This Week In Frog: Name Results/Our Foreclosed Palace

Stephen Robert Morse & Andy Kroll

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In case you missed it, last week we interns started a Frog Blog to compete with Kevin Drum’s catblogging. This week, we decided to overhaul our little fellow’s tank. One side effect of the Great Recession is that people are realizing how expensive it is to be pet owners. Thus, we were able to find a ten gallon tank complete with filter, a castle, artificial plants, eight pounds of gravel, a piece of driftwood, large rocks, a net, cleaning solution, food, and six fish that needed adopting—all for $30 on Craigslist. 

frog-1.jpg (JPEG Image, 300x200 pixels)

Yesterday, we added six snails to the mix to keep the tank squeaky clean. Only after introducing the snails to their new frog neighbor did we realize that we’d accidentally acquired a stowaway fish as well in the water-filled pet store bag, bringing our grand tank total to seven.

frog-3.jpg (JPEG Image, 300x200 pixels)

As for the long-awaited naming results…After much consideration, we decided to stick with the traditional “Smart, Fearless Journalism” theme…With that, we introduce MUDRAKER.

 Here’s this week’s frogs-in-the-news roundup:

1. In arts and culture, if you’re in the New York area, be sure to check out the new exhibit called “Frogs: A Chorus of Colors” at the Museum of Natural History.

2. Down Under, thousands of corroboree frog eggs were flown to safety to prevent them from becoming extinct due to a fungus that has already wiped out eight frog species in the past thirty years.

3. Without sounding like a depressing local news broadcast, here are some gruesome pictures from a car crash in Louisiana that left many dead frogs on the side of the road. If it’s any consolation, the frogs were already dead (killed by frog hunters) prior to the accident.

4. In India, people are flocking to worship a “miraculous” color-changing frog.

5. Melissa Segrest of ABC-7 in Los Angeles explains how to attract frogs to your backyard, noting how you can volunteer time with Frog USA to help endangered frog species.

6. In the film world, Disney’s upcoming animated feature “The Princess and the Frog” has sparked controversy over whether Disney’s first African-American princess has a skin color that is dark enough.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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