Frog Report: Winter Edition

Hello again from the Frog Report! We are once again back to discuss the most common, overplayed talking points that are so edgy no mainstream publication will print them.

In the past six months, we’ve been yelling at people who wear glasses to stop wearing glasses and just try harder to see faraway things. We’ve been proving that we are healthy, well-balanced people with hobbies like building side tables out of driftwood and shaming anyone who likes video games. As you can see, this has nothing to do with our personal problems and everything to do with a need to keep anybody we don’t like from doing things.

Since it’s winter, we are finally writing a Frog Report from the ideal place for a frog: our mud pit! Fully surrounded and hibernating in our slimy ideals, we are poised to defend our views by saying we are just people who like frogs. Or, in my case, “just a woman who likes frogs.”

After all, if you are a woman and you like something, you always have to highlight the fact that you are not like other women in that you like the thing. Otherwise, people may erroneously believe that it’s common for women to enjoy pizza, wine, trucks, conservative values, sports, pants, cats, unfair public policy, books, swear words, beer, unnecessary violence, Disney, scary movies, getting paid, autumn and being a mother to a boy.

We also insist that nobody appreciates the true meaning of Christmas anymore. We express this by continuing to get rid of our traditions because we don’t feel like doing them and instead continuing to commercialize the holiday even more. While this may seem hypocritical, rest assured that we are doing our duty by yelling at culturally-Christian agnostics who still celebrate to remember the story of Christmas.

Of course, it wouldn’t truly be a Frog Report if we had anything meaningful to say or any structure outside of just saying our opinions loudly. It’s just too much fun watching people act shocked at stuff many people have said before and probably better, even if it’s still wrong and said in bad faith. I hope this page has opened your eyes to everything the media has hidden from you, which it somehow manages to broadcast nearly 24 hours a day.

Featured image: hehaden on Flickr

The Frog Report: return from hiatus

The Frog Report is back! We have, like every good frog, been hiding in our mud pit that is now not only ideological, but literal.

Around Christmas and the New Year, our irrational political opinions were attacked at all sides due to our relatives spewing evil things called ‘cogent arguments’. As such, we decided to shift to long-term readership outreach for the past six months or so in order to avoid the onslaught.

Here is what our focus group had to say:

This correspondent chose to lie low, so as not to get kicked out of the workplace.
Image: The Frog Report

Anonymous Frog #1: “The Frog Report is the bravest, most envelope-pushing journalism there is! It’s the only outlet that dares to publish the dangerous unpopular opinions that I and my 749 Facebook friends all share and post regularly.”

We interviewed the second correspondent by a private pond.
Image: The Frog Report

Anonymous Frog #2: “The Frog Report brings plenty of common sense to my news feed. It always cheers me up, especially when they repeat aphorisms I learned as a kid 30 years ago that everybody else is scared to publish. What a shame that nobody is allowed to have an opinion on a subjective statement of questionable factual veracity anymore.”

The third correspondent wore camouflage to hide from facial recognition technologies.
Image: The Frog Report

Anonymous Frog #3: “The Frog Report is one of those delightful, nerdy gems that most people just don’t get, like the Star Wars films, Lord of the Rings, and Doctor Who. Everyone thinks I’m kind of unusual for talking about it all the time to the annoyance of everyone else, but that’s just the kind of frog I am.”

Of course, we don’t just interview readers to get short soundbites of support to disprove basic facts. We also put great effort into showing the public that we mean business and have done something radical.

That’s right, we’re planning to spend thousands of pounds on a huge hunk of metal. The money was given to us by donors, who thought it was going to the good cause of amphibious reporting. After all, this is far more palatable to the public than the idea of actually having to take action!

The 10-foot-tall bronze frog fountain is in the shape of a giant frog spitting the pure water of unsubstantiated personal convictions on the public. It will cost approximately £30K, take the better part of five years to build, and should appear in our office in not-quite-working condition by December 2026.

Despite being very closely plagiarized from a smaller frog fountain at the Morton Arboretum in Illinois, it took four months to design. This because we spent £40K on hiring a design consultant to talk with us during those long, hard months of creative labour.

They told us to make the edges a bit more rounded to appeal to logo design trends in the age of social media, improve the Report’s image among millennials, and increase engagement on TikTok. We look forward to making this happen and would like to thank our readers for their generous contributions to this future feel-good PR stunt. We hope it will hinder our reporters’ productivity significantly while also being a fire hazard.

Featured image: Wikimedia Commons

Hot music picks for staring out the window of the Robinson Library and mourning your failure to pursue a career in advanced mathematics

Most student papers’ arts and music sections are constantly running the most dull articles–this year’s top dance club hits! Best Christmas songs! What we listen to when we study! This needs to end, especially as everyone knows the answer to the last question is either “I don’t study” or “lofi hip-hop beats, which I listen to with my quirky pet hermit crab Fitzgerald while simultaneously pretending to be the lofi girl and some boring side character in Harry Potter even though I’m twenty-two.” Here, we understand student life: we relate to the experience of staring out the window of the Robinson Library while mourning your failure to pursue a career in advanced mathematics, even though you’ve never touched a math book for more than five seconds, and definitely not when anyone could see you reading such a thing.

Disclaimer: We are not being sponsored by any of these artists to share their music in this article, especially as most of them, if they knew, would want to sue us and burn every copy of this article so that their music would not be associated with the field of mathematics.

Nothing embodies your existential angst about the world failing to recognize your yet-undemonstrated potential for being the next great mathematician like “The Winter” by Balmorhea. Something about the violin in the background just completely complements the feeling of staring out the window at the fading light above the Law School and the piano bit that comes next hints at picturing a bunch of equations you don’t understand spiralling out from the air above your head like you are in a movie…

For when the rain is pounding down on the window and you think that if you’d just tried harder at the necessary calculus to get into university, you could have solved one of the Millennium Prize Problems while also making irreverent films about your daily life on campus involving heavily-involved Rube Goldberg-esque devices and stick people made of spaghetti.

For when you are gazing at the ground at the complex pseudo-Mandelbrotian spirals of ice on the concrete while you’re walking through Leazes Park on the way to the Robinson Library, wishing you understood the complex equations behind fractals so you could look upon the world around you in an all-understanding way that would lead you to great conclusions about the life we are living. While also realizing that if you took up math now it would be too late because it would just be a skill, and not an ingrained part of your quirky-but-profound personality and outlook that is simultaneously overly naive and childlike and similar to that of a 46-year-old college professor who treats everyone around him like a 5-year-old.

For realizing you will never be that cute girl in the goldenrod-yellow ribbed sweater and high-waisted jeans who casually does linear algebra with her set of Muji 0.38mm fineliners in a pastel pink Moleskine, who is also probably teaching herself three languages and has a vlog channel about Greek mythology. You know her, the one who says that math is “easy” because it’s “logical” and “makes sense” and only passed up the opportunity to singlehandedly run a university math department at the age of sixteen because she was more interested in “living authentically”, which led to her backpacking Germany for a year. You know, the person you thought you’d be by the time you were nineteen, but now you’re twenty and you still can’t organize your own space, much less take care of a succulent and run a tumblr about speaking Swedish in the cosy hideaway of blankets and fairy lights in a Twin Peaks-looking cabin evoked by this song.

The Frog Report 2.0: how to find a mud pit

Hello frog fans, welcome back to The Frog Report!

We’re working hard to get you the freshest, froggiest news, here in our office mud pit, safe from the dangers of questioning our own preconceptions. Get some frog juice from your fridge, pull up a seat and get ready to whine about some problems that you wouldn’t bother to fix if you could.

This week we’re talking about winter. After all, as any experienced student of the amphibious world knows, most frogs living in areas that get cold tend to hibernate. Last week, we talked about the mud pit analogy; this week, we are discussing how to find your very own mud pit as the temperatures get colder.

First, you need to pick something with a lot of emotional value, preferably from your childhood, and proceed to take it way too seriously. Something like Disney, Narnia, or some play you were the lead in when you were 15 should work nicely. You have to try as hard as you can to apply commercialised, nuance-free media messages to the real world and use them to justify war, hating people you don’t like and refusing to acknowledge that some people celebrate holidays that you don’t!

Secondly, you have to defend this sturdy base of your mud pit that holds your ideas. Whenever your ideas are pointed out as being morally simplistic and scientifically baseless, you need to make a show about how you can do whatever you want to do because you don’t care what they say: you are an innocent, fun-loving person who doesn’t want mean businesspeople to
ruin your magical dream of destroying a forest to build an amusement park. Whenever it’s pointed out that there is literally nothing that supports your narrow ideas about how people in other countries should practice their religion and what women should do with their bodies, you must do your best to remind them that your sense of whimsy is infinitely more important than their lives. After all, you are just a nice traditional person who doesn’t understand why the world must victimise you by not following the social conventions of historically-inaccurate films about wealthy people.

Third and finally, you must remember that you are not the frog hiding in the mud pit, your ideas are. After all, you aren’t a coward. You believe in freedom of speech! You are brave enough to walk outside every day and defend your ridiculous, cardboard-cutout ideas from the boring, evil people who don’t believe in your wilfully ignorant fantasies and won’t let you apply them to the
way that they get their healthcare. When the world doesn’t work the way you expect it to, it has nothing to do with the fact that you make decisions according to your own whims with no idea of how they will actually play out in the future; it’s all the fault of pretentious modern liberals who have been conditioned from a young age to ruin the fun of dreamers like you.

Let your idea frog remain safe in its mud pit, where it will not have to contend with the agents of society’s downfall, like people who don’t use the Oxford comma, skirts that fall above the knee and media that is too political because it contains one message you disagree with in one scene!

Image: jenniferhernandez via Pixabay

The Frog Report: an introduction

Do you only feel comfortable viewing politics through the lens of Harry Potter?

Do you use crustaceans’ social hierarchy as an explanation for complex socioeconomic structures such as modern capitalism?

Are you looking to abandon the trends for something a bit more wet and slimy that you can use to one-up your friends at parties when they tentatively suggest that not all gamer girls are fake?

Here, we utilize the serious discipline of armchair batrachology to fashion complete, objective political reports that don’t force you to come out of the comfortable mud pit that is your political echo chamber! We don’t shame you for your ignorance here. We all want to remain in a comfortable, toothless, uncontroversial state of misinformed political self-importance that requires no critical thought or self-reflection whatsoever. What does that better reflect than a frog’s desire to find a safe, warm patch of mud in which to hibernate?

Away from influences like TikTok, PornHub, Fannibals, and the Mean Girls musical that are turning your children into liberals, frogs clearly know what’s best.

Indeed, all of world politics can be easily conceptualized through this lens. Brexit is clearly reflective of a frog’s journey to separate from the clump of eggs, lose its tail, and move onto land! The US election clearly reflects the behaviour of two massive ideological frog gods. Specifically, frog gods worshipped by citizens and presidential candidates alike, dipped in red and blue paint and hopping around on a massive map of the US!

So if you prefer a lily pad to an iPad, hop on over to the Frog Report! After all, a lily pad won’t expose your children to Buzzfeed, Doctor Who fan fiction, Nickelback, Gerard Way, or other dangerous thought leaders. Together we can mourn the end of a movement that was never really a thing in the first place while drinking, wearing bad costumes, and doing absolutely nothing about it.