EXPLODING TOADS. Toads are exploding in Germany. As many as 1,000 toads have exploded in recent days, sending their "innards" shooting up to 3 feet in the air. (Go ahead, take a moment to stop and ponder.) This is pretty cool, in an apocalytic sort of way. I'm thinking of the plagues God sent on Egypt. No, I don't think it is because a German was elected pope.

However, if you showed a split screen of all the cardinals walking around in their red robes and caps with the exploding frogs on the other half, you'd have a pretty good start to a horror movie.

Anyway.

A veterinarian thinks he has it figured out. It's the crows. No, that is not another plague. Well, not exactly anyway, although if you have been in Cityview at dusk, that looks like a horror movie with all the crows flying around and screeching. If frogs were exploding too, even I might freek out and take my shirts to a different dry cleaners.

Anyway.

This vet named Mutschmann, of course, thinks it happens becaue the toads have been attacked by crows who want to eat their livers. It is starting to sound apocalytic, isn't it? Evidently, toads swell up in self defence, like teen age boys. But when their livers are ripped out and eaten by nasty crows, their stomachs get punctured, blood vessels explode, lungs collapse and the other organs come out, according to Mutschmann the vet.

Actually, the plague explanation now sounds simpler and, frankly, less gruesome.

So, now German toads have a new boogey man. When little toad children won't eat their vegetables, momma toads say "if you don't eat your vegetables, the crows will come and peck you and make you explode, and your guts will fly into the air and the crows will eat your liver!"

But, relax, because a few years later, toad philosphers will come along and say it was just an old toad's tale made to scare baby toads into eating vegetables and was an expression of the superstition that crows were evil when really they all just had bad crowhoods and suffered from stereotyping and if toads would just get to know them, toads would love them and crows would love them back and they would all sing kum ba ya together, at least until one of the crows pecked the toad singers and made them explode and ate their livers, cackling in toad blood lust until dusk, when they get together and say "let's go to Cityview!"