So less "it is specifically frogs that are a problem" and more "it is impressive and terrifying that God can conjure up so many of one thing to harass us"?
well i mean pharaoh did beg moses to get rid of the frogs and that he would let the israelites go just from frogs and not a fucking massive river of blood that stank up everything so they must have been more than just a nuisance, yeah. he changed his mind though and the plagues continued.
...i should probably add i'm getting my info from what i remember of sunday school/the prince of egypt movie and wikipedia, so there might actually be more significance to the frogs than what i think.
Less symbolic, more logistic totally unsupported guesses from perfunctory googling: apparently a ton of frogs would appear in the Nile every year as part of their life cycle. So in a similar way to Noah's "oh sweet elohim has there ever been a flood as big as this flood, it definitely covers the entire world", I imagine that a particularly abundant frog year could enter into legend as "that year the Jews' god decided to fuck us up with frogs". Wikipedia says that the ancient Egyptians had a frog goddess called Heqet (which sounds to me like "ribbit", nice) and other sites imply that frogs were sacred and not supposed to be killed. That last bit isn't supported by any good sources I found though.
It would do a number on your ecosystem, too, assuming they were normal frogs who wanted to eat things. Sister pointed out that the Egyptians had a frog goddess (Heqet) so depending on their attitude towards their deities, it could have been pretty demoralising to be overrun by and forced to kill animals associated with her. Edit: ninja'd!
TIL that I only write male characters. This is a startling realization that I have decided to immediately rectify. Why do I gotta man-pain all the time? Everyone will suffer. And be f-ing awesome.
today i learned the cgi animators for jurassic park filmed themselves running around a parking lot pretending to be gallimimuses to get an idea of how the animation should look. part of their job was literally "pretend to be a dinosaur" and i think that's beautiful. https://filmschoolrejects.com/i-was...of-its-magic-creators-fcad379ee10c#.y8grmqcvo it's about a third of the way down the article, although i first learned this fact from watching the special features on my copy of jurassic park a little while ago.
Shit, I would've volunteered for just about anything if part of the description was "Spend hours running around a parking lot with other adults screeching like a dinosaur." That sounds hilarious. More places should try to pitch jobs like this.
heck yes! but yeah, jurassic park gets more and more amazing the more i learn about it. it was the first movie to have cgi animals, everything before it was like, the liquid tendril in sphere or chrome people in terminator. they actually were originally planning to use stop motion and had created tons of scenes and it would have been the most ambitious and detailed stop motion project ever at the time, but the cgi looked more real. they ended up using the stop motion animators as consultants for the cgi folk because they were more familiar with how animal movement worked. it's funny because the scene where alan grant says "looks like we're out of the job" and ian malcom replies "don't you mean extinct?" came from the lead stop motion guy saying offhandedly to steven spielburg "looks like my line of work is extinct". he added it into the movie sort of as a homage to stop motion. the whole reason he wanted to make a jurassic park was because he was inspired when he was younger by this old stop motion king kong movie where he fights a t-rex. also i learned the way they did the scene with the cup vibrating with the t-rex steps was they wired a guitar string through the dash of the car and had a guy lay underneath and pluck it on cue.
@all the Bible and Nile talks. I guess growing up a Christian or being surrounded by Monotheism isn's any weirder than growing up with some dude like, "I'm now descending to another plane of existance. Follow me, or not, up to you, and only you. By the way you stupid fuckers, I am NOT GOD. I don't create shit, now stop attributing shit to me. Peace out, yo."
Today my mom was talking about Mr Smith Goes To Washington, and afterwards I found myself wondering where on earth the word filibuster even comes from. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it probably comes from the Dutch vribueter (freebooter), variants of which were used to describe pirates in the West Indies in English, French, and Spanish as well. Then it started being used in reference to "lawless military adventurers from the U.S. who tried to overthrow Central American governments". The current sense didn't show up until 1861.
TIL honey badgers are actually in the weasel family, and they are crazy smart. in the documentary i watched, this wildlife preserve owner had a honey badger who was a pet the owners didn't want anymore so he was unfit to be released into the wild, and so the preserve kept him. they kept him next to the other animals at first, but he dug under his cage and started attacking the closest enclosure. he also ran up to the guy's house, opened a window, and opened the fridge and ate their bacon. they put rocks under his fence and he worked at them, carefully rearranging til he fit out a hole. they gave him a female to try and keep him busy, but he made her climb the fence and unlock the gate deadbolts while he pushed from the bottom. they eventually made a specialized cage with flat concrete walls that couldn't be climbed up and he broke a branch off the tree in his enclosure and propped it on the wall to climb out. they cut off all the branches and he slowly but surely bent the tree to lean on the wall and ran to the guy's office and sat in it waiting for him to come back the next day. they took the trees out so he gathered all the rocks in the enclosure and propped them on the wall and climbed out. they took out all the rocks and he waited for it to rain and rolled mud into balls and propped them on the wall and escaped. every time he escaped he would either run to the guy's house and trash it, or fight one of the other animals in healing waiting to be released back in to the wild. giraffes, warthogs, lions, you name it he grabbed their private bits in a death grip at one point.
TIL (okay i didn't learn it's existence today but i did learn a lot about it) about casa susanna, a hideaway for crossdressers in the 1950s. there's a book with photos of the people who spent time there, and even a broadway musical based on the place called casa valentino. the link goes to an article about the photographer. i really like the photos because it's just a bunch of people being close and feeling safe to be themselves.
TIL (well, two days ago, but I got distracted) that despite bb-me's insistence on pronouncing maelstrom "male-storm", the word has nothing to do with storms. It's from Dutch*, and literally translates to "grinding-stream". Now every time I see the word I think of a watermill. *Lately I seem to keep discovering English borrowings of Dutch words
Women were commonly employed as telephone operators not only because women earn less than men, but because the boys they were hiring at first started pranking their callers. (Wikipedia) (Steal This Computer Book 4.0)
