The talking frog

October 26, 2009 at 3:44 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

A guy is 72 years old and loves to fish. He was sitting in his boat the other day when he heard a voice say, ‘Pick me up.’

He looked around and couldn’t see any one. He thought he was dreaming when he heard the voice say again, ‘Pick me up.’

He looked in the water and there, floating on the top, was a frog.

The man said, ‘Are you talking to me?’

The frog said, ‘Yes, I’m talking to you.

Pick me up then, kiss me and I’ll turn into the most beautiful woman you have ever seen. I’ll make sure that all your friends are envious and jealous because I will be your bride!’

The man looked at the frog for a short time, reached over, picked it up carefully, and placed it in his front pocket.

The frog said, ‘What, are you nuts? Didn’t you hear what I said? I said kiss me and I will be your beautiful bride.’

He opened his pocket, looked at the frog and said, ‘Nah, at my age I’d rather have a talking frog.’

With age comes wisdom.

THE NEWS

Curves and home-cooked family meals are favoured by French teenagers: “They had been depicted as a lost generation prone to British-style teenage contradictions — dreaming of a Kate Moss waistline while eating burgers, pizzas and chocolate bars. Instead, they want traditional home-cooked food — and the curves that go with it. Whatever their social background, French teenagers like traditional dishes such as bouillabaisse, the fish stew from Provence, choucroute, the Alsatian sauerkraut, veal sauté and strong cheeses. The sit-down family meal also remains popular — particularly when cooked by the teenagers’ grandparents — as opposed to Anglo-Saxon TV dinners, according to scientists who spent three years interviewing 500 adolescents. Gallic worries were allayed further when the study cast doubt on the assumption that thin models had become icons for a fashion-conscious youth. The teenagers tended to reject Kate Moss as an example of beauty, citing instead the pop star Beyoncé and Amel Bent, the French singer. However, the notion of family cooking was complex, with grandmothers’ recipes tending to be seen as a bastion of gastronomic quality while cooking by the teenagers’ mothers was scorned.”

Driver loses licence after 45mins: “An 18-year-old probationary driver has lost his licence after he was caught speeding just 45 minutes after passing his driving test. Police said the Melbourne man was clocked travelling at 154km/h in a 110km/h zone on the Hume Freeway in Benella, north of Melbourne, at 4pm on Wednesday afternoon. When asked why he was travelling at such a dangerous speed, the man told police his 20-year-old passenger was feeling unwell and the pair were in a rush to get home. The driver lost his licence for six months and was fined $421, police said.”

Inspiring shrimp: “The eyes of a giant shrimp living on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef could hold the key to developing a new type of super high-quality DVD player, scientists say. Mantis shrimps, dubbed “thumb splitters” by divers because of their vicious claws, have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom. They can see in 12 primary colours, four times as many as humans, and can also detect different kinds of light polarization – the direction of oscillation in light waves. Now a team at the University of Bristol have shown how the shrimps do it, using remarkable light-sensitive cells that rotate the plane of polarization in light as it travels through the eye. Manmade devices do a similar thing in DVD and CD players but they only work well for one colour, while the shrimp’s eye operates almost perfectly across the whole visible spectrum from near ultra-violet to infra-red. Transferring the same multi-colour ability into a DVD player would result in a machine capable of handling far more information than a conventional one. “The mechanism we have found in this eye is unknown to human synthetic devices. It works much, much better than any attempts that we’ve made to construct a device,” said researcher Nicholas Roberts. He believes the “beautifully simple” eye system, comprising cell membranes rolled into tubes, could be mimicked in the lab using liquid crystals.”

Scanner reveals dog inside man’s luggage: “Customs officers at Dublin airport were shocked to discover a live dog inside a passenger’s bag. When they first saw the outline of the dog on the airport scanner staff first thought it was a stuffed toy, the UK’s Telegraph reports. However when they opened the luggage for closer inspection they discovered the tiny Chihuahua inside, hidden in a cage. The luggage belonged to a Bulgarian man who arrived in the airport on a flight from Madrid, Spain. The dog is in quarantine after being handed over to the Department of Agriculture and Food. An airport spokesman said the dog appeared to be in good health. “The dog appears to be in good health although a little dopey from the journey.” The Bulgarian man was arrested.”

Marriage secret found in the numbers: “For many, a successful marriage can be put down to attraction, devotion, patience – and true love. But one group of statisticians begs to differ. They have developed a distinctly unromantic formula to predict how compatible a couple are based on their ages, education and previous divorces. The experts claim their theory can tell in advance that some couples are up to five times more likely to end up getting divorced than others. According to the study, the couples with the best chance are those where a woman with a superior education marries a man who is five or more years older than herself. Neither should be a divorcee. By comparison, a marriage where a woman partners an equally poorly educated male divorcee who is five or more years her junior is up to five times more likely to fail than a typical marriage. The findings appear in the European Journal Of Operational Research. Academics including Emmanuel Fragnire of the University of Bath studied interviews with 1534 Swiss couples who were either married or in a serious relationship. Five years later they followed up 1074 of the couples to see which had separated. Using the data collected about their age, education, nationality and previous relationships, they found the factors that many of those who broke up had in common.”

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