It's raining tadpoles in Japan town
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TOKYO (AFP) – Meteorologists in Japan say the rainy season has just started in Tokyo, but residents in a small coastal town have reported a different phenomenon -- tadpoles dropping out of the sky.
An office clerk in Nanao said he first noticed the anomaly when he heard a dull thud in a parking lot last week, news reports said. Looking around, he saw about 100 dead amphibians splattered on car windshields and the ground.
More reports followed from bewildered residents in Nanao.
"People speculate that a waterspout picked them up and dropped them from the air," an official at a local weather observatory told AFP. "But from a meteorological point of view, I have to say it is most unlikely."
"We have checked the weather conditions of last week, thinking gusts of wind might have hit the area but confirmed no damage," he said. "To be honest, I don't think it was anything caused by a weather condition."
Similar events -- in what is sometimes called the "Fafrotskies" phenomenon, short for "fall from the sky" -- have been reported around the world, with whirlwinds passing over water bodies and picking up frogs, jellyfish or other unfortunate animals before dumping them back to earth.
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Moon no longer mysterious thanks to science
2009/6/13
With a stationary front engulfing the nation, the tsuyu rainy season is here--a welcome season for rice paddies and rain-loving frogs. The weekly weather forecast on TV does not show too many rain icons yet, but I imagine I will soon get into the habit of looking up at the sky in the morning to decide whether it will rain.
But raindrops are not the only things that are pulled by gravity to suddenly fall out of the sky. Last week, about 100 tadpoles reportedly "rained" on Nanao, Ishikawa Prefecture. Nobody knows how these rice paddy denizens ascended to the sky in the first place.
According to reports, a man in a parking lot heard a pattering sound. When he turned around to look, tadpoles were strewn all over the place. The same phenomenon also occurred in Hakusan, about 80 kilometers away, where about 30 tadpoles were found. And in another town, about 10 small crucian carp apparently fell out of the sky on Tuesday.
In 2000, a "downpour" of small fish occurred in eastern Britain, blanketing the garden of a private home. In this case, a waterspout had sucked schools of fish out of the sea. Tornadoes and waterspouts are known to cause "showers" of frogs and small tortoises, but this does not explain the phenomena in Ishikawa Prefecture. Could those creatures have been disgorged by birds in flight?
While some things fall out of the sky indiscriminately, others do so in a controlled manner. The Japanese moon explorer Kaguya impacted the lunar surface on Thursday and ended its mission. Launched 21 months ago, it beamed back high-precision images of the moon's surface and the rising and setting of the "full Earth" on the lunar horizon. Thinking of all the hard work Kaguya must have done for us, I murmured my thanks.
The last job for Kaguya's project team was to control the explorer's impact and let it happen on the side of the moon that is visible from Earth. When signals from Kaguya ceased on cue, applause erupted from the team. Kaguya carried messages from about 410,000 people, publicly invited to make their wishes upon the moon. I am sure the messages were delivered safely to the Moon Rabbit--the creature that lives on the moon in East Asian folklore.
Amayo no tsuki, which literally means "the moon on a rainy night," is an old Japanese idiom denoting a person or an object one cannot actually see and can only picture in one's mind. There are still many unknowns in life that defy our imagination. The moon used to be a foremost example, but the power of science has brought it a lot closer to us.
When the moon peeks out of the clouds on a drizzly night, I think I will try to remember Kaguya, the hard worker that left a treasure trove of valuable data and disappeared silently.
--The Asahi Shimbun, June 12(IHT/Asahi: June 13,2009)
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Interesting...
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rained fish, tadpoles, wat do u hope raining next?
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Originally posted by Bangulzai:
rained fish, tadpoles, wat do u hope raining next?
semen?
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u want your umbrella to be sticky after using
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Originally posted by Pitot:
semen?
I wish it was money.