Sunday, October 17, 2004 5:44 AM
by
will
Satan Frog
I have to write briefly about Satan Frog.
I have lived for nine years in Singapore, a place with year-round ninety-percent humidity. In Singapore the relentless humidity slowly destroys everything you own: Cameras, photographs, books, clothes, buildings, and whatever. When I first moved to Singapore the humidity softened my earwax and made me temporarily deaf. Really. One thing no one needs in Singapore is an electric humidifier.
Beijing is dry, especially in autumn and winter. It is on the edge of the Gobi Desert (which creeps a little closer every year), and the cold air sweeping down from the arctic has swapped its moisture for dust in Mongolia. The moment I moved back to Beijing, after my two-week break in Singapore, my skin dried out, my lips cracked and my scalp disintegrated completely, all of which surely impressed the girls in the office.
So people use electric humidifiers, which are small appliances that turn a reservoir of water into soothing water vapor that is blown into your desiccated home or office or wherever.
When I first looked at my apartment I noticed this odd appliance sitting on top of the shoe cabinet. I thought it was an air freshener on steroids. It was about thirty centimeters high (Americans: a foot) and shaped like a cross between a frog and a mushroom, with cute little feet, a huge, disconcerting grin, and two bulbous blue eyes. The head was a transparent, green reservoir holding about three liters of water. A knob stuck out right where the navel would be, if either frogs or mushrooms had navels.
I didn’t know a humidifier from my ass (which occasionally has humidifying properties of its own, but that’s another story), and it was only by looking at the inventory on my lease that I figured out what it was. On a lark, I turned it on. With a gentle hum, two white streams of water vapor began streaming from the frog; one from each eyeball.
Thus was Satan Frog born.
Despite the unnerving appearance of a leering plastic frog with a maniac grin and smoking eyes, the humidifier is soothing and pleasant, and I am a convert. When my wife was recently here for two weeks she put Satan Frog on her nightstand and slept comfortably in his moist and only vaguely sinister embrace. Give thanks for Satan Frog! All bow before Satan Frog!
So if you live in a dry environment, check out an electric humidifier. It is guaranteed to restore the youthful glow to your mummified mien. If you can find one, I highly Aipu Dianqi’s incomparable Satan Frog model. I write this of my own, free will, and am certainly not under Satan Frog’s dark influence.
Comments:
re: Satan Frog
Here in exotic Ohio I switch between a humidifier and de-humidifier in fall and spring. I only get a 2 month break in fall and spring from needing one or the other.
Sure wish I had one that looked like a frog though ;-)
From across the globe
I'm under Satan Frog's spell
...send me one?
As intriguing as this demon amphibian sounds, I fear that were I to set one up in my new abode in Chicago, the arctic gusts racing in from across Lake Michigan would turn the little puffs of eye vapor into snow.
The Windy City. It's more than just a catch phrase from the Chicago Bureau of Tourism. I was born in New York, of Russian Heritge and a small part of my long term memory and genetic makeup still remembers and adapts to cold weather, in spite of 20+ years of getting softened up in California. My poor wife though, raised in Hawaii.. Well, hopefully she won't bump me off in my sleep and move to Arizona.
Hey Will,
Sounds like a great little device - you should export them!
How are the cats reacting to this device?
Back home in The Netherlands we used to hang terracota 'vases' onto our grilled shaped heating system to moisterise the air a bit during winter. Mostly clean white and blending in with the grills they formed a basis part of every household.