This event was VERY funny in real life. I'm afraid it's not going to translate well onto the blog, but you'll all learn an important lesson, so I'm posting it anyway.
I was at a dinner party at my sister's house Sunday night. We were talking about frogs' legs (What? What do you talk about at your dinner parties?) and the conversation turned to a story that I guess gets told in Sunday School classes. Or it used to. I'd never heard it. Here's how it goes: If you put a frog in a pot of hot water, he'll jump right out. If you put a frog in a pot of cold water and gradually turn up the heat, though, he won't notice that he's being cooked up for a tasty dinner treat, and he'll stay in the pot. The idea is that, for example, you might not have ambitions to be a drug dealer, but you start smoking those candy cigarette things and the next thing you know, BAM, you're selling crack off your back porch. (My sister used a different example of a vice you could slide into, but I'm not going to repeat it here, because it would bring ENTIRELY the wrong kind of Google traffic to the blog.)
So, we're talking about frogs in pots and how they hop out, when my sister's friend pipes up, "Oh, they DON'T jump out. They just die." We turn to look at him. "No, you put a frog in a pot of hot water and he will NOT jump out." The frogs get cooked either way. And my sister's friend knows this because he TRIED IT OUT. He put a frog in a pot of cold water and turned up the heat. Result? Death! And he put a frog in a pot of hot water. Result? Also death. He assures us that he wasn't trying to kill frogs (and I believe him, because he's a very nice, soft-spoken attorney), he was just testing analogies.
So, you realize what I'm saying, right? Stop with the analogies! They're usually bad, and now we know that they're also incorrect and result in actual amphibian deaths. There's probably a frog drowning in a bucket of cream right this instant, because someone's been reading Sam (or is it Charly?).
3 comments:
I like frogs. They taste just like chicken. I also like the fact that we can learn good lessons from false stories. I really think that we need to start making up false stories just to teach people things. Maybe a story to teach people about driving in Utah, or maybe even a story to teach people cell phone tact. Maybe we should work on these stories. Cheers!
The first time I killed a frog, I cried. It never gets easier.
I've heard the frog analogy many many times. Never thought to test it though. I guess I always assumed that whoever came up with the analogy had tried to cook up a few tastey frog legs himself and had better luck when he started with cold water.
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