Poison Dart
Prologue

Two blue frogs stood guard over a small pond in the rainforest. The gloomy light that penetrated to the forest floor was giving way to night. The raucous daytime cries of bird and beast would soon quiet down, and a more sinister symphony would take over. But this was just background noise hardly worth paying attention to for a pair of poison dart frogs watching over their first clutch of eggs. Most animals knew better than to mess with the black-speckled amphibians. Their eggs, however, were vulnerable.
The male frog, Roar, pounced on a beetle and held up the wriggling morsel to show his mate. "Hungry, Ree?"
Ree eyed the offering. "It's a green harlequin, your favorite. You have it."
"I don't mind giving it to you."
Ree scrunched her eyes thoughtfully. She knew how to settle situations like these. "How about this- throw it up in the air and whoever catches it gets a snack, and loser gets first watch tonight."
Roar laughed. Typical of Ree to turn everything into a contest. Roar was just as happy to share, but it was always fun to play her games. And it was even funner when he won and Ree pretended she had lost on purpose. He didn't often win, though. "Okay, deal. Ready?" Without waiting for an answer, he tossed the beetle into the air.
The dazed insect sensed freedom and had just enough time to unfurl its wings from its shiny metallic carapace when a blue tongue put an end to any thoughts of escape. Ree swallowed and launched into a celebratory flip. "Yum! Tastes like I win! With a slight aftertaste of you lose!" She stretched her arms and yawned. "Well, I'm tired, I guess I'll have a nap."
Roar laughed again. There was never any malice in Ree's boasting, and it was just another of the things Roar loved her for. He obligingly pretended to be miffed at losing. "Alright, alright, enjoy your snack and your nap. I'll wake you up in a few hours." He kissed her and she fell asleep. He was always amazed at how easily she could just nod off. Roar was more of a night frog, himself. He enjoyed listening to the sounds of nocturnal predators and prey. Not to mention the frog chorus.
He tore a piece of grass and stuck it in his mouth to chew, looking like a cowboy with a stalk of wheat in his mouth, though such imagery meant nothing to him. He looked up at the moon. Usually the forest canopy blocked out views of the heavens but there was a gap in the foliage over the pool. He sighed contentedly. A few more days and the eggs would hatch, and the tadpoles would begin the struggle to survive long enough to turn into froglets. And then Roar would be a dad! He couldn't wait.
Perhaps it was just as well that Roar didn't see them coming.
There were two of them. If Roar had seen them, he would have thought that one had far too many parts, and the other one, somehow, not enough. The first was a confusion of spikes and fangs and legs and seemed to be armored with, bizarrely, a snail shell. The other looked like a decaying lizard missing its head.
The first snuck behind Roar and impaled him with a spike. He died without feeling a thing. The spike was from the head of a rhino katydid, and the creature didn't even bother to retrieve it, allowing the entire head to detach from its mishmash body with an audible squishing sound.
The other thing clumsily sidled up to Ree's sleeping form. Standing directly above her, it lowered itself on its legs and enveloped Ree within its ribcage, which was open to the air along the bottom, and only partially enclosed by dried-out skin above. Ree awoke with a start to find herself caught in a prison cell made of ribs. She tried to squeeze through the opening but the ribs snapped shut with a sickening breaking sound. She called for Roar, but there was no answer. Again and again she called as she was carried away into the night.

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I'll try to post a chapter once a week or so, and each will have a dedication and a suggested soundtrack, as well as some director's commentary, like so:
Dedication: The entire thing and today's prologue are dedicated to my wife Michelle who Ree resembles in passing- not that Michelle has poisonous blue skin, you understand.
Soundtrack: What else, Kermit the Frog's trademark song, It Ain't Easy Being Green. Or, in the case of Roar and Ree, blue.
Director's Commentary: The seed of this story began more than two years ago with this story, which thought would be the prologue but as I wrote the first couple of chapters I realized I needed to completely rewrite it. I changed the unwieldy names which were meant to sound like something a frog would say, but kept a kernel of the old ones. Simple is better. Also, I decided it would be better if there were no supernatural monsters, just native flora and fauna . . .
Next chapter

Have you checked out the Encyclopedia of Life yet? The goal is that eventually it will catalog each of the 1.8 million known species of life. For now they mostly have a lot of fish. Not much on bears and hardly anything on frogs. Right now it's slow and crashy. Bear with them and I'm sure they'll work the bugs out and get her purring like a tiger. Okay enough with the bad puns.
Anyways I was hoping they would have the entry on Dendrobates azureus ready because 2008 is the Year of the Frog, and tomorrow is Leap Day, which has sort of become the unofficial day to celebrate all things frogular. Leap frog, leap year, see? Sadly I have to work tomorrow and all weekend so I will be unable to attend any of the events planned at the Valley Zoo. I'm sure your local zoo will have some goings on so if you love frogs make sure you jump at the opportunity to observe them and maybe contribute to the conservation efforts going on on their behalf. Darren Naish has some good links and info on his blog Tetrapod Zoology, specifically this post here.
In honor of Frog Year I started writing a children's novel about them and beginning tomorrow I will start serializing it here for your enjoyment. The star of the show, as you might have guessed, is Dendrobates azureus.
And I have no idea why my link text color changed color. There is no CSS explanation for it. It is a Mystery of the Unexplained.

Greenwood's had a crazy sale last week so Michelle and I went and bought about a hundred pounds of books. Only $5/lb! Not really, of course but wouldn't that be a great way to sell books, by weight? One book I wasn't able to buy because it wasn't in stock was The Smaller Majority, by Piotr Naskrecki. Luckily the library had it, and it is stunningly beautiful. The website does not do it justice.
The library also had Sir David Attenborough's BBC series Life in the Undergrowth, all about invertebrates. Check out the top ten scenes to see what I mean- sadly if you have a Mac it likely won't work for you. Michelle was skeptical at first but even she found it fascinating rather than gross and disgusting. Though she missed out on the episode with the slugular gay sex.

Are all spiders predators? They are, aren't they? Why am I asking you when I can just ask google? Google says yes, all spiders are predators. It's weird to me that in the entire evolutionary history of the spider, some 380 million years, not a single spider decided to go vegetarian. Maybe one did but then it got eaten by another spider. Anyways, I found some interesting pictures of fossil spiders with these weird giraffe necks in a book, and it turns out that there are living examples! Crazy.
Did you know there were once predatory ungulates? That's right, hoofed carnivores. Like vampire cows only meaner. Andrewsarchus mongoliensis is a great example.
And did you see this bird-poo caterpillar? Not many predators for those things, I'll bet.

Fanart Friday: The Diamond Age

So I just reread Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age for the fourth time. One of my favorite books of all time. This time around I read it because it was my pick for our book club. Yeah, I'm in a book club with some of my wife's friends. First we read The Garneau Block by local writer Todd Babiak ('twas good, but alas there exists no Garneau Block fan art in the entire universe that I am aware of) and then it was my turn to pick a science fiction book. Hopefully they like it- Michelle read it but I think she wasn't thrilled in the same way as I was. Oh well. Anyways, there isn't a whole lot of Diamond Age fan art out there either- I'm cheating a little and including the above professional painting for the French translation, depicting Nell astride a Chevaline.
From Ariokh's beautiful painting of Hackworth and his Chevaline Kidnapper you could be forgiven if you thought the book was steampunk, but in fact it is a nanotech book with a Victorian framework set in China. It concerns a young girl named Nell who finds a copy of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, an interactive book designed to encourage subversiveness. Nell is rendered here by Pyroiguana. The Primer provides Nell within its world with Night Friends who teach her the skills she needs to survive and prosper- in real life they are her stuffed animals. Megolas gives possibly the only extant picture of the Night Friends.


And that's about it for Diamond Age fan art! As a special bonus you can return to Ariokh's gallery for a cool portrait of Raven from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Devil Frog Devil Frog!


The big news from the paleo world today is the giant predatory Mesozoic frog fossil discovered in Madagascar. They're calling it Beelzebufo, devil toad. Too bad I just returned my big froggy book to the library eariler today, I could look up the modern pac-man frogs they're related to. I do know "bufo" is a genus name for toads (all toads are frogs) and is derived from the same root as buffoon.
I think this deserves some paleoetry if anything does.

Beelzebufo, devil frog
You start out life as a pollywog
But then you grow to epic size
Truly you are the Lord of Flies
You're the top toad, the amphibial apex
But you're no match for Mr. T-Rex!

Ole shovel 5 finally kicked the bucket the other day. Actually its bucket is still fine but everything else is all seized up. After 33 years or so it is finally being retired. I wonder if it may have been the last operational 2100 in the world- well, probably not but almost certainly the last one in North America. It was due to be retired in two months after our new hydraulic shovel showed up but I guess it was just too tired. Fair enough. I was given the honor of walking it out to its final resting place but after fiddling with it for a few hours to make it go, we discovered that it would not. So someone else will have to take it on its anti-maiden voyage.
I took a whole slew of photos, including some of the cab, and you can look at them here if you want.

Fanart Friday: Cowboy Bebop

Since yesterday was Valentine's Day it's only fitting to feature Faye Valentine and her bounty hunting buddies! Actually it's been five years since I've seen an episode of Cowboy Bebop, so if anyone wants to send me the series on DVD they would be more than welcome. Now, one trouble with anime and manga fanart is that most of it is done in the anime style, without much in the way of personal style. Which is why I love this first picture so much, by borogove13. The next one is a colored version of diablo2003's always-amazing lines. Nick SpazerCo follows with some Popeye Bebop. Finally we have a great cosplay photo, which is fanart of a different kind, from Kuragiman's gallery.



Daimida brings us an oekaki of Faye Valentine- oekaki means drawn on a web browser, basically. Then a cool Spike from EndersTruth and a watercolor Jet by RedXII. There's this guy at work whose name is Spike and I always say "Eh Spike-u" in my best Jet voice. He has no idea why. Can't forget Ed, she's my favorite, and I like Reenigirl's version.



Eh Spike-u!

I have a sort of a tradition of writing a non-mushy love poem to my wife on Valentine's Day to share with all of you. The mushy ones are just for her. This year I was at work and a little busy, so the result is somewhat subpar but better than nothing:

On Valentine's I had to go to work
Where my foreman was being a jerk
I don't like to swear so I kept saying "Furk!"

But I went down into the hole
And got you some nice and shiny coal
It's Valentine's Day after all!

Though on December 25th
I gave you the same for a Christmas gift
And it sort of seemed that you were miffed!

So instead I'll give you this poem
Since I can't be there at home
Which is where I prefer to roam

There's a couple of examples of poetic licence in there- my formean is actually a great guy that I admire immensely, and I actually like to swear just fine. I'm a coal miner after all and am furking good at it. Giving my wife coal for presents, of course, is not an exaggeration at all.

For those of you who were wondering, I wasn't in the bus crash. But thanks for your concern. My shift started today so I missed being in it by exactly 24 hours. My good buddy Robin's dad was on it, but he was not hurt too bad- seperated shoulder. According to the news but not to any firsthand information, one guy had an ear severed. Pretty crazy. Amazing that no one was killed.
Bleh. Sometimes I wonder why we do it.

Awww look at the little guy! A tiny little pterosaur was announced today. Which sounds to me like the perfect opening line of a new paleo-poem!

Ode to Nemicolopterus crypticus

Tiny little pterosaur, hello!
You seem like a cute little fellow
Flying around on your tiny wings
Looking around for shiny things
How did you get so small and shrinked?
I would ask you but you're extinct!

The new CG Clone Wars series is going to debut on the big screen August 15th before becoming a half-hour weekly TV show in the fall. Anakin has a padawan, and we know she wasn't around in Episode III so I wonder how she dies? Hopefully not by getting shot in the back by some clone troopers. I hope Grievy gets her.

I ran into an old buddy I haven't seen in ten years or more- my good friend Peter. We met in kindergarten I think, grade 1 at the latest, so we go back a ways. It's funny- we're both married with mortgages, he has a son even, and it was just like we were back in elementary school. I laughed so hard I was practically crying as we reminisced about the good old days. He was the guy I forged detention slips with so we wouldn't have to go outside in the wintertime. He was the guy who laughed at me when our music teacher tied me to my chair to keep me in my seat. He was the guy I laughed at when the class bully offered a bag of candy to anyone who would fight him and Peter accepted the challenge and got his ass kicked. He was the guy who cofounded the diamond mine with me in the back woods of our schoolyard. He was the guy who pretended he was a woolly mammoth with me all throughout grade 2. He was the guy who was with me when I snmashed up my parents' car on the way to a death metal gig when we were in grade 11- Disciples of Power rock on!
He was the guy.

Fanart Friday: Aayla Secura
Of all the thousands of characters to appear in the Star Wars movies, Aayla Secura is unique in that she was a comic book import. Lucas saw the cover painting on an issue of Darkhorse's Star Wars series and decided to put her in the movie. She was in a few scenes in Episodes II and III and then was shot in the back by some clone troopers. It would have been waaaay cooler if she had had even a brief fight scene where she takes a few of them with her but oh well. She lives on in fanart. We'll start with a collaboration between penciller Rene Cordova and colors by Redeve, and then a chibi Aayla just by Redeve. Then another collab between penciller Wardog-Zero and colorist thisisanton:


This row features art by my pals FunkYeti, dpdagger and joefreakingrocks:



Here, themico shows her in action against some vikings or something, and the goblinqueeen gives her a retro look:

Have you ever seen that movie Fallen? "Let me tell you about the time I almost died . . . " Great movie with a great cast (Denzel Washington stars) that came out ten years ago to mostly middling reviews. You should watch it if you've never seen it. I bring it up because I've been telling some of the younger guys at work that they should watch it. A lot of my buddies are ten years younger than me, or more, and have missed out on some of these great-but-ignored movies. Another one is Diggstown, one of my favorite movies about boxing and gambling and conning. What else?

The Oilers aren't doing so well, are they? I know most people are only thinking football today but apparently my subconscious is more concerned about the Oil, since I once again dreamed I was on the team to help them get out of this current slump. Also on the team was a lithe figure skater from India, she scored a goal against the Columbus Blue Jackets. Only, in my dream they weren't Blue Jackets, they were Vikings. Literally vikings. Their goalie was using a shield and a war hammer, which you might think would make it harder to play goal but he did alright. We won in the end and everyone cheered. But then I woke up and realized I wasn't an Oiler, but at least I am still an oiler. At work.

Fanart Friday: The Ramones

Gabba gabba hey it's Friday! A great day to listen to some Ramones and look at some visual tributes to the greatest punk band ever. First up take a look at a mockup of what could have been a classic Hanna Barbera cartoon in the 70s, from Montygog:




After that the artwork is by Alex Novelli; Hitlersbrain; dynam0; ajonesa; adventurevisual.