Would you like to go up on A-Deck and look at them with me?

[austin_dern]

More guesses as to what Cocoa the Coati is, based on just watching and listening around his enclosure at the Popcorn Park Zoo (and I should mention the photographs and the guesses are wholly unsynchronized, although the guesses I overheard I did hear in this order; the pictures are just ones I took as he ambled around and got particularly excited when dinner approached):

	``Coatimundi.'' (Clearly someone had advance word, since the plaque just says ``coati''. Still, he's riding high and waiting for the scritches people.)
	``Anteater.'' (He's not saying he'd turn down a plate of ants, if offered, just that it's really not the point of things.)
	``Skunk.'' (Really? This is two people who say skunk somehow.)
	``Coyote.'' (This has got to be a misreading of the plaque.)
	``Sloth.''
	``A raccoon crossed with ... '' and I couldn't hear the rest. (Cocoa chooses to curl up and hide away from the rest of this.)

Coming up next: out-takes! Or some such fripperies.

Trivia: Antoine-Augustin Permentier is credited with creating demand among the French common people for potatoes by growing a crop in field just outside Paris (donated by the King), with guards posted throughout the season. The guards were withdrawn when the potatoes were ready and the curious locals supposed to have rushed in to steal the presumably valuable crop. Source: An Edible History Of Humanity, Tom Standage. (I don't have specific reason to think Standage is reporting this incorrectly, it just sounds awfully urban-legendish is all.)

Currently Reading: Doctor Mirabalis, James Blish.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

The 'skunk' pictures is exceedingly teethy. Yipe!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there are not a lot of pictures of coati (or raccoon) teeth on the web, which is probably for the better, as they seem to intimidate people. When I was still going through the phase of old friends discovering that I had not made the species up after all,the second round of shocked discoveries on friends' part would be getting a glimpse of teeth, sometimes in action, sometimes just along the way to a yawn.