RECREATING a foreign environment in your garden can have some unexpected consequences, as Arizona science writer Star Lawrence discovered. Not fond of the desert landscape in Chandler, a suburb about 25 kilometres south-east of Phoenix, she planted a lush array of greenery and dug small ponds outside her house, including one with a pump to keep the water fresh.
One evening she heard strange noises outdoors. After turning off the pond pump and poking around a bit, she finally realised that a toad had settled in to enjoy the wet and green space. She has named it Mr Peepers and identified it as a Woodhouse鈥檚 toad, Bufo woodhousii, which has a penchant for making loud noises, like frogs in wetter climes.
Mr Peepers鈥檚 croak is not exactly pleasant, resembling a sheep with a cold or a decidedly unhappy infant 鈥� which wasn鈥檛 a problem until the doorbell rang a few nights later. Her daughter answered it, and a moment later announced, 鈥淢om, there are two policemen here to arrest Mr Peepers.鈥�
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It transpired that a neighbour had mistaken Mr Peepers鈥檚 call for a child in distress, and the police had duly arrived to investigate. It must have been a slow night in Chandler, because a third patrol car soon arrived. The officers took down Lawrence鈥檚 name, but she says, 鈥淎t least they had the common sense not to say, 鈥楾ell your frog to keep the noise down鈥�.鈥�
The story may not yet be over. The toads breed when they find a nice damp environment, and Lawrence worries that if Mr Peepers finds a girlfriend, she may wind up with so many noisy toads the police will send in a SWAT team.
AUTOMATED mail-outs give themselves away sometimes. A colleague who has been receiving mail from a children鈥檚 toy company received a letter the other day addressed 鈥淭o the parents of New 杏吧原创 magazine鈥�.
And reader Dave Prichard tells us that he received a spam recently that began 鈥淒ear Curriculum Vitae鈥� 鈥� the result, presumably, of a robot trawling the net for email addresses and finding a copy of his resum茅 online with his email address attached.
READERS who saw Mission: Impossible will remember that the agents got their top-secret instructions on recordings that would self-destruct.
The Walt Disney studio in Hollywood is now planning a real-life Mission: Impossible experiment. In a few weeks, Disney will release a batch of movie DVDs in four US cities that cost less than usual because they self-destruct a day or so after the vacuum-sealed packet has been opened and the disc played. The technology, called Flexplay, has been in development for a couple of years now, but so far it has been used only for a promotional DVD given away to publicise the latest James Bond movie.
Feedback got hold of a Bond promo disc and tried it out. The DVD started off light red, but within a day it had turned dark red and after two days it was black and refused to play.
But a friend in the US reasoned that many chemical reactions involving dyes are accelerated by heat and oxygen, so he kept his Bond disc in a sealed box inside a refrigerator. It was still playing nearly four days later.
He has dubbed this new sport 鈥渂iohacking鈥� and confidently expects the net to be buzzing with much cleverer chemical tricks as soon as the Disney discs go on sale.
LIKE everyone else with an email account, we would be delighted if someone could find a way to block spam that offers ways to enlarge a certain part of the male anatomy. However, Trend Micro appears to have gone a bit overboard with a recent update to its security software, which managed to block all incoming email containing the letter P. The company hastily issued a revised update that restored P to the alphabet.
HOW鈥檚 this for a fine example of corporate gobbledegook? The following breathless appeal to employees鈥� sense of adventure appeared in an in-house jobs ad sent to staff at the Chevron company in San Ramon, California: 鈥淭his position & objectives are a new addition to the stable of existing Global Lubricant Solutions (GLS) functions. The role participates in the development of the ChevronTexaco Global Lubricants Innovation Solutions Vision and drives cultural change with associated front-end strategies and concepts that eventually become customer-facing differentiable Integrated Solutions鈥︹��
We wonder if anyone applied.
FINALLY, is there nothing that eBay won鈥檛 try and persuade us to buy? Do a Google search for 鈥淢cDonalds鈥� and a banner comes up at the top saying, 鈥淢cDonalds 鈥� great offers on new and used products. Find it here!鈥� Fancy a half-eaten Big Mac and large fries, anyone?
When reader Keith Huggett called in at his local Aldi store, he was impressed to find that it was selling 鈥淐oloured invisible tape鈥�. His first thought was: how could anyone possibly know?