Grumpy

I’ve been chewing on this one for a while. A while back, I posted this photo to a weather site because I thought that it captured early summer morning mist in a thoroughly bucolic setting. It has the hand-hewn fence, the thistles, the Queen Anne’s lace and – of course – the cow (incidentally, an heirloom breed).

A bunch of people came by and left nice notes and rated the picture more highly than anything else I’ve posted to that site. 

But one person dropped by and said that anyone could take pictures of cows – in fact, she claimed to have taken some herself – but what made this picture special for her was its title (Beauvine). 

I wrote back saying that for someone who had spent 35 years in Louisiana, spelling Bo as Beaux and Go as Geaux came pretty naturally and anyone can do it – most people do, and clearly I had just done it.

So I’ve been muttering under my breath about it and I finally realized that what bothered me was the gist of her remark…that the photo was unremarkable for its visual content, as though that cow by any other name wouldn’t smell of more than – well, whatever.

Anyhow. I’m headed over to my Flickr site, because my second-most-popular photo in terms of views is an unremarkable shot of a woodchuck that Yahoo! images has keyed on as a top-indexed photo. I intend to boost its memorability and acceptance by renaming it “Geaupher.”