Questions and curiosities serve as the basis of scientific study and are a habitual pattern for lifelong learners. When a human brain suddenly cannot let go of a particular input, when attentiveness stemming from a sudden frequency illusion becomes obsessive, when you just have to know if the thing you’ve noticed has some sort of meaning, when that happens you find a sweet spot of learning.
It was most certainly some sort of cognitive bias that led me to notice that a lot of my doctors offices have close up photography of frogs. My dentist has them and so did another doctor I went to see last week. There’s one in my GPs waiting room.
I must have known that frogs have plenty to do with the science of health, but I didn’t know anymore. The waiting room frogs struck me as an odd choice. Their tapioca eyes and gleaning skins. Watching the photograph seem like it was breathing while my head rattled with dental tools. When I go home, I forget about the frogs again.
My brain erased the role of frogs in society, in nature, in mythology. Regeneration. Respiration. Rehabilitation. My brain stored three frog memories and one that was jarred lose today while writing this episode of FBT:
- Last year I went to the effervescent botanical garden in Jena, Germany. In the entrance they have a variety of tropical frogs in a terrarium. Aside: feels strange to use the word “effervescent” to describe a garden.
- Many years ago, I tried frog legs in an outdoor cafe in Prague. Like snake* and crocodile, I find that frog legs tasted like fishy chicken. Whale tastes like fishy beef.**
- The Scorpion and the Frog. A fable, which many people do not understand despite the morals being pretty fucking simple.
Jarred loose this week was a visualisation from 5th or 6th or 7th grade biology? I know I had to dissect a frog, I have a fuzzy vague memory of said frog guts. I can see the twitch. There’s very little there, I’m almost unsure if it even counts.
My cliched story about science that seems to explain my brain’s decision to delete frogs, is that I don’t have the brain for such things. I’m creative, not logical. Imaginative not rational. I’m a girl and should leave the sciencey stuff to the boys.
*After tossing a spade and ordering it’s demise like some sort of Wood Assassin, we ate a rattlesnake in the Sierra Nevadas. That entire affair deserves its own short story because in addition to rattlesnakes there were rednecks, four-wheeling, flying, a broken transverse process that didn’t reveal itself until 12 years later and a young woman who had won an all expenses paid trip to Florence but wasn’t going to go because “I can git spaghetti rite her, whudd I wanna go to Itly for?”
**I’m aware of the optics of the implication “I’ve eaten whale”, especially for someone who has spent a large chunk of her career working with Greenpeace. Everything has a context though. If you happen to be in the arctic circle and the local indigenous community offers you some of the whale that they helped stop living after it got trapped in the fjord, you may too have thoughts about what is, in that moment, the right course of action. In my case, I decided that the whale wouldn’t be offended.
- Frogs in medicine > https://afroghouse.org/frogs-in-medicine/
- the Cognitive Bias codex (again) > https://bias.wiki/?lang=en
- The Sideways Effect > https://archive.is/20260204112335/https://slate.com/life/2026/02/red-wine-white-alcohol-sideways-effect-movie.html
Maybe I’m gobsmacked
The book was a Christmas present, it wasn’t for me. I “borrowed” it indefinitely, and finished reading Margaret Atwood’s Book of Lives: a Memoir of Sorts this week.
Why do you read? That sounds like a joke from Bill Hicks. It IS a joke from Bill Hicks. Perhaps I should qualify the question a bit better. Why do you read memoirs (if you even do)? I read biographies and memoirs partly because I seek to understand the inner lives of people who are known for things. What is going through his head when he decided to document volcanos and then basically invent ecology (Alexander Humboldt)? Why did she fund an alcoholic splatter painter for so long (Peggy Guggenheim)? Why would he endure childhood stardom (Elliott Page)? Aren’t existentialist philosophers just annoying at some point (Simone de Beauvoir)?
I’ve not yet understood any of these inner lives, certainly not in the case of Margaret Atwood, whose memoir had very little to do with her feelings. Her expression of emotion seemed so…detached. Margaret Atwood really didn’t care much about her feminist reputation. She shrugs her shoulders at the perceptions other people have placed onto her over the years. It seems really healthy.
Maybe it’s just me, but my inner life is all over the map. My emotions are all over the map. My ideas, beliefs, understandings and interests, all over the goddamn map. I never know if I’m coming or going. Is everyone else just…sane?
- How people map the Internet > https://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinkelly/albums/72157613562011932/
- You Know, You Can Just Say “Patriarchy” > https://jude-doyle.ghost.io/y/
- Why More Companies Are Recognizing the Benefits of Keeping Older Employees > https://longevity.stanford.edu/why-more-companies-are-recognizing-the-benefits-of-keeping-older-employees/
Maybe I need help
I had a lot of a week, to be honest. There’s been a lot going on. It’s raining now so I’m going to find a new book to read and shut out the world.
header image Giant Blue Frog — Odeith in Portugal