Robert Iger is why the Yankees lost. 

 … I wouldn’t normally ask you to read a long piece by Joan Didion in The New York Review of Books, you’re supposed to be working, after all – nose to the grindstone!  But this one’s good.  And it’s time-saving.  Because Didion extracts Cheney from (among other things) all those books you said you were going to read:  The One Percent Doctrine, Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies, The Halliburton Agenda, Hans Blix’s Disarming Iraq, etc. 

I’m partial to her subtle smackdowns:

His own official spoken remarks so defy syntactical analysis as to suggest that his only intention in speaking is to further obscure what he thinks.  Possibly the most well-remembered statement he ever made (after “Big-time“) was that he did not serve in the Vietnam War because he had “other priorities.” 

And this – Didion revisits a discussion between Cheney and Colin Powell (September ’02) where Powell said war might be a pain: 

Powell:  “International reaction would be so negative that we would have to close American embassies around the world if we went to war alone.” 
Cheney:  “Not the issue.” 
Powell:  “We could trigger all kinds of unanticipated and unintended consequences.”
Cheney:  “Not the issue.”

The personality that springs to mind is that of the ninth-grade bully in the junior high lunchroom, the one sprawled in the letter jacket so the seventh-graders must step over his feet.

Hmmm … where’s a copyeditor when I need one.  Anyway, something lighter, less disturbing in a minute or two.  Get up and stretch, take a bathroom break while I watch Clifford.

I’m froggy, I’ve jumped the frog. Frogs on the brain. Frogs, frogs, froggy frog. Why? Well, one, it’s a great word, “frog.” It’s fun to say. (“Frog, frog, frog”, I don’t get tired of it!) Two, they are boinking like hell in my backyard at night — at least I assume that’s part of the clatter. I know they croak just to croak sometimes, but it’s been, as they say, at fever pitch.

Also, the ghosts of Rocky and Sally Ann (RIP: 4-10-06 / 5-1-06) are rattling long sticky dead frog tongues in the attic and those three tall, cool swingers of Belleville are eating their ice pop frogs-on-a-stick. Slurp, slurp. (Just watched it again last night.)

So there’s that and then this morning M. horrified me with this:

“If you cross a particular form of the female eastern grey treefrog with a male spring peeper (another frog), they will produce offspring, and everything is fine while the animals are tadpoles. But when it comes time to turn into a frog, the animals explode.”

Thanks. That won’t disturb me all day long. [From Mark, via Olivia Judson's blog "The Wild Side" (Times Select)]

I guess I never bothered to officially announce Rocky’s death, immediately followed by Sally Ann’s (or vice versa). I just assumed anyone who knew me had them pegged for dead from the start. In retrospect, I would have given them one food tablet per day, I think, instead of two. Jr. was bored with them by day three, so hasn’t noticed the empty pond, and G. just came right out with it the other day: “They’re dead, huh?”

“Yes,” I told her. “Why did you think that?”

“Because the ones at my school are dead, too.”

Sick. Sick. This senseless harvesting of the tadpole population for the pallid amusement of armchair nature-watchers.

Anyway, in lieu of flowers or a charitable foundation, I offer, in memory of Rocky and Sally, this poem:

Small Frogs Killed on the Highway (James Wright)

Still,
I would leap too
Into the light,
if I had the chance.
It is everything, the wet green stalk of the field
On the other side of the road.
They crouch there, too, faltering in terror
And take strange wing. Many
Of the dead never moved, but many
Of the dead are alive forever in the split second
Auto headlights more sudden
Than their drivers know.
The drivers burrow backward into dank pools
Where nothing begets
Nothing.

Across the road, tadpoles are dancing
On the quarter thumbnail
Of the moon. They can’t see,
Not yet.

[From: Poetry Connection]