Worse things can happen to people!

Mimi started learning a new language some time ago. She thought she had to, it would make her life much easier. Big mistake! Huge! She discovered that age has on her the same effect, that blond hair has on Kelly Bundy: the more she learned of the new language, the more she forgot of the ones she spoke already, including her mother tongue. Her linguistic capacity is finite.

Roufa, meanwhile, set out bravely to learn the guitar. He thinks in notes now. But he can't write in notes.

In short, we lost it. We got sloppy and helpless. Our prepositions got slippery. It could take some time to sort things out.

--

This banana-not is one year old. A rotten banana? Sven will wear a funny hat to celebrate.

--

Dear readers, we've had great fun with this banana-not. But now, we have to take a break and go for fresh fruit.

We will continue to look at the world in perpetual astonishment and the same we hope for you too. We will continue the trip in both marvel and disgust. And silliness.

We love sweet, marvelous, talented, silly, and disgusted persons.

All this is not to say that we shall vanish along with the fruit! We will continue to visit you, because we love the company. And we'll always enjoy comments and emails.

Don't forget to visit Sven now and then! He only pretends he doesn't care!

Seven Up

I am a little stick of dynamite / wishing you'd die / wishing I'd die / until I found you / and there was a place we could call home. / Cute miss sensibility / high on big ideas / depressed / and deprived / until we found a place we could call home. / Under our twinkling star.


Not so fast, I can't keep up; Then you go ahead; OK.

Air

I will not mock you, I will not trick you, I will not poison you, but I will serve you the best meal I can prepare for the life of me. I know what I know only for you to savor it.

Still looking for the meaning of life? Here it is!

--

Still looking to resolve the financial crisis? We'll tell you what:
Shut down the markets for a couple of weeks and let everybody clear their heads. If a whole country (be it Belgium) could function impeccably for months without a government, surely the world will not end if we stop trading air for a while - and the talking heads stop airing their ignorance like a trophy.

We, for two, sold everything in time, and spent it all too. And we bought the best there is!

--


--

Weekend, friends. Airing time. Time for music, time for Rainbows and Hope. Thanks to our coffee- and chocolate-loving friends, Bimmy, Obi-Sven, Frank, who took the time to respond to last week's quiz. It's not a school, so responding is enough. The correct answers have been posted, see comments!

I kissed a boy (and I liked it)

It is that kind of day again, when Jim the schoolteacher (not to be confused with one-legged Jim the fat pigeon) would concede defeat in the morning battle against fatigue and laziness and the moody blues and, between sips of hot black coffee, he would devise the following task for his students -- or is it our readers?

Let us play: Who said what?

Here are the Quotes:

1. The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.

2. The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its economists will have its thinking done by snobs and its economy run by morons.

3. I detest war. It spoils armies.

And here are the Voices in Time:

a. Grand Duke Constantine of Russia, c.1820
b. Thucydides, 5th century B.C.
c. Tentacles, 2008.

Can you match the Quotes and the Voices? The correct answers will be posted next week!

--

So you think men and women are the same? We dare you to try and sell a producer the following idea for a song and promotion video:

a young, masculine, straight guy surrounded by gorgeous, masculine, straight men at some kind of fraternity party singing:

I kissed a boy and I liked it
I hope my girlfriend won't mind it!

Actually, it might sell! After the Metrosexual and the vastly underestimated Asexual, please welcome the Antisexual!

Raising awareness of the extinction of the Real Man, Ladies! Another brilliant idea, RTGML20081002.

P.S. Does "I kissed a guy" sound better than "I kissed a boy"? Please let us know! You opinion counts!

Humanity is Underrated

... just balancing things.

--

At last: Women have gradually and definitively fulfilled one of their greatest dreams, perhaps the greatest: conquered the world with their humps and turned men into their private impotent clowns. If you have been following the MTV VMAs the past few years, you will agree with us. Where have all the men gone?

--

Super frogtastic financial opportunity for all you programming freaks out there! Big bucks to be made! Here is the brilliant RTGML idea that will make you rich and famous! We expect generous thank-you gifts.

We have a project to outsource.

Suppose you've sent an email message without thinking. Everybody has! You clicked "send", and before you could begin to realize the magnitude of your blunder, the message has already arrived at its destination! Everything goes so fast with email! Wouldn't it be great to have a little code in your mailer, which you can send to the same person and it would delete or scramble the latest message that you sent to them? Or you could even customize it, have it delete all of your messages with a particular subject, and so on. As long as the message has not been downloaded yet to all kinds of devices yet, problem solved!

Patent no RTGML20080924.

Shoe Porn

We thought we were life-respecting people, until we slowly came to realize what that truly means. Apparently, it means to plunge into the Darwin soup and pray you are fit enough to float; take care of your own, and prey on the rest, or let them die; (just as long as you don’t say Darwin, that's a sin.)

Apparently, the Hunter is the Son of Life; takes it as it comes. Plowing the earth and grafting trees constitute hubristic intervention. Nature has given us plenty of animals to shoot.

Those retarded farmers. Those villagers, they love their animals more than they love their own daughters, who they’d kill for the crime of falling in love.

Language, like statistics, can prove anything.

We stand corrected.

--

Has somebody called you a loser? Insult them right back:

You are not even a loser; because amongst losers, you are the winner.

--

Our streak of brilliant ideas continues!

What do women love unconditionally and above all and couldn’t have enough of, around them, on them, and on the computer screen? Shoes!

And men? Sex! Naked women! So the cliché goes and so Internet traffic patterns confirm! So if you want to see you revenue sky-rocket, here is your business: Shoe Porn. Women wearing nothing but beautiful shoes, doing things to each other. Both sexes would be delighted. They could even start doing nice things to each other too.

And if you really have to give the women in your business tattoos, if you really, really must, this is what you will give them: there on their lower back, where the tasteless would carve dead-black wings, you would give them a pinkish, fluffy-looking bunny tail!

Patent No RTGML20080915.

Home is where Sven is

For the hard-working people we are, we've praised laziness and vacations and easy money quite a lot through this bblogg. That’s because we can appreciate them fully!

What’s the alternative? Do nothing else but praise work? I love work! I can sit and watch people work for hours!

We are back from our lovely vacation, dear readers. As some of you know, we’ve been back for a week already. But Frog Ted needed some time to sort out the photos. We still need some time to bond with Sven properly, so we’ll now give the mike to our Frog Ted, who can’t wait to tell you all about his adventures down in Greece.

-



Hey friends! It’s me, Frog Ted!

I followed Roufa and Mimi to Athens and Ancient Olympia! I have some fun pictures to show you from our trip! I have to warn you though that I didn’t take any pictures in archaeological sites, because 1) I had to buy a ticket to enter, but 2) I could not because I am not human, so 3) I was hiding in Mimi’s bag.

--

Here I am, on my way to the airport! The sun is shining already!



We've just landed in Athens and Metaxa is already beckoning!



Here I am at the noisy KTEL station, from where coach buses leave to the farthest corners of Greece! And that includes a couple of islands! Don't ask me how they do that, perhaps they are amphibian buses?





In five hours Roufa will be lighting a cigarette in Ancient Olympia! No, silly, not with sunlight!



Peloponnesos, here I come!

The sea is so blue! You think it's bad for my fur?



Ghost Frog!



The best thing to fight the morning heat, and the high-noon heat, and the afternoon heat, is not Metaxa, but cold coffee, with plenty of ice: espresso freddo (left), or nescafe frappe (right), which is a half-century-old Greek invention. You can even have them without milk! That's great because cream and milk can weigh you down in the heat! You can find these things everywhere you go for 2-4 euros!



You can even find miniature ice-cream cones at the local pastry shop. Perfect for my size, Mimi told me. (What am I punished for, again, Mimi?)



I gave this new friend of mine Sven's email address.



Back in Athens, more fans of Sven!



These gals were organizing a Sven's bride competition!!



Tentacles the Wise (but Reclusive) Octopus is very highly regarded here. Take a closer look...



See?



We spent many days in Athens. Here I pose in Plaka, the old neighborhood at the foot of Acropolis! We had delicious food at the square behind me!



And here I am in Glyfada, a seaside suburb a few km south! You can see the St Constantine church on the right and behind me you can see the FNAC! Where Mimi and Roufa browsed books and DVDs, as usual. I think they are composing a world map of book and CD stores. Mimi was very happy to find the CD-single of Nickelback's Rockstar here at a bargain price! She says it's the “best, most feel-good song ever”. They've posted the lyrics on Banana's Appendix. They're nuts. (They'll give me miniature ice-cream if they read this.)


Now all this has made me very very hungry! Some baklava with kaimaki ice-cream on the side sounds perfect!

Before I go, here's a nice video we shot in the center of Athens, as the city bus was approaching the National Garden! There's some antiquity for you!

Going for Octopus

Here is another tip for staying young: being perpetually astonished!

And another one: have younger people visit you now and then.

And here is how to survive them.

In fact, it's been great fun having the nephew around. We told him we didn't have Internet in the house, so he had to make do with all our daily routines, from the grocery store to watching Seinfeld on DVD. We selected episodes of Seinfeld very carefully for him and now he is a fan! The Pony Remark. The Whirlpool. The Soup Nazi. And so on. What other 16-year-old has such life-changing opportunities?

We also watched The Long Way Round with him (Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman around the world on motorcycles). Two episodes at a time (three, eventually), because he became addicted. The slapstick of that series turned out to be perfect entertainment for him (the Mongolian ball soup; Claudio's Russian haircut; the guy who shot a Kalashnikov as a welcome gesture; Ewan the Manimal. And so on, and so on.)

As for going to bed with the chickens? Not a problem. He arrived exhausted from his family vacation and a long trip with his friends. In our place he's had to wake up early in the morning like we do, since he's been sleeping in our living-room, so he stayed tired. He begged to sleep. Problem solved.

We did let him drag us to numerous shoe shops. Shoe shops? Yes, shoe shops. This generation, they are worse than Carrie Whatsername from Shoes and the Clitty. He was on the phone for a half hour the other day, trying to convince his mom that he needed more football shoes. We learned a great deal about the negotiating might of a teenager.

---

And now, your banana moment of zen:

Condoleezza Rice said:

“This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can invade its neighbor, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it. Things have changed.” There will be consequences!

A real journalist would have asked:
Can you be more specific, ma'm??

Her Russian colleague Mr Lavrov declared:

“We understand that this current Georgian leadership is a special project of the United States,” he said, “but one day the United States will have to choose between defending its prestige over a virtual project or real partnership with Russia.”

What can we say? Indeed, if you can be partners with the real macho, who gives a dime about the shitty little balalaikas in between?

--

Leave of Absence #5

Dear readers, it is time for our long deserved vacation. This bblogg is going to take a long break! We are going to have ourselves baked in Greece, the birthplace of Tentacles the Wise Octopus, as well as his retarded brother Tentacles Tentacles, his cousin Testicles of Sypholos Island, and Icicles and Bicycles the conjoined twins of Mount Colymbos! But don't you worry! Come September we will be back with many silly pictures of Frog Ted in Athens! We'll try to convince Tentacles to pose with him, but we can't promise.

The billion dollar question

Here we are again, and here you are again, in our cozy little corner, in the backstreets of this big, noisy, overinflated cyberjungle. That such wonderful singularities can emerge from such chaos is astonishing. Singular friendships. Quantum billiards.

Welcome! Banana split, anyone? Colorful cocktails? Refreshing smoothies?

Life can be sweet.

So let's chill out and dream away...

--

They say that great wealth allows people to be exactly who they really are. If you had a billion Eurodollar pounds, what would you do?

For example, would you still want to have a 24/7 job?

Or would you – for example -- build your dream house (small enough to find your spouse in it) some place nice? And fly your favorite family and friends over once in a while? And pay their Internet and phone bills so they don't have any excuse for not keeping in touch? And the rest of the time enjoy whatever it is you really enjoy and makes you happy? Yes, you have to update your investment portfolio now and then to make sure you can keep it up. But otherwise, really, you can do anything you like! You can even do things people get paid to do! But solely cause you like them! Go canoing. Read. Solve equations. Travel. Have five children. Buy five more. Raise them yourself!! And twenty dogs! Knit. Cook. Go shopping. In Paris. Learn the piano. Write books. Songs. Publish them. Blog, if you must. Feed the children. Save the world. It's up to you!

There are people who see things differently, of course. Typically CEOs of gigantic companies with creative accountants. And talentless, vain superstars with no taste, not even in stylists and interior decorators. There are people who must have more billions. More phony fans. People who just can't quit bossing people around.

Poor them.

They say if you are poor, despite your best intentions and hardest efforts to find a decent day's work, you really don't deserve being poor. Isn't that right? Well then if you got all the riches in the world and you don't know what the heck to do with them, you are really not worth it either.

--

For one week, starting today, our silly and charming teenage nephew will be visiting us. Finally! A third human in our house! We will have to strike a delicate balance between inappropriate silly behavior, which is a daily occurrence in our household, and what appears (to the untrained eye) to be the dull life of two married people who regularly go to bed earlier than the chickens do.

How did you think we stay young? See? No wrinkles!

The secret to our gorgeous, youthful looks and spirits is very simple indeed: good sleep, delicious food, plenty of water, vitamins, our daily abs, music, movies, books, silliness, using our legs, and sun protection SPF 50 (20 in the winter). Elementary.

And coffee. And no alcohol. Except when we have cyberguests.

A new round of Blue Margaritas then!

SvenStadium

Relativity is not for octopuses.

Tentacles the Wise Octopus of Sopholos rarely looks up in the sky. But when he does, his disdain for the Theory of Relativity takes the better of him. He observes:

They say that if my vision was infinitely sharp and I waited long enough, I could look far into the sky and see the back of my head. If I turned around, I would still see the back of my head. Left and right and in between, the back of my head is ahead of me. I am surrounded by the back of my head. This can't be right.

And who can argue?

And the reason is allegedly that space is curved. So if I walk straight ahead I will arrive here. Not in my lifetime! Not on these tentacles!

Certainly not.

If space is curved, then time must be curved too; and the arrow of time is bended and taking us back in time!

He has a theory as to why there is more matter than antimatter in the Universe:

... assuming that the Big Bang did happen, antimatter moved backwards in time and into a backward Universe!

Greek philosophers are not what they used to be.

--

The first journalists arrived in China to cover the Olympic Games. Only to discover that their Internet activity is being monitored. These people are responsible for keeping us informed and they had to google “how to get to Tien An Men Square from Hilton Hotel” to find out that – if you can believe it! -- Internet in China is censored! We don't have enough leaden cucumbers to offer them.

We do have a very informative article to recommend.

Speaking of the Olympic Games, we have a suggestion as to what the London Olympic Stadium for the 2012 Olympics should look like.

This is Bird's Nest, the Olympic Stadium in Beijing that looks like a Bird's Nest:




And this is our suggestion for the 2012 Olympics:

Empty Nest Syndrome

As you all know, Marina the Nut lives and works in Germany, Europe, Third Rock from the Sun.

So many of her co-workers are Cancers and Leos, apparently, that for the past two or three weeks there has been cake almost every day on the occasion of somebody's birthday. They've been pulling a Laney on her! (That's short for Elaine Benes, obviously.)

Not that she minds!

Anyway, yesterday morning she received this e-mail from a colleague, sent to the whole floor:

Subject: Can it be true??

Yes it can!
Cake today at 3 p.m. at the usual place.

By 3p.m. the following sign had appeared hanging on the door to the “usual place”:

Cake we can believe in!

Who said they didn't have a sense of humor?

--

So the price of oil has been going up and up and up and tumbling down and up and down. Ask any smart-ass like us and they will tell you that, obviously, there are forces at work using aggressive speculation to push some players out of the market and create some kind of powerful elite or whatever. Nothing to do with real-time supply and demand. So now we told you and the world is smarter. So what? So what?

Can we do anything? No. Can you? We didn't think so.

Does this sound uncharacteristically depressing?

Oh, don't mind our moods. Something else is bothering us, really.

Nine months of labor on this blog to make Sven famous and... voilà. Mission accomplished. As you know, he has his own blog now. He's out there on his own! He doesn't need us anymore! ***sniff***sigh*** We need a purpose.

Should we give a golden apple to George W. Bush for saying Wall Street was a binge-drinker in a bad hangover? When he thought the world was not listening? Naahhh.. That would be like giving U2 a leaden cucumber for a second-rate bootleg recording.

Blessed

Blessed are the meek. And the heterosexuals.

What? He didn't say that? Everybody says it's in the Bible! Perhaps in different words!

Unsure, we asked Tentacles of Sopholos, the wise octopus, for his opinion.

Tentacles's pipe blew and puffed. He gave us his oracle,

The Bible is the interpretation of the Bible.

We looked at each other. Mimi spoke up. And let me guess, God is the interpretation of God and a tree is the color of plants.

Tentacles blinked his tiny eyes very slowly. That sounds more like Tentacles Tentacles, he said, referring, of course, to his brother the cretin, who always says things twice, but in different words.

Then he put out his pipe and tip-toed away, mysteriously.

Tentacles Tentacles, who had been eavesdropping all along, popped up and said.

I guess what my brother is trying to say, what he wishes for you to understand, is that the Bible is more than a list of rules, a collection of guidelines. It's ...

a loud splash interrupted our exchange, and thankfully so.

--

Tentacles took a dive into the deep blue sea, where secret treasures go on glimmering in the dark.

We would like to thank our Mom...

Kirsten says:

“I am an only child. The whole world revolves around me. This is a fact.”

Well, we are happy to reassure her that it doesn't show (in a bad way) on her very entertaining blog, the SoccerMom Files!

We, on the other hand, happen to be the youngest children of our respective families. In accordance to Uncle Kurt's theory, based on his personal experience as the youngest child in his own family, we just aim to entertain. We are used to not
being taken seriously. Not all people like to be entertained, though, or not by us anyway. At the end of his days, poor Kurt was lamenting that he had no family left to entertain. As for us, our respective families live far away – or we live far away from them. So we entertain each other silly on a daily basis.

But now it seems we have managed to entertain Mom Kirsten too! As we announced last Wednesday, she gave us an award!!

And what a beautiful one too!


by Arte y Pico.

OK, here comes the copy-paste part (the weird grammar is not ours):
Rules:
1) You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award, creativity, design, interesting material, and also contributes to the blogger community, no matter of language.
2) Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his or her blog to be visited by everyone.
3) Each award-winning, has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her or him the award itself.
4) Award-winning and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of “Arte y pico”blog , so everyone will know the origin of this award.
5) To show these rules.

--

And now comes our part!

We are very fond of all the blogs we list in our blogorama – see right side of this page, not to mention a couple of others that we just haven't gotten to include yet. So this is a bit tricky.


--

First we'd like to acknowledge a couple of finalists that didn't make it, but we love them nonetheless.

Frank Widman, from Simple Man Simple Thoughts, for his excellent other blog Strange News for a Coffe Break Chuckle. Don't be turned off by the ad posts now and then, there's some hilarious news in there! Go look for them!

Our dear Monica, and her Quarks and Bosons we'd love to honor, but she keeps a low profile to protect her privacy. Charming!

Jeannette (her doctor calls her Lynn) still eats Spaghetti and she is beyond nuts. Very silly, pointless blog that promises exactly what it offers: Jeannette Eats Spaghetti... then blogs about Whatever. You have to love her, but why?

--

And the winners are:

ONE: We can not not give an award to FrogBlogDogLog!!!, by Bimmy the Bookish and Co., which happens to be an excellent blog for children, which we still are, according to our families. Now you have to understand that Bimmy may not be able to follow all of the rules above, because the blog is read by underage children too, who are not supposed to surf around following links all over the place. So Bimmy may choose to comply with the rules selectively, or not comply at all, or transfer the whole procedure to her adult blog, the Reading Hero, which we could have awarded as well.

Recent post example.

By the way, Bimmy, something tells us you might enjoy the Doodle Week project we just found out about!


TWO: Next comes Catpaw, the angry cat from Toronto, because we like grumpy cats, even when they are not grumpy any more. And we hope he will not disappear again, like he did last January! Cats tend to do that...

Recent post example.

THREE: Another one who does not have a lot of time to blog these days, because she's found a real job, is Jillian, the Verbose Slacker and slacker no more. Her blog JillianApproved is very popular already, but it can be so stupid, we really have to. To be perfectly honest, this is also a bribe for her to approve us.

Recent post example.

FOUR: Speaking of bribes, how could we forget LordLikely! We hope to always be granted access to your lavish lounge, your Obscene Magnificence!

(Any post will do as an example.)

FIVE: So we have two Brits, one American, and one Canadian, so let us switch to a different language and give our fifth Arte y Pico Award to Lotofagus, and his Greek blog Land of Oblivion, so that he doesn't forget us with all those lotuses he's been eating. He too tends to be grumpy and we'd like to cheer him up. Actually, he is on vacation right now so he will not hear the good news for a while. Hopefully he will not forget to come back.

Recent post example.

--

Hope you'll enjoy some of our picks! Well, thanks again to all our readers, and as Lord Likely would say,

Toodle-pip!

And have a very nice weekend!

You look glassy-eyed!

Oh, some good news.

--

First of all, Ingrid Betancourt, the French lady and former Colombian presidential candidate, who had been kidnapped by FARC rebels and was held hostage for years in the Colombian jungle, is free!

Along with her, three American paramilitary contractors and ex-marines were rescued. These adventurous freelance exterminators held a press conference to let us know that the FARC rebels are Terrorists. Thanks for sharing this, fellas.

Well, that's it? No details, no juice, no insight? Where is the story?

These excerpts from the diary of a Dutch woman, who joined the FARC rebels to serve a good cause (oh the Age of Ignorance...), are precious.

Also precious is the silly movie chronicling the adventures of Woody Allen as he joins the ranks of a similar group, decades ago, for a good cause of his own – namely, to impress a girl. What movie? Bananas, of course!

--

More good news!

Sven has his own blog! Thanks to Bimmy, Frog the Dog, and Co! Are you ready for his frogtastic adSventures?

--

And more great news! We've been awarded an award! Thank you, Soccer Mom! This is the related post. We'll post the award and pass it on in a couple of days. For the moment, you will excuse us. So much to do, so much to read, so much to write... As we were telling Bimmy the other day... We really gotta run. Luckily we don't have to literally run. Do not read and run.

What do they smoke under the sea?

Tentacles of Sopholos, the wise octopus, discovers a new phenomenon:

--

What are an octopus's tentacles? Are they limbs? If so, are they arms or are they legs? Can't they be both? This is obviously a case of arm-leg degeneracy!

Or are they fingers? Or toes? They can't be fingers or toes. (If they were, what happened to the other two?)

--

Roufa asks: If you dig a hole to the other side of the Earth, at some point around the center of the Earth you will have to turn upside down, right?

Tentacles warns:

If you dig a hole to the other side of the Earth, you will have all your questions answered by a giant moronic octopus. Beware of the giant moronic octopus!

--

We felt like pulling his arm-legs. So we asked him: If you work out in the rain, do you have to shower afterwards?
He said there was no rain in the sea.
There's no soap either! observed Mimi. Roufa insisted: Really, isn't rain water the purest you can get? For humans anyway?
...And fish stink! continued Mimi. But only dead fish!

Tentacles said: You are silly, all right. Then tip-toed away on all eight toeless tentacles.



[-Are you the Wise Man on the Mountain?
-What mountain?]

Tentacles' tentacles

You have seen the devastation caused by natural disaster...
Witnessed the atrocities of war...
Listened to world leaders.. and leaders who want to rule the world.
You have heard from men of God...
and men who kill in God's name.
Gazed into eyes filled with hope
and seen hearts consumed with hopelessness.
Together we have followed the facts around the world!
Come with me! And see where the story takes us next!

This is, more or less, how Christiane Amanpour advertises her show on CNN. With such a record, honestly, we are too scared to follow Christian Amanpour. If Christian Amanpour is within arm's length from you right now, you must be in a rather unenviable situation. Unless you are a man of God.

Christiane Amanpour has been to North Korea and to the very tower that they have just destroyed, the cooling tower of a nuclear reactor! She has been filmed there! We have watched her interesting item, chronicling the visit of the New York Philharmonic to Pyong Yang, not long ago.

You think the North Koreans are getting rid of the tower to show the world they are not pursuing a nuclear program? Yes, but no, but yes, ... but No: It's because Christiane Amanpour has visited it, and obviously that's bad luck. Don't give us the evils!

It's a cement construction. They can complete a brand new tower before the dust settles of the old one's demolition.

--

Forget Christiane. A much more enjoyable way to explore world news is, we've just discovered, Spiegel International's on-line quizzes! We recommend, for example, “Plastic Obama and the Lost Gnomes” and “Something's Burning in Germany”.

--

Next on cecinestpasunebanane: Tentacles' tentacles.

Who is Tentacles?

Tentacles is an ancient Greek philosopher, who happens to be an octopus. Don't confuse him with Tentacles Tentacles, who is his brother. Tentacles Tentacles is just an idiot who likes to say everything twice in different words (he didn't get to choose his own name). He believes it makes him sound clever and lends him an aura of authority. He's right.

Grrrrrrrl Power!

You've probably heard about the so-called pregnancy pact: rumor has it that a number of schoolgirls, from Gloucester High in Massachusetts, had “a pact” to get pregnant as soon as possible and help each other raise the babies! The rumor was sparked by the observation that the number of pregnancies among the school's students had quadrupled the past year, and that, according to the school nurse, the news of the positive pregnancy-test results were invariably received with triumphant smiles and high-fives!

And everyone's shocked now. Why? Oh why? Bravo to the girls! What they are effectively saying to their parents is “guess what, if you won't give me a little brother/sister, I'll just go out and get one myself!”. Not to mention: “More labor hands to secure your retirement plan, ma!”. So save the drama!

Now that's pure girl power. No boy could ever do this!

--

Our Frog Ted is participating in the Frogjob Week(s) on FrogBlogDogLog! Where he shows how he helped prepare soup for Mimi when she was sick. His story and pictures have just been published! See their post of June 25 and the very special Frog Chef page!

Frog Ted's next assignment will be to help us raise a puppy properly. We are going breeder-hunting next month! So he's reading all about it, as you can see.



Yes, of course, he's a dog, but that doesn't mean he knows how to raise a puppy! All those people who read about babies, haven't they been babies themselves?

Isn't it amazing that you need a license to do virtually anything, but they let you walk out the hospital (if you've been there in the first place) with a new born, just a couple of days after delivery, with nothing but best wishes and the bill?

There's something about Sonia

Our collection of quirky or otherwise interesting performances of Sonny (Bobby Hebb) is expanding.

The Mexican movie Sin ton ni Sonia is a silly movie. Not as silly as Aaltra. But like Aaltra, it features its own unique version of Sonny! It's actually called Sonia and it's in Spanish. We were very happy to find it on You Tube! Here is the full version (and a cropped one), with fragments from the movie!

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The following is from As good as it gets, where Jack Nicholson plays a grumpy, obsessive-compulsive author of romantic novelas:

Smitten fan: How do you write women so well?
Author: I think of a man... then take away reason and accountability.

One half of this banana is female and nevertheless found this very very funny.

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Back to Sin ton ni Sonia, where our hero, Orlando, has been pursuing and stalking René for days and nights (and tequilas) in a row. She finally leaves her steady ex-boyfriend and before long Orlando and René are making hot, passionate love in a hotel room. As soon as they're done, though, he turns his back to her and crashes for hours. She is not pleased of course and when he wakes up she starts complaining: Yada yada yada, “I just needed a hug!” she concludes. His eyes still trying to adjust to the light, and his brain to reality, he delivers this hilariously honest protest: “I'm sorry, I haven't slept for days! I need a hug too, you know!”

But who's Sonia? Sonia is Orlando's steady ex-girlfriend. He doesn't stand for a lot of reason or accountability either.

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Somebody we know very well has been going through an early midlife crisis:

“I am a blond trapped in a brunette's skin. I am an idiot, burdened with a nerd's brain!”

She should be glad that having your hair dyed is rather standard procedure and does not require a psychiatrist's evaluation.

In at least one state in the U.S., though, it might require the husband's approval, since legally the hair belongs to him. Neither of us can recall which state(s), unfortunately. Can anyone help us?

Well, it's not urgent. Save the research for the office bore-out and enjoy your weekend!

Sven the Cactus and Lenny the Wise

Great news!

Sven the Cactus is now also Sven the Cartoon! Sven C: such a Cool name! Here he is, the new star on FrogBlogDogLog!!!. If you ever need wise advice, on any topic, you can ask us, or you can ask Sven the Wise Old Cactus. He has his own e-mail address and his own blogger profile, thanks to our dear friends from Team Frog.

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Yes, we know, it has been Father's Day, and everybody's wounded.
As everybody knows, though,
Blood is thicker margarine than grease.

Is Sven C as old and wise as Lenny? The one who's responsible for the slanted words above? (That's Leonard Cohen, of course. But when you've known him as long as we have, you call him Lenny.)

Here's a little something from Lenny, ideal to repeat like a mantra when you feel there's somebody wishing you harm:

So you can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll
I'm very sorry, baby, it doesn't look like me at all

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This is Lenny savoring his coffee:



... and his banana:


He must be a fan.

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Mimi is feeling a lot better. Many thanks to our Team Frog friends at the beach house for the e-card, which definitely helped! As did Roufa's soups, of course.

To suffer in style

Where have we been? Where we still are, most of the time: Mimi in bed and Roufa in the kitchen. Mimi is sick and Roufa is busy preparing a variety of soups for her.

Although she feels lousy, Mimi gets up every morning, has a decent breakfast, and then a shower, before crawling back under the sheets. She finds being dirty and sick a hundred times worse than plain sick. She'd rather stay sick longer, if that's what it takes to stay clean. She's such a silly kitten.

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Have you ever been given advice on how to suffer in style? If not, worry not, it will come. Just keep on reading lifestyle magazines. What can it possibly mean, to suffer in style? It must mean something photogenic: Think film-noir heroine. And then the question arises. What would you prefer: to suffer in style or to be happy out of style? That's not a valid dilemma. If you can stay stylish while suffering, surely you can keep it up when you are happy too.

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Too much soup.

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And now, a little exercise. Let's try find alternatives to the famous piece of wisdom "What does not kill you, makes you stronger."

What does not kill you ...

...leaves you paralyzed.
...leaves you crippled.
...leaves you deformed.
...gives you a hell of a pain.
...will kill someone else.
...does not come in powder form.
...loves you.
...makes the jokes a lot better.
...will make you laugh, eventually.


Any more ideas?