Dogs, dogs everywhere.

[Lanfear]

Check this article out.

http://www.slate.com/id/2256007

Let's see if we can find exceptions to this rule.

[Wizard of Oz]

.. Lanfear it poses an interesting proposition doesn't it .. why should poor canines be the harbingers of plot changes ?? .. why not cats meowing ?? .. horses neighing ?? .. although I have experienced the occasional "cattle lowing" ..

WoZ snoring

[zmjezhd]

Well, I suppose it coluld be a tried trope as the author implies, but it might go back to a time when animals and their activities did augur the future. (In a pre-novelistic times, it might have been cock's crowing or a hawk screeching, and geese honking did save Rome from those pesky Gauls.) Dog's barking in the distance might remind us of a time when we huddled around an open fire and heard wolves howling in the distance. You might want to check some works on folklore and see if dogs barking is a motif in folk narratives, and what other animals might be involved.

[Shelley]

Hark, hark! The dogs do bark!
The beggars are coming to town . . .

[trolley]

Even if a dog doesn't bark in the distance, there's a pretty good chance that a siren will wail, a child will cry or a train whistle will blow. I'm sure that, somewhere, a duck quacks but no one ever seems to think it's worth mentioning.

[Wizard of Oz]

.. trolley I do know that frogs ribetting and crickets chirping do have a soothing all-is-well feeling of sitting around in the evening at peace with the world .. generally just before the mad axe murderer bursts out of the trees chasing a blood soaked terrified semi-naked female .. but back to the ducks quacking ..........

WoZ burping

[Bobinwales]

Have you noticed that everyone is avoiding mentioning the echo of a duck’s quack?

[Erik_Kowal]

I suspect it's because Daisy has unfortunately been eaten by a fox. Discussion of her quack's echo, or the lack thereof, would consequently be in poor taste; following her encounter with the fox, the unavailability of an echo must necessarily be, at the very least, a subject that is liable to stir up painful or melancholy sentiments.

[Ken Greenwald]

I heard a tree barking in the distance, but I was unfamiliar with its timber.
_________________

Ken – June 23, 2010

[Erik_Kowal]

It was probably barking mwahahah!ad.

[Phil White]

.. trolley I do know that frogs ribetting and crickets chirping do have a soothing all-is-well feeling of sitting around in the evening at peace with the world ..

I'm sure we've mentioned it before, but very few frogs "ribett" or "redeep". Just one species of frog makes that typical noise: Hyla regilla or the Pacific Treefrog. It happens to be widespread around Hollywood, so when the early sound effects engineers were told to "go record a frog", that was the sound they came back with, and it has been the stereotypical sound of frogs in movies ever since.

As so often, the source of this useless factiod was that magnificent English show QI (the clip unfortunately finishes before the snippet of information about the Pacific Treefrog).

A nice page on TV tropes:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... undEffects

[Bobinwales]

I have caught QI out several times in the past. I am sure that they said that Herod's wife, Salome's mother, was named Doris. He was married to Doris, but she was his first wife. Still a good piece of knowledge, but just a little less interesting in that it wasn't the famous queen.

[Phil White]

QI have set up a quibbles blog just for such anoraky comments (although nobody has yet quibbled with "Doris"). I have to say, I am a sucker for the show.

And just to prove how right you are: Here is the clip. And here is a site with a resident anorak who has corrected the Doris issue.

Oh dear, I appear to be getting anoraky about QI....

[Wizard of Oz]

.. Phil so sorry for the confusion .. I was actually invoking geek-speak to imply that Aussie frogs are very intelligent .. ribetting actually refers to the action of mulling over epsilon conjectures of semistable elliptic curves whilst paving the way towards Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem .. it is a verb formed from the name of the famous mathematics geek Kenneth Alan Ribet .. bloody clever frogs our bell frogs ..

WoZ farting (pardon me)

[christinecornwall]

QI have set up a quibbles blog just for such anoraky comments (although nobody has yet quibbled with "Doris"). I have to say, I am a sucker for the show.

Oh dear, I appear to be getting anoraky about QI....

Can you fill me in about anoraky, because this is what I found...
Main Entry: an·o·rak
Pronunciation: \ˈa-nə-ˌrak\
Function: noun
Etymology: Dan, from Inuit (Greenland) annoraaq
Date: 1922
: a usually pullover hooded jacket long enough to cover the hips