Plaques & Hams

There are just a few reasons to rock my Blackberry on weekends.

My Curve is fast becoming my go-to gadget, primarily because I can email, text, and call all-in-one. The downside of being connected at all times is, well, being connected at all times.

This afternoon, though, standing in the dressing room line at J. Crew, the blinking red light provided a delightful surprise.

Jonathan — he of the woefully-lapsed blog — sent me an email that read, “We saw this at the zoo.” Attached, I found a photo of an exhibit plaque that read:

Smokey Jungle Frog
(Leptodactylus Pentadactylus)
You, Dear Reader, may recall that my college band was called Smokey Junglefrog. And, in fact, we too discovered the species at the zoo (in our case, the Syracuse zoo). The name stuck, I think, due in no small part to its randomness. Or, perhaps, its irreverence. I don’t remember.

While the photo made me laugh, it was the brief description that really cracked me up. “Loud calls,” it read, “entice females to ponds during mating season.”

Funny. But not so salient to a guy just a few days shy of tying the knot. I found the second tidbit more relevent: “Males churn skin secretions to mounds of foam to support thousand of eggs.”

Not yet, but someday. And metaphorically, people, metaphorically.