Weirdness: March 2004 Archive Page

The BBC news item, Puzzle over three-headed frog (originally titled "'Warning' over three-headed frog") spawned this story that swept the news media and the weblog circuit over the week following March 5th 2004. Briefly: staff and pre-school children at the Green Umbrella day nursery, Weston-super-Mare, UK, found the above. After they'd taken photos and a video, it escaped. The BBC took up the story, citing one of their own wildife experts, biologist and presenter Mike Dilger, as "stunned" and saying "it could be an early warning of environmental problems" (they published the same factoid in their CBBC Newsround children's section). From there, the tale snowballed to newspapers worldwide. Here's a slideshow of images at local6.com, and there are videos at CBS News (scroll down to "Freak Frog") and ITV West. But is it really a three-headed frog, or a hoax as some have suggested? --Three-headed Frog... not! (Apothecary's Drawer)

I didn't blog the "freaky three-headed frog" story when I found it, becuase the lack of expert opinion troubled me. Obviously, it didn't trouble me enough to blog about it (though I was busy getting ready for a conference that weekend... but I digress).

This "Apothecary's Drawer" looks like a great site, with posts debunking the Nanniebot and face on Mars stories.

One problem with our effort to sanitize the language of all that might offend is that it leads to lunatic results. Just ask the music reviewer at the Los Angeles Times. Last month he reviewed an opera by Richard Strauss, which he described as "a glorious and goofy pro-life paean." A diligent copy editor replaced the controversial term "pro-life" with the inoffensive "anti-abortion." This resulted in not one but two embarrassing corrections explaining that the opera has nothing to do with abortion. --Margaret Wente --Call me nuts, but PC language cripples us (The Globe and Mail)

I remember reading of an incident in which all instances of the word "black" were changed to "Afr0-American." The result was that an article in the business section referred to a company's finances as being "in the Afro-American." (Thanks, Jim.)

"Mixed in with the usual stuff about CIA mind-control beams, talking dogs, and monkey-people, I heard him mention beta decay, instantons, density matrix, and subspaces of n-dimensional Riemannian manifolds," Willard said. "I'm not sure where he got it, but he definitely seems to have had extensive schooling in theoretical physics. Man, what could've happened to him?"

Stanford theoretical physicist Carl Lundergaard seconded Willard's theory on the loonball.

"He's definitely had some advanced training, though I'm not surprised that it went unnoticed for so long," Lundergaard said. "It's hard for the layperson to differentiate schizophrenic ramblings like 'Modernity chunk where the sink goes flying on the ping-pang' from legitimate terminology like 'Unstable equilibria lie on the nodal points of a separatrix in phase space.'" --Raving Lunatic Obviously Took Some Advanced Physics (Onion -- Will Expire)

Foreign Dispatches has archived a longer snippet.

Your worst nightmare has come true. (Or maybe your fondest wish - if you are a sick little puppy.) The dead no longer stay dead. Zombies are taking over the planet. So what do you do? Give up and become a shishkabob for one of the ever growing ranks of the undead? Not on your life! You are prepared for this, thanks to the following list. --The Survival Guide for a Zombie World (http://zombiejuice.com)

This one's for Mike Arnzen.

GREETINGS. MY BROTHER, THE LEADER OF A FOREIGN NATION, WAS RECENTLY DEPOSED BY A VIOLENT COUP THAT DESTROYED ALL KEYBOARDS CAPABLE OF PRODUCING LOWERCASE LETTERS...

GREETINGS. I AM NOT THE BROTHER OF A RECENTLY DEPOSED LEADER OF A FOREIGN NATION WHERE KEYBOARDS DONT HAVE LOWERCASE LETTERS.

I AM INSTEAD SOMEONE WHOSE WEBLOG HAS RECENTLY BEEN HIT WITH A VARIATION OF THE "NIGERIAN 419 SCAM".

I tell you, what with e-mail spam, pedophile-hunting viligantes, and the 419 scam, even the most far-out science fiction authors couldn't predict just how convoluted and endlessly strange the world would become, all thanks to the wonders of technology.

What woman could resist a wedding proposal in the form of a brand-new computer? Johnson popped the question by etching the message, "Will you do me the honor?" into the side of the machine.
Photo: Courtesy Michael Johnson
--With This Rig, I Do Thee Wed  (Wired)

Found via Work in Progress, where Julie Young prays, "Let this never happen to me."