:-( I get the whole “red in tooth and claw” thing, but I hope the goat died quickly.

That was spectacular. Seven minutes well-spent. Previously, I had always imagined you hunting field mice and small marsupials to bring home to the table. This changes everything.

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

If it’s any comfort, I think a fall from that height is probably one of the least painful ways to go in the natural world.

Mike: we also totally eat monkeys. Well… one man actually put it best in a Christmas card.

Well, as awesome as that eagle looked, I gotta give some props to my totemic kin, some of whom were charging that eagle pretty fiercely.

Fricking ancestors, fricking being named after young deer, and then having a fricking species of small Mexican deer named after young deer hundreds of years later…

I don’t suppose it would help to say that I like the image of a delicate-stepping, noble deer better than the cold cruelty of an imperial eagle? Or that I apparently live at the end of the town? (Which fucks no-one’s shit.)

No.

One German etymology of my name is “gravedigger”—which would arguably fuck up the shit of humans, but not baby goats.

So I’m ok with that.

As someone named after something that also fucks up shit (though arguably more maliciously and with less cause than the Eagle), I salute you. Also, this is for you. Spotted on a blackboard at the Pratt Institute and captured with my godawful camera phone.

A young deer? Huh. I always figured hb’s name was somehow related to a badger.

And though my own name isn’t associated with any critter, I think we all know my totem can take care of itself.

Hm. That comment error was unexpected.

Yeah, it’s been doing weird things with comments recently.

M, that photograph is like a gift that will keep on giving through the years to come. I have, of course, immediately posted it on Flickr:

http://flickr.com/photos/neagle/2439494655/

Also: “Gravedigger” is an awesome last name, Megan. If you really consider yourself an American, I think you ought to abandon the link to your now-irrelevant Germanic origins and embrace “Gravedigger” as your literal last name.

AWESOME!!!

My last name has French etymology and means a furrier or skinner (think pelt rather than owl regurgitation or rabbit shit.) Surely this also qualifies as fucking up animals, if in a less fascinating manner.

Well, mine is widely taken in this country to be an ethnic slur — especially as it’s spelled on my birth certificate rather than my driver’s license (three or four languages and two or three alphabets in four generations can make a mess of things) — and in some variation designates in most of the languages of Europe a nationality that I am not. It doesn’t really fuck shit up, unless you count the ethnic jokes about screen doors on submarines and all that.

Differently spelled it’s also some variety of fish. Etymologically, I think it designates a person from a flat or cleared land — maybe farmland? It was presumably imposed arbitrarily by hostile authorities on my patronymically-named ancestors. But I guess there’s an outside chance I’m descended from a rabbi who fucked up the shit of other talmudic interpreters.