Date: 2008-05-01 10:35 Subject: frog calls Security: Public Tags: frogs

Okay, now I'm going nuts.  I had a nice post written about crows nesting in the Chicago area, and then got derailed onto cricket frogs, and tried to find you a recording of cricket frogs only to realize that the frogs I've been calling cricket may actually be chorus frogs.  Then I blew the post away by accident.  How embarrassing.  So here are some URLs for some cool frog call recordings.  Meanwhile I'm trying to find out what frog I'm thinking of!

The frog I want sounds like "a thumb being dragged across the teeth of a comb."  In thousands, their call is quite overwhelming.

And yet this one, a Mississippi version, is some kind of mutant.  Certainly not my frog.

Ooo, here's a whole bunch of good frogs and toads.    

...And BINGO.  Mine are apparently upland chorus frogs, and wowee.  Imagine a few thousand of them singing in a schvamp.  They're almost impossible to see, even when you're standing almost on top of them.  About the size of a dime.  When they puff themselves up to sing, they're the size of two dimes.

I researched toad calls when I was writing THE VELVET CHAIR (coming May 20 to a store near you!)  (there's the commercial,  not too shabby eh?).  Now you get to wonder where the heck the toad calls come in.

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Date: 2008-05-01 10:44 Subject: monsters in the closet Security: Public Tags: monsters

When I was a kid I had monsters in my closet.  I've developed a fondness for stories about kids with monsters in their closets, in the same way that I've grown fond of movies with psychotherapists in them.  It's always engrossing to see what somebody else does with this.

There's a really grand new strip running in the Chicago Trib called Lio by a guy named Mark Tatulli.  Lio is the mad-scientist small son of a single father, a father with a very pruney-wrinkled, harried face and a desk-worker's paunch.  Lio gets pushed in the mud sometimes...but he always has a comeback, generally high-tech, not to say rube-goldbergian, and his best friend is a squid.  And nobody talks on his strip.  Ever.  Pretty brilliant stuff.

Last day or so Lio has been dealing with the monster in his closet.  I think my favorite was the one where he makes the monster play "tea party."  As Tatulli says in an interview on the Universal Press Syndicate site, [compared with a kid traumatized by his secret world], "Lio is much more accepting."   

This revelling in the strangeness of the world is something that kept  me sane when I, too, was a mostly wordless, weird little kid.

Go read the whole thing; it's really brilliant.  Kids' worlds are dark, he says.  "It's not .... [Lio's] imagination but his reality" he says.  This guy can think like a kid.

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