Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Auspices

So last spring, in a Livy-reading-induced bout of whimsy, I decided to take my auspices (which is to say, look at birds in the near vicinity and "interpret" their movements as they pertained to my fate). The picture above is what I saw (those are deflated balloons below, in case you were wondering). At the time I interpreted it as a bad sign (and considering how the rest of that day played out, I was probably not wrong in this assumption), although last night I translated an anecdote about a guy who in the middle of a one-on-one battle with a huge, ferocious Gaul and had a crow land on his helmet and then go attack the Gaul for him, after which the crow returned to his helmet to just hang out and be groovy, so maybe crows are all well and good.

I am obviously really cool and popular.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Really, Tessa? You've been my friend for HOW long and you're just realizing that crows are all well and good? Geez.

Samuel S. Hunter said...

Crows have the same brain mass/body mass ration as chimps.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows.html