Mark Murrmann
It all started at happy hour. Most wise decisions do. With a bunch of us gathered around a twelve pack of Red Stripe and bag of stale Tostitos, Kevin Drum’s cat blogging became the topic of conversation. Earlier in the day, I’d bragged that we, the latest crop of MoJo interns, could overtake Kevin’s traffic, and after consuming a single screwdriver the brilliance hit me for real. What’s the only thing better than a cat blog? The only thing better than the Obama dog blog? A frog blog.
Within an hour, we found ourselves at the 6th Avenue Aquarium in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond district. When we asked the clerk if there were any frogs available, he nonchalantly pointed to an empty, unmarked tank and said, “Sold out.” Despair. We’d come all this way for a frog and didn’t want to wait a week for another shipment to arrive. As my colleagues pondered purchasing an amphibian of a less-rhymophile friendly genus, I took one final look at the “empty” frog tank. Inside, I noticed a pair of eyes slightly protruding from below the water’s surface. It was no mistake; one frog remained who’d been left for dead. When I explained the situation to the employee, he said, “Grab a net.” After first removing some bettas (Siamese fighting fish) from their perch atop the frog tank, we successfully extracted the frisky little fellow from his lonely home and immediately treated him to a feast of three crickets.
After spending the night in my apartment and enjoying amenities such as my roommate’s singing, man’s new best friend found his way into MoJo‘s offices this morning after a 40 minute bus ride. (You know how guys who walk their dogs get tons of attention from women? It doesn’t apply to guys with frogs.)
So welcome to our inaugural post of Friday frog blogging. We hope that readers will pitch in to choose a name for our new friend. Balloting will close in one week, on Friday at 6am Pacific Time. Thereafter, look for This Week In Frog.
