Frog

Once upon a time, in jungles far, far away, there lived a frog and a grasshopper without any names. Now, the reason they didn't have names is because nobody knew they existed. Virtually all the birds in these Ecuadorean rain forests had fancy scientific names in Latin. All the monkeys and cats, like the deadly jaguar, had names. But the frog and the grasshopper were unnamed and unknown. Part of the problem was that the two animals lived in forests so remote that the "name people" - biologists - hardly ever visited.

John Cleese has gone undercover - so to speak. The strikingly tall, ingeniously funny former "Monty Python" comedian is in "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" and "The Swan Princess," but most filmgoers will have trouble recognizing him. "The Swan Princess" is an animated fairy tale in which the Englishman's distinctive, acerbic voice is totally unrecognizable behind a talking frog's French accent. For Kenneth Branagh's version of the horror classic, Cleese disguised himself so thoroughly with buck teeth and flowing white locks that he looks more like something out of "Interview with the Vampire" than the embattled Basil Fawlty.

Say your name is Steve Poses and you look out on Locust Street one fine, late summer day in 1985 to find your flagship restaurant, Frog, getting squished in the stampede to the trendy new DiLullo Centro. Do you roll over and play dead? Heck no. You get hopping. It had been five years since my last review visit to Frog at the restaurant's elegant Locust address, and though my 1981 assessment had been enthusiastic, subsequent meals I'd had there were not always impressive. A new look at the restaurant seemed overdue.

Philadelphians have come to take the existence of scores of palate- pampering restaurants for granted. Those distant days when "dining out" here was almost a choice between pretzel vendors all but forgotten. Yet last week, headlines about the closing of just one Philadelphia restaurant stirred up those old memories and sent shivers through the ranks of the dining-out set. Pate-bearing forks paused in mid-air. Tastebuds trembled. Many people just could not help wondering: Is Philadelphia's legendary "Restaurant Renaissance" in trouble?

There were no crowds fighting to get in the door at 1520 Locust St., no weeping customers and no clumps of nostalgic waiters locking arms and bursting into "Auld Lang Syne. " The Frog was never that kind of place to begin with. And when it closed for good last night, the Center City restaurant that many people credit with launching a culinary renaissance in Philadelphia went quietly. "We were delighted that everything on the menu was the same, and there was no sense of last-minute closing frenzy," said Frederick Kent, who heads the music department at the Free Library.

Over the last two decades, the entrepreneurial energy and imaginative meals of Steve Poses have established him as the rumpled king of Philadelphia's restaurant renaissance. Now Poses is cooking up another surprise for the city's dining public: Frog, his 14-year-old flagship restaurant, is about to be transformed into . . . well, not even Poses is sure. "It's no secret that the Philadelphia restaurant industry has become incredibly competitive over the past few years," he said yesterday.

It's not news that sex is a major theme of modern advertising. It's used in everything from peddling jeans, as in the kiddie porn of Calvin Klein, to gorgeous women flashing long limbs as they get out of sleek cars. But recently, the Budweiser beer people came up with one of the most peculiar sexually suggestive ads I've ever seen. As most TV viewers know, the current Budweiser ads feature frogs. In one commercial, three frogs make croaking sounds. And eventually, the three sounds come together to form "Budweiser.

Everyone knows the story about the frog that turned into a prince. Here's a tale about a Frog that turned into a swordfish. The restaurant space at 1524 Locust St. - Frog, in its first restaurant incarnation - has given way to Cafe L'Espadon, which emphasizes seafood and fresh pasta. L'Espadon is French for swordfish. In between, the location was Jasmine, an upscale Chinese restaurant that turned out lovely fare. Cafe L'Espadon likewise has a serious kitchen. But it's hard to chase the ghost of a restaurant that had so many fond followers.

Vinny Prospal never set out to become the John Rocker of Canada. Prospal, a former Flyers winger from the Czech Republic who now plays for Ottawa, thought nothing of it when he called Montreal defenseman Patrice Brisebois a "Frog" during a Dec. 27 encounter. The slur is a common one in hockey, a sport in which anyone with a Native American background is invariably nicknamed "Chief. " "I didn't know there was anything wrong with that word," Prospal said last night after the Senators' 1-1 tie with the host Flyers.

If you could time-travel back to the Jurassic period, you would see all sorts of dinosaurs, but you might also glimpse a more familiar creature - a frog, according to a new finding by University of Pennsylvania evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin. After years of painstakingly putting together tiny bone fragments, Shubin and colleague Farish Jenkins from Harvard University have reconstructed the skeleton of a frog that hopped among the dinosaurs nearly 200 million years ago. This finding of the earliest true frog will help paleontologists understand how the frog evolved its unique jumping ability - an adaptation that they believe allowed the frog to spread around the world and persist, barely changed, for so many millions of years.

That JPMorgan Chase could lose $2 billion in risky trades involving bonds, with the nation still recovering from a recession caused by big banks, might remind newspaper readers of the parable about the frog and the scorpion. That's the one where a fearful frog agrees to give a beguiling scorpion a ride across a river on his back, only to be stung halfway across. "Why?" the frog asks, noting that they both will now drown. "I couldn't help myself," replied the scorpion. "It's my nature.

By Carlos Martínez Rivera The world's frogs and toads are in the midst of a crisis that has been compared to the fall of the dinosaurs, with more than a third of species in danger of extinction. Many others, such as the beautiful Panamanian golden toad, have already disappeared from the wild. Why should you care? Simply put, frogs matter. Beyond Kermit and their place in our national psyche - and each species' intrinsic value as a unique biological marvel - frogs and toads are important components of many ecosystems.

The old-school Disney princess - we're talking Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty here - sweeps the hearth, does the dishes, and waits around, warbling "Some day my prince will come. " The new-school Disney princess - think Mulan and Tiana of The Princess and the Frog - pursues her dream (saving her nation, the family's bacon) and in so doing discovers a prince pursuing her. In truth, the jazzy, pizzazzy, and enchanting Frog is a little old-school and a little new. Old-school in that it's the product of hand-drawn animation rather than the digital sort.

When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are - so goes the old Disney theme song, one that explains the universal resonance of its classic animation. In recent years, though, "who you are" has come to matter, hence the ethno-political scrutiny that's greeted recent heroines like Mulan and Pocahontas, and now Tiana, the first African-American character in what the company calls its "princess line. " Early drafts and images reportedly prompted objections that led to changes in Tiana's name and appearance, and the trajectory of her story.

In 2004, when the family musical A Year With Frog and Toad made its debut at the Arden Theatre, circumstances were slightly different for its stars, Jeffrey Coon (Frog) and Ben Dibble (Toad). Though Coon and Dibble were busy actors, they have since become two of the area's hottest theater names and mainstays of its major stages. This season, Dibble played the title role in the Arden's season opener, Candide. Coon barely had enough time to change out of the T-shirt he wore as Stanley Kowalski in the Walnut Street Theatre's recent production of A Streetcar Named Desire before again donning Frog's striped jacket.

The Main Line Art Center in Haverford will host "The Art of Illustration: Children's Book Fair," featuring more than 10 illustrators, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday. Participating illustrators include Robert and Lisa Papp, Roger Roth and Gene Barretta, all of whom will show their work, share drawing tips, and talk about their inspiration. Their books also will be sold. Resident teaching artist Patty Greenspoon will teach "Make and Illustrate Your Own Book" workshops for youngsters at noon, 1 and 2 p.m. A valentine gift-making workshop is scheduled Saturday at the center where families can create their own paper, decorate boxes and illustrate cards for loved ones.

First, Blair Hedges and a colleague discovered the world's smallest frog. Five years later, in 2001, he reported finding the smallest lizard. Now the Pennsylvania State University biology professor has completed what you might call the tiny trifecta: Under a sun-baked rock on the island of Barbados, he and his wife found a new species of reptile that can coil up comfortably on a quarter. Meet Leptotyphlops carlae. The globe's smallest snake. "It's kind of a weird coincidence," admitted Hedges, who published the results yesterday in the scientific journal Zootaxa.

The Elmwood Park Zoo in Norristown and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia are inviting families to jump into leap-year weekend with workshops, exhibits, and activities focused on reptiles and amphibians. The Elmwood Park Zoo will start this weekend celebrating the Year of the Frog with a Leap Day Amphibian Crisis Family Workshop at 6 tonight. The workshop, for children ages 6 and older and their caretakers, will address issues such as pollution, habitat loss, and competition affecting amphibians all over the world and in backyards.

Women like to say they'd kiss a lot of frogs to get to a prince. Men are not so hardy. Few of us would kiss anything to get anything, since for us the kiss (and related activity) is not a means to an end. It is the end. Woe, then, to the title character in the offbeat comic fable "Penelope. " She is a young lady (Christina Ricci) cursed by a witch to have the nose of a pig - a curse that can only be lifted when a young man of noble birth agrees to marry her. Mom and Dad (Catherine O'Hara, Richard E. Grant)

The birds and the bees. And the frogs. And, maybe, someday, us. Birds, bees and frogs have something sad in common: There are now many fewer of them. In some cases (birds) the cause is clear; in others (bees) it's opaque; in still others (frogs) it's complicated. But these dyings-off are happening. They're real. They can't be laughed off with glib sarcasm. No, don't panic - rather, accept these as true harbingers of profound processes in which we play an important role.