The 12 New Night Frogs

I had written a story about Biju’s night frog discovery. I still have some of the photographs, so here goes

		Frogs VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

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Spinular Night Frog Nyctibatrachus acanthodermis	The species name is derived from two Greek words – ‘acanthos’, meaning spine or thorn, and ‘dermis’ meaning skin – referring to the spiny skin of this species.
Daniel’s Night Frog Nyctibatrachus danieli	This species is named after J.C. Daniel of the BNHS, in great appreciation of his contribution to Indian wildlife research.
Deven’s Night Frog Nyctibatrachus deveni	The species is named after Deven Brian Sheth, a young nature lover in honour of his parents Mr Brian Niranjan Sheth (of Indian origin) and Mrs Adria Marie Sheth, for their contribution to global conservation of Indian amphibians.
Gavi Night Frog Nyctibatrachus gavi	The species is named after Gavi, where the specimen was collected.
Wayanad Night Frog Nyctibatrachus grandis	The species epithet grandis (Latin word) is an adjective meaning large, referring to the largest adult size reported in Nyctibatrachus.
Indraneils Night Frog Nyctibatrachus indraneili	This species is named after Indraneil Das, to honour his contribution to herpetological research in south and south-east Asia.
Jog’s Night Frog Nyctibatrachus jog	The species is named after Jog Falls, where the type series was collected.
Periyari Night Frog Nyctibatrachus periyar	The species is named after Periyar Tiger Reserve, where the type series was collected.
Pillai’s Night Frog Nyctibatrachus pillaii	This species is named after R.S. Pillai of the ZSI, in appreciation for his contribution to Indian amphibian systematics.
Meowing Night Frog Nyctibatrachus poocha	The species epithet poocha (Malayalam word, the major language of Kerala state) means domestic cat, referring to the advertisement call which is reminiscent of the call of a cat.
Shiradi Night Frog Nyctibatrachus shiradi	The species name shiradi is derived from Shiradi Ghat
VUB Night Frog Nyctibatrachus vrijeuni	The species is named after the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where S.D. Biju, Ines Van Bocxlaer and Franky Bossuyt completed their PhDs.

That Cigarette

I’m not supposed to smoke anymore. Oh, yes, I know. I was never ever supposed to smoke. Smoking causes cancer, arterosclerosis, thrombosis. emphysema, Crohn’s disease, bad teeth and impotence.

But I , like so many of my fellow lovers of the common smoke, my fellow ten o’clockers,  have been able to ignore all those irritating warnings on pasteboard packets. After a point you’re able to switch off the lecturing of family members who may have never tasted that lovely sweet bitterness of a lungful of tobacco on top of a heavy thayir saadham.

I think I blame Biggles.  Adults in Enid Blyton books smoked pipes and cigarettes, but as adults in Enid Blyton books had lower IQs than Buster or Timmy or Loony or whatever the team pet was, their smoking never was very attractive. Biggles, Biggles was a different matter. A seventeen year old who would fly out across enemy lines in his Camel shooting down a brace of Boche and escape Richthofen for a bet? When he lit up, it was awesome. And underage!

The screw up is that feeling of something missing from your day.  That taste. The smell between index and middle.  The blissful feeling as you take your place on the morning throne – with newspaper in the other hand.

I was in the hospital ward with about sixty other angiogrammees. My loins had been shaved and several meters of wire had travelled up my femoral artery to take a dekko around my heart.  As I lay recovering, one of the doctors bandaged my legpits.  “Being a doctor is the worst thing in the world”, he said. My feeling at that point was that being a patient was the worst thing in the world, but I said nothing. “You see so many people come here with really bad heart disease because of those bloody cigarette companies. The game is rigged. The Government needs the money. The Cigarette companies need profits. And we end up spending more in healthcare than we  make in excise.” It’s a line he has used many times, said without vehemence. One of his patients had died yesterday.  He wasn’t happy about it.

It was unlikely that she was a smoker though.

Or maybe it was Sherlock Holmes who glammed the tobacco on? Come on, Watson was a Doctor. Who smoked “Ship’s”.  And Holmes smoked toe jam.  And Watson bhashaned him only about ruptured nasal septa and other 7% solution stuff.

Or was it the Foundation crew? Salvor Hardin with his Vegan (a book from the time the word meant “from the planet Vega” and not holier than though cultists doing what millions of folks considered a way of life for centuries) -  cigars in Jara Ford’s silver box? Merry and Pippin with their Longbottom Leaf from Southfarthing and the inferior Southlynch? Unlikely. While Hardin was cool, Vegan cigars sounded unappetizingly fungal. Merry and Pippin were kids, for Gods sake. And while Aragorn did smoke a long carved pipe and Gandalf would wipe the floor Bilbo’s  bottom smoke ringing, they never made it look cool.

I’ve got the twitchies now. I was on my feet and half way to the potti kadai down the street where the shopkeeper automatically takes out two packets of charms when he seems me approaching at a high mph. Had to turn back cursing lesions and blockages.

“Bond took out his black gunmetal cigarette box and his black oxidized Ronson lighter and put them on the desk beside him. He lit a cigarette, one of the Macedonian blend with the three gold rings around the butt that Morlands of Grosvenor street made for him…”

Aaaaaargh. I can’t take it anymore, and I haven’t even come to Wodehouse’s “The Man Who Gave Up Smoking”, Joseph Cotten’s masterly rings, Bogie in Rick’s Café with a bottle of booze and Dooley Wilson on the piano. Gatzing along to that orange light across the dock.

Blogstuff

I haven’t done anything for the last few months – part because of general dijness, part because of moving to Bangalore and being without an Internet connection at home for a couple of months and partly because of the truly terrible net access at work.

Anyway, going back to the blogs that I have missed out on in during my limited net access months - there are a couple of things that I found interesting. The first was an article in the Smithsonian Magazine about Finland's successes in education. Picked it off Pharyngula - where Myers sums up with "They put good teachers in charge of deciding how students should be taught? How radical."

The other thing is the explosion at one of my favourite blogs, Balloon Juice. I've loved Cole's blog since I came across it - via Greenwald - when Cole got pissed off about the whole Schiavo shitfest. I loved the fact that among the heaping amounts of politics and media snark there would be intense discussions on the Dead or the latest Bioware game. But things blew up this morning with this post from Anne Laurie. I don't really think she should have done it the way she did, but I kind of get the frustration. While ABL may have her good points, I found her tedious and frankly depressingly fanatical in her defence of Obama. And she has her own crowd of Obots that do nothing but crap on anyone who dares criticize the dear leader. Plus you get the feeling that she confuses offensiveness with directness and any criticism made becomes racist. I've kept away from her posts and their threads - sticking to Cole, DougJ, Freddie DeBoer, Levenson and Laurie's posts instead. I always thought that Anne was one of the sweeter posters - with her pet rescue blogs and food stuff, which makes her meltdown all the more spectacular.

Its a huge pity, but I think Anne will lose this one. Plus, I wonder what Cole will do. He can't ignore this war any longer. The best thing to do would be to get the two As - ABL and AL into a room and shout at them until one agrees to tone down and the other agrees to back down, but I don't see that happening. Or will he chuck them both out? Or go Narasimha Rao and do nothing? The fight may be good for page views, but not for the blog. Whatever else, its more drama.

Hal Wallis and Casablanca

Yes. I know. Everybody comes to Ricks. Everybody knows about Casablanca. A movie that returns 16 million results in .13 seconds in Google.

Heres a niblet. Lena Horne or Ella Fitzgerald instead of Dooley Wilson? Hal Wallis did consider this.

or the alternative to the most famous movie ending of all time

Heh. August 7th . My birthday

Hal Wallis. Often overlooked. Always significant.

Fred Astaire

I’m watching the Fred and Ginger Box Set that Hari  bought me so kindly. I’m doing this for the fifth time – I think.

The whole RKO bunch – especially the best of them – Top Hat and The Gay Divorcee are stand outs. Though I wonder how Universal got the rights for RKO movies in the UK.

Anyhoo (to quote Major Monogram), back to Mr. Astaire. Or, back to Mr. Astaire, Ms. Rogers, Mr. Horton, Mr. Blore, Mr. Polglase and Mr. Plunkett and Mr. Pan.

I think David Thomson in his review of Joseph Epstein’s Fred Astaire – called the stories “they were irrelevant upper-class fables with the sketchiest plots, a string for the pearls of dance routines married to some of our best popular songs”, and he isn’t too far wrong about that. The rest of the article is utter crap¹. (I have to mention Self Styled Siren’s amazing blog here – its essential for anyone interested in old English movies) .  Even without the songs, the movie (Top Hat is what I’m on about, mostly, but the others qualify) would be a splendid little confection, a souffle that melts in your mouth, leaving just a lingering sweetness – a Joseph Cotten smoke ring, ethereal, ephemeral and its gone…

The thing to remember about Astaire was that he was deeply insecure about his dancing. He worked at it. It all seems so effortless and easy, but just take a look at the picture here

That doesn’t seem so easy. And he knew that he made it look good – as he famously said later “I suppose I made it look easy, but gee whiz, did I work and worry”. Or at another time – “I don’t think I was completely happy with any of my dances”² . You get the picture of a perfectionist who knew he would never be perfect, doing what he would call “A sweat job”.  And in an age when every two bit celebrity calls himself or herself a perfectionist, it is refreshing to find someone whom everyone else called a perfectionist, but never applied that descriptor to himself. 

But there is perfection – whether its in the rollerskate dance to “Lets call the whole thing off”

Tapdancing on Roller Skates, to Gershwin

or the sandman dancing with an ashtray under his arm or a drunk destroying a bar while maudlin in self pity  in “one for my baby”

And thats not candy glass either–wartime sugar rationing meant it was the real deal

Astaire also seems a genuinely nice guy. Debbie Reynolds tells a story of how he found her, a seventeen year old crying under the piano, after a particularly harsh and punishing rehearsal during “Singing in the Rain”. He takes her out to his sound stage and asks her to watch him rehearse. She watches him struggle and struggle for an hour, sweating and red faced, at the end of which he comes up to her and says, quietly – “You see how hard it is? It never gets easier. This is how it always is”. Or take Cyd Charisse describing how Tony Martin knew who she had been dancing with that day – “If I was black and blue, it was Gene. If I didn't have a scratch it was Fred” Or David Niven’s summation- “a pixie — timid, always warm-hearted, with a penchant for schoolboy jokes”.

For a guy who introduced some of the most famous songs in “The Great American Songbook”, he was remarkably diffident about his singing voice. “   It`s nice that all the composers have said that nobody interprets a lyric like Fred Astaire. But when it comes to selling records I was never worth anything particularly except as a collector’s item”, he said. Well. Not really.  Eight number 1 records and 18 top 10 hits isn't really “never worth anything”.`  Especially if one of them was “Night and Day”

Take a look at the song. Its a love story – the chase and the pursuit, the reluctance, the adoration and finally, the fantastic consummation – in four economical, graceful minutes. And Ginger’s look of astoundment in the afterglow of the that amazing dance sequence – I wish I could have some woman look at me like that – even if she was faking it .

Rejection, Persuasion and Consummation

If you want a much better discussion of the Astaire Rogers dance head over to Richard Corliss at Time – where he breaks down the “Caught in the Rain” song from Top Hat. The entire article is worth several reads, as well.

David Thomson says that Astaire was “Fred Astaire was not human, not sexual, not sexed”, but that’s just utter crap.  Look at the song and the dance and tell me it’s not about fucking.

Since Astaire started his stage career when he was four and a half, and was partnered with his sister. That must have taken its toll on the whole dancing bit, because his first partner, Clare Luce – had to prod him to amp up the sex appeal. “I’m not your sister, you know, Fred!” she’s said to have told him. Astaire romancing anyone seemed to be like a kid cajoling a female relative for sweets – “Oh, please don’t be that way”, he’d say. And then he would be tap tap tapping all around her, grabbing her hand and letting go at a look – he was a gentleman, after all, and before you knew it, there would be two pairs of feet tapping, skirts swirling over sofas and tables, and you would have forgotten your late 20th century cynicism and irony and be watching in slack jawed wonder.

When it comes to dance, I’m a philistine. The kind of thing I would normally watch involves well endowed women and metal poles, in dim lighting. My father still reminds me that I slept through a Padma Subramaniam recital. But I can watch Astaire again and again. It doesnt matter if he’s dancing  with a girl (The Ginger dances are special, of course, but Ginger needs a whole writeup herself) or a hatrack or a bunch of shoes.

Tell you what. I’m going to watch Swing Time. And leave you with Corliss’ last words

In the pop culture war, sex won — real, insolent, dirty sex, not Ginger's kind. And class went to the back of the class. It sits there, ignored and aloof, waiting for the young to recognize it. Can't they see how sensational that slim figure back there looks in his top hat, white tie and tails, as an indulgent smile plays on his face and his feet describe elaborate designs on the schoolroom floor? Can't they see that Britney Spears is not dance — that Fred Astaire is? I hope, some day, the kids will get Astaire. He's too cool to be the property of fogies like me

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1. Though Epstein writes for the Weekly Standard – which means I should automatically hate him. David Thomson wrote some excellent stuff about Howard Hawks and Cary Grant But this time, much as I dislike this,  I’m firmly on Epstein’s side. Astaire was no matinee idol, but to quote James Agate “May I suggest that the solution hangs on a little word of three letters? Mr Astaire's secret is that of the late Rudolph Valentino and of Mr Maurice Chevalier — sex, but sex so bejewelled and be-pixied that the weaker vessels who fall for it can pretend that it isn't sex at all but a sublimated projection of the Little Fellow with the Knuckles in His Eyes. You'd have thought by the look of the first night foyer that it was Mothering Thursday, since every woman in the place was urgent to take to her bosom this waif with the sad eyes and the twinkling feet.”

2. I paraphrase this one, couldnt find the original quote