This gives new meaning to taking a “light” snack!

You’ll find this photographic gem in National Geographic’s Daily Dozen for the 1st week in April, 2009 …

Photo and captions by James Snyder: April 2, 2009. This is a Cuban tree frog on a tree in my backyard in southern Florida. How and why he ate this light is a mystery. It should be noted that at the time I was taking this photo, I thought this frog was dead having cooked himself from the inside. I’m happy to say I was wrong. After a few shots he adjusted his position. So after I was finished shooting him, I pulled the light out of his mouth and he was fine. Actually, I might be crazy but I don’t think he was very happy when I took his light away.

I’m guessing the frog instinctively thought this was a fire fly!

Infidelity on the iPhone?

Hoax or tragedy? This is just too salacious to pass up …

In Apple’s discussion forums, under a post titled “Pictures automatically attach to e-mail?“, recently registered Susan042764, with only two posts under her belt, asks …

“Please help! I took my husband’s i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent. Has anyone ever heard of this happening? The future of my marriage depends on this answer!”

Can cooler made from recycled PC parts …

This is a nerd project, to recover a few major parts from a scrap PC to make a clamp on cooler to chill a highly caffeinated beverage. The aim is to take a canned drink at room temperature and cool it in less than 5 minutes to a crisp, refreshing 8 degrees Celsius.

Milk Tart

“Melk Tert” is the Afrikaans name of a South African custard pie, a desert typically served at a braai (barbeque) or at tea time. Milk Tart, on the other hand, is not simply the English translation of that desert. It’s a road-side concoction which bikers brew up from easily obtained ingredients from almost any convenience and bottle store on their tours around sub-saharan Africa. It’s an alcohol based drink reminiscent of Bailey’s Irish Cream, only younger, stronger and tastes like more. Sublime on the rocks (which is the hardest thing to find along the roadside, ice, not rocks) …

Recipe:
One medium can of condensed milk (approx 300g).
Half a bottle of vodka (375ml).
Pour can of sweetened condensed milk into half a bottle of vodka.
Shake up well and pour over ice.

Suggested reading Wikipedia’s entry on Bailey’s Irish Cream |
Melk Tert recipe | Mrs Kwok’s Mini Fruit Tarts

Raccoons eating goldfish in our fish pond!

This past September strange things started happening in our fish pond, a plastic-lined half whiskey barrel set out in the corner of our deck. At first the water lilies were being destroyed. Large parallel tears started appearing in the pads. I imagined it was a cat striking out at the fish with its bared claws.

Excepting for the destruction of the vegetation I didn’t think the fish stocks were dwindling — but they were indeed. When some old friends stopped coming up at feed time and then some stones off the bottom of the pool were found scattered on the deck I was determined to find out what was causing the loss.

I clamped a compact fluorescent lamp to the back of a garden chair and aimed the reflector at the pond, set my PowerBook on the kitchen table with its iSight camera facing out through our sliding glass door and set up the software to capture time-lapse images every second throughout the night. On the very first night the culprits were revealed in this silent movie …  

What I’d appreciate hearing in comments is how other people protect their small fish ponds from raccoons. I’ve heard of a dark, rigid hexagonal grid that can be mounted below the surface of the water which the fish can swim under to escape — but which would limit the ability of tiny hands from swishing around to catch their prey. But that won’t save the water lilies …