  Sometimes I don’t bother with those things, because I know myself pretty well, but since it had to do with finding out my Biblical name, and I’ve recently been reading about the history of The Middle East, I clicked on it.  Boy, was that a mistake.   Your Biblical Name Is… Zenoa Nehemiah  You will not live to see the end of times.  What’s Your Biblical Name? Not only am I apparently doomed, I am doomed to be eaten by a shark.  Lovely.    If you are a regular reader of this blog (and if you’re not, it’s time to take a long, hard look in the mirror),  you know that sharks are a source of fascination and gut-wrenching fear to me.  Yep, being eaten by a shark is pretty much my worst fear come true.  The other scary part is that I know I’ve been spendin ...

Spot The Difference Between Me and Brad Pitt 2007-08-14 23:19:23 It seems an appropriate time to write this post, since I am a virtual bachelor, having lost my wife to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows a couple of days ago.  About two or three times a year, I have a sweet, harmless dream that Jennifer Anniston and I are romantically involved.  I do not have dreams about other celebrities.  I do not know why I dream about Jennifer Anniston, since I’m not much of a movie person and I’ve only seen a few episodes of Friends.  It just seems to be one of those things.  Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to go potty, sometimes my left calf hurts and sometimes I dream about Jennifer Anniston.  No big deal.  Last night, I had a romantic dream.   A dream about… …Angelina Jolie.  What does this mean?  Now, people have been mixing me up with Brad Pitt for YEARS.  It’s easy to see why.  Take a look:                   Confusing, isn’t it?  One of these pictures is Brad Pitt ...

The Fearless Frog’s Stock Picks for August 13, 2007 2007-08-13 09:37:49 The background info about The Fearless Frog is here. The more recent background info about TFF’s patented Alphabetic Inversion and Chart Reversal Strategy is here. Today Credit Suisse upgraded TXT, so TFF is downgrading it.  TXT opened today at $113.78.  Keybanc downgraded DBD, so TFF is upgrading it.  DBD opened at $49.18.  The TFF rules state that if there is a palindromic stock symbol available, TFF has to use it.  So this week was a breeze, since the TFF research department didn’t have to go surfing around typing all of the up/downgraded stock symbols backwards on financial sites hoping for a match.  So we let them out early to go see The Simpsons Movie.  They loved it. The TFF Portfolio gained about .5 percent on The Wall Street Portfolio this week.  The complete numbers for the year so far, complete with closing prices from Friday the 10th, are here. - ...

A Post For Janice, Who is Trying To Undermine My Street Cred 2007-08-12 00:11:57 I should really be in bed. It’s way too late. But Janice of Twist and Skewer, which is here, is trying to challenge the street cred I claimed in the post I just put up like 10 minutes ago.  In part, she commented, “Uh, Mt. Clemens isn’t exactly Detroit…. ”  Check out the map below.  The area referred to as Mt. Clemens is located roughly one and three quarter inches from the area referred to as Detroit proper.  The reason these areas have different names is not because Mt. Clemens is not in Detroit (obviously it is because it’s in the yellow shaded part), it is only because lots of people live in little neighborhoods in this area.  Manhattan neighborhoods have names like “The Village” or “Midtown.”  Midtown and The Village are different place-lets located in the same city.  The Village is to Midtown as Detroit is to Mt. Clemens.         The next two maps show the location of Mt. Clemens and Detroit respectively ...

Please Pardon Our Appearance As We Upgrade This Site For Your Benefit 2007-08-11 23:03:47 No new post the last few days.  Since September is just around the corner, and it’s time for me to get back in the music teaching groove, I’ve been working on importing my music teacher site over here.  If you’re interested, it’s being moved to the cool new “Music” tab just under the header.   In other news, Beth and I watched the movie “Four Brothers” tonight, and, well, not so good.  It was about a hood with a heart of gold who gets revenge on his mother’s murderer, who, as it happened, had part of the city council and some of the police force in his pocket.  It sure painted a dreary picture of Detroit.  My wife pointed this out, and I reminded her that Detroit is my city of birth, so I think that she thinks I’m a lot tougher now than she did a couple of hours ago, which is cool.  - ...

100 Frogster Facts- Fact 6 2007-08-08 08:58:24 Fact numero seis about me is that I can give myself hiccups on cue.  There is a spot on the right side of my jawbone which, when rubbed, causes me to contract a case of the hiccups.  I have diagrammed the exact location on my niece Kira in the picture below.      I used a picture of Kira because she is better looking than I am.  The self-inflicted case of hiccups is a great party trick (as long as you are at a reasonably mild-mannered party, with soda and crackers; obviously there is a host of party tricks on display at frat houses and watering holes around the world that make mine pale in comparison, but this is, after all, a PG-rated blog.  The PG rating is currently under dispute, by the way, because I still contest that “poop” just isn’t a PG word).  The problem is that every time I shave, when I get to that spot, I get hiccups.  And it is a problem.  It is a problem because I use an old-fashioned safety razor, described here.  Hiccupping and shavi ...

The Fearless Frog’s Stock Picks for August 6, 2007 2007-08-06 09:50:51 The background info about The Fearless Frog is here. The more recent background info about TFF’s patented Alphabetic Inversion and Chart Reversal Strategy is here. The TFF Portfolio made a bit of a comeback this week, but still trails the Wall Street portfolio by 5.5 percent.  But TFF has some picks today that will turn this ship around.  Today Credit Suisse upgraded SPG, which opened at $86.98, so TFF is downgrading GPS, which opened at $16.68.  JMP downgraded CSE, which opened at $18.58, so TFF is upgrading ESC, which opened at $24.80.  In another interesting development, Bear Stearns upgraded Tenet Healthcare.  Tenet Healthcare.  A healthcare stock.  The ticker?  THC.  For a healthcare stock.   A HEALTHCARE stock symbol happens to be the SAME LETTERS as the commonly used term for that part of marijuana (tetrahydrocannabinol) that makes you feel at one with the universe when you’re at a Dead show and they play “Eyes of the World.”  I&rsquo ...

Top 5 Pizza Topping Combinations 2007-08-04 01:23:05 Still having a bit of trouble sleeping, and when I don’t sleep, I like to work out meditate eat.  I like to eat the things I listed here. Regarding the whole pizza thing, just in case, I wanted to make it clear that I am not monopizzatic, but enjoy plenty of variety on my pizza, as evidenced by my list of the top 5 pizza topping combinations below: 1.  Pepperoni, mushroom, garlic. 2.  Mushroom, garlic, pepperoni. 3.  Garlic, pepperoni, mushroom. 4.  Pepperoni, garlic, mushroom. 5.  Plain (because, as the Italians say, Non si vive di solo pizza uno (Man does not live by one type of pizza alone)).   - ...

A Piece of Cartilage to Pick With Shark Week 2007-08-02 15:25:43 I would have a bone to pick with Shark Week, but, as we all know, sharks are not bony fishes.   It’s Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, one of the few times each year I am motivated to actually decide to turn on the TV at a certain time.  I’m fascinated by sharks.  I just searched this site and I have 7 posts that mention sharks in some way.  I love Shark Week.  A couple of years ago when they had Shark Week in 3-D I was the first down to my local Discovery Store to get my free 3-D glasses.   I used to tape Shark Week every year, though during our last move I got rid of about 12 years of Shark Week videotapes, because I’d already watched each of them roughly a thousand times.  I wish I hadn’t because I’d like to do some comparing.  At the end of EVERY Shark Week episode EVERY YEAR there’s some famous person in the world of marine biology or the Discovery Channel world saying, “Sharks aren’t after humans and most attacks a ...

The Fearless Frog’s Stock Picks for July 30, 2007 2007-07-30 10:47:21 A few more people have been stopping by The Frog Bog lately.  In response to the “What is with all these weird stock market posts?” question, I offer the following explanation: A number of years ago I traded options on the floor of The Pacific Stock Exchange (we called it ”The P-Coast”).  It was JUST LIKE the end of the movie Trading Places in the orange juice futures pit, with less compassion and more cussing.  I learned a little about the stock market during those days.  The scoop is as follows: 1.  In the olden days, rich people who knew what was happening before everyone else shared this information with their best pals and they all got richer.  2.  Certain other people frowned on this, so then the rich people stopped sharing the information with their pals and the rich people got richer by themselves. 3.  The government frowned on THIS, so then the rich people had to figure out ways to take advantage of their inside information in a less transp ...

A Victory Over The Simpsonizer, Or “It’s Alive!” 2007-07-27 10:03:17 The Simpsonizer!  Hah!  You’d have to be a complete geek to sit there refreshing the screen every minute or so for goodness knows how many hours until you finally got in and uploaded a picture it actually liked.  Then there would be the waiting for your computer to spit you back out as a Simpson.  As if life’s not short enough!  As if there aren’t thousands of things we could be doing to make this world a better place!  What kind of a person would go through the torture of The Simpsonizer?  What sort of person would wait until the rest of the world was asleep to try to successfully get in?  What sort of person would hold a camera up and take 25 pictures of their face to try to get one with enough contrast for the computer reader whatsits?  What sort of person would spend that kind of time just to see what some silly computer program thinks they look like? Well, me.               I think it’s not bad.  It really was like 2 or 3 in the ...

The Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, Or A Desperate Housewife’s Best Friend 2007-07-25 09:13:33 I am a housewife.  Don’t think that I can’t be a housewife just because I’m a guy- we housewives have to put up with enough annoying comments (oh, so you don’t work?) as it is, so don’t go getting all chauvinistic on me.  And, until recently, I was quite desperate indeed.  I was desperate because stains were ruining my life.  Here a stain, there a stain, everywhere a stain stain!  My life was stained.  Juice stains, coffee stains, and most of all bicycle tire stains from carrying my bike up and down the stairs and banging it into the walls.  It was dreadful.   I can’t bear to think about those dark days!  I was looking at the world through stain-colored glasses.  Oh, the horror! But then I found my savior in the form of a musclebound bald man with one gold earring.  The man who would solve all my problems.  The man who would remove my stain-colored glasses and allow me to see beauty, color and, most of all, cleanliness.  Mr. Clean.   ...

The Fearless Frog’s Stock Picks for July 23, 2007 2007-07-23 10:24:07 The background info about The Fearless Frog is here. The more recent background info about TFF’s patented Alphabetic Inversion and Chart Reversal Strategy is here. Today Citigroup downgraded KWK, which opened at $44.80, so TFF is upgrading it, as it must, according to TFF’s Law Of Palindromic Tickers. This states that if a stock symbol CAN be reversed, it must be, and has nothing whatsoever to do with TFF being too lazy to sift through all of the upgraded/downgraded stocks to find a reversable ticker.  Lehman upgraded HBC, which opened at $93.35, so TFF is downgrading CBH, which opened at $37.01. TFF caught a bit of a break this week, which helped to fuel the .75 percent beatdown the TFF portfolio administered on the Wall Street portfolio.  Someone in The TFF Data Entry Department entered an opening price for SEH last week that was four dollars lower than the actual opening price.  Trust us, this individual has been terminated with extreme exuberance. The complete ...

For Whom Do The Deathly Hallows Howl? 2007-07-20 18:23:01 I read the first Potter book, but none of the others.  I really enjoy the movies, though.  Usually, I’m the other way around.  But since the final installment is going on sale tomorrow at midnight plus change, I figured I’d make my Potter Prediction.  J.K. Rowling stated that two main characters would kick the bucket in the final book.  Those two characters will be… will be… will be… Ron Weasley and Lord Voldemort.  Remember, you read it here first.  - ...

The New York Times Made Me More Stupider 2007-07-20 09:19:49 First of all, it should be pointed out that my grammaticals is goodly and my spelling is lejenderry.  So it’s not like I’m some kind of a maroon! It’s really not The New York Times’ fault.  There’s a movie called Wordplay, which is a great flick.  It’s a documentary about puzzles in general and The Times Crossword in particular.  It’s about people who are complete puzzle geeks, people who put together puzzles, the history of The Times Crossword and the hate mail Will Shortz, the puzzle’s editor, receives.  They trace one particular puzzle from origin to publication and show people like Jon Stewart, Bill Clinton, Mike Mussina and The Indigo Girls solving it.  It also shows the triumph and tragedy of The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.  I liked it, and my enjoyment of it was the seed that sprouted my now blossoming unsmartness.  We get The New York Times on Sunday.  That’s not actually true.  We’re SUPPOSE ...