Saturday (January 28th, 2017) was Chinese New Year! It’s now year 4714, the year of the fire rooster! Holy smokes, that sounds like an intense animal. Ferrebeekeeper is going to celebrate the spring festival with a whole week devoted to chickens (especially roosters). I write a lot about other animals, but I owe a truly inconceivable debt to chickens, since chicken and rice are my staple foods. Indeed, I eat so many chickens that, I am probably going to get to the afterlife and find hundreds of thousands of angry spirit chickens waiting for me with flame eyes and needle sharp ghost beaks. A week of pro-chicken posts can only help when that day comes.
Tomorrow we will talk about the ancestral wild chickens—the red junglefowl of the subcontinent—and how they became humankind’s favorite bird (if you look at the scale of chicken farming, I think you will agree that no mighty eagle, or super-intelligent pet parrot can compare in our collective esteem). We have some other observations to make about chickens as domestic animals and some rooster anecdotes. A brain-damaged rooster was the animal sidekick in Disney’s latest (amazing) princess film. My parents have an ugly multicolor rooster who is somehow endearing himself to them. Before then though, so I have something on this first workday of, uh, 4714, I would like to present these 4 chicken themed flounders.
The one at the top is a fairly straightforward rooster, greeting the dawn from the back of a turbot which is swimming between classical urns and stars which look like flowers. We will talk more later about the second flounder/chicken hybrid (which not only evokes the lost world of zoomorphs, but also speaks to my roommate’s latest creative/spiritual/magical pursuits (?). This leaves the third flatfish (in glowing green), a clear allegory of the serpent tempting humankind to taste chickens (as various mythical animals and imps excluded from creation look on from beyond the charmed circle).
Finally, there is a contortionist aiming her bow at a target beyond this world as a glowing multicolor cock stares her beadily in the eye. The sable flounder is surrounded by bats in the crepuscular sky as well as an armadillo and a horny toad. We will talk more about chickens tomorrow, but these images should give you plenty to think about as you start off the new year.
ferrebeekeeper 
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February 1, 2017 at 7:16 PM
Neomys Sapiens
So it’s: Wayne Ferrebee, Devourer of chickens?
When a certain company, to which I’m related, experienced a change of ownership recently, a internal symbolic figure was presented in the shape of a really moronic blue rubber duck. Of course, the darker and more creative minds, me among them, made already lots of fun about it.
When we were looking for a most symbolically relevant devourer of ducks, a coworker, who was not involved up to this point, suddenly looked up and stated: ‘that would be me!’ Because, as he told us thereafter, he orders duck from a chinese food service about twice a week, sometimes more.
Then he had a similar vision of afterlife as you, whereupon we secretly installed one of those asian ‘one hundred thousand ducks on a street’ photographs as wallpaper on his desktop!
February 4, 2017 at 12:04 PM
Beatrix
What would you call a cross between a flounder and a rooster? A flooster?