Missing Link

A few posts back, I wrote an introduction to Fred the Frog. In that post, I promised to write more about Fred’s (mis)adventures. Since I’m not one to go back on a promise (unless I forget, which is always possible….), here’s another tale about fred. This is the “True Hollywood Story: A Frognapping gone wrong”.

First, let me start out by saying that I don’t remember all of the details of how this happened; it was over a year ago and the finer details got misplaced somewhere in the rusty steel trap I call my brain. Keeping that in mind, if someone reading this knows of the story and thinks “hey, that’s not how it happened”, you’re probably very correct. Parts of this will likely be completely made up.

So, one day, about a little over a year ago, I got back home to my VIP suite (You spend more than 4 years at that school and you can live wherever the hell you want on that campus….) and knew instinctively that something was not quite right. I couldn’t at the time figure out what it was. I checked my email in my office and chatted on AIM with the guy across the hall (Bob Jansen) for a few minutes while pondering what was out of place. After a few minutes of that I went to watch TV and just as I turned on Comedy Central I realized what it was… Fred was not there. Usually, Fred would stay in bed and sleep all day (and then rub that fact into my face when I got home). Other days he’d be sitting on the sofa watching tv when I got home. Occasionally, I would catch him looking at inappropriate pictures on the Internet. Today, he was doing none of the above. I looked around for a few minutes seeing if I could find him, and was growing more worried as time went on.

It was about 10 minutes into the search when I found it. A note. A poorly written note. It said simply: “ey kant go on. ey am 2 tired. Ey wil mis u. – Fred”. I then noticed the second thing that was “wrong”, the window was open. Stepping over to the window, I saw what was the remenants of a “crime scene”, with a distinctly frog-shaped chalk outline. I cried.

On the surface, it looked very much like Fred had been upset about something and decided to end his little froggie life. I couldn’t figure out what, though. He had seemed particularly chipper that morning. I couldn’t see any warning signs that would point to the little guy killing himself. That was probably because he hadn’t really killed himself, it was staged. Pretty quickly I made the realization that Fred can’t write… his hands are incapable of holding writing instruments. Add to that the fact that no police agency would actually draw a chalk outline of a frog.

As it turns out, it was a frognapping. Ann’s stuffed Bunny (named Ginger Bunny), had some of her friends come find Fred and bring him to her, because she thought he was cute. Ann caught on to the plot and recovered fred and brought him back to me (mostly) unharmed. He did have a lump on his head where one of the goons hit him with a AA battery, though. A strategically placed band-aid made him good as new, though.

Ever since then, Fred has insisted on learning martial arts, and can often be found sneaking around setting up boobytraps whenever I’m not home to protect him. He did, however, start dating Ginger Bunny… but that’s another story.

[Edit: 11/20/06 6:08pm EST] Fred wants it to be known that he reads all comments on here, so if you want to say something to Fred you can leave it in a comment here.