This Week In Frog: Name Results/Our Foreclosed Palace

Stephen Robert Morse & Andy Kroll

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In case you missed it, last week we interns started a Frog Blog to compete with Kevin Drum’s catblogging. This week, we decided to overhaul our little fellow’s tank. One side effect of the Great Recession is that people are realizing how expensive it is to be pet owners. Thus, we were able to find a ten gallon tank complete with filter, a castle, artificial plants, eight pounds of gravel, a piece of driftwood, large rocks, a net, cleaning solution, food, and six fish that needed adopting—all for $30 on Craigslist. 

frog-1.jpg (JPEG Image, 300x200 pixels)

Yesterday, we added six snails to the mix to keep the tank squeaky clean. Only after introducing the snails to their new frog neighbor did we realize that we’d accidentally acquired a stowaway fish as well in the water-filled pet store bag, bringing our grand tank total to seven.

frog-3.jpg (JPEG Image, 300x200 pixels)

As for the long-awaited naming results…After much consideration, we decided to stick with the traditional “Smart, Fearless Journalism” theme…With that, we introduce MUDRAKER.

 Here’s this week’s frogs-in-the-news roundup:

1. In arts and culture, if you’re in the New York area, be sure to check out the new exhibit called “Frogs: A Chorus of Colors” at the Museum of Natural History.

2. Down Under, thousands of corroboree frog eggs were flown to safety to prevent them from becoming extinct due to a fungus that has already wiped out eight frog species in the past thirty years.

3. Without sounding like a depressing local news broadcast, here are some gruesome pictures from a car crash in Louisiana that left many dead frogs on the side of the road. If it’s any consolation, the frogs were already dead (killed by frog hunters) prior to the accident.

4. In India, people are flocking to worship a “miraculous” color-changing frog.

5. Melissa Segrest of ABC-7 in Los Angeles explains how to attract frogs to your backyard, noting how you can volunteer time with Frog USA to help endangered frog species.

6. In the film world, Disney’s upcoming animated feature “The Princess and the Frog” has sparked controversy over whether Disney’s first African-American princess has a skin color that is dark enough.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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