Calf and a Half

In the justly underrated Young Guns sequel, a late-80's iteration of Billy the Kid (Emilio Estevez. Really?) informs a new victim of his impending immortality. "Yoo-hoo, I'll make you famous," he hisses before cocking his prop... It's an iconic line from a forgettable film and it's stuck with me through years of staring down debutantes and dirt-bags in the name of news. Today it burbled from my lips again as I peered into the abyss of a young calf's cornea. Of course the beast regarded me with udder indifference (sorry!), but the two fat green flies floating over his eyelid did dip and wink at me in some sort of cross-species solidarity. Then again, I could have been hallucinating. It was close to a hundred degrees and my day had turned weird an hour or so earlier, when I slept-walked into the morning editorial meeting only to see three cryptic words etched in dry-erase marker by my name:

Six Legged Cow

Hoo-Boy. Either I was about to point my lens at an after-market bovine or profile a local Emo band with the worst name since Panic! at the Disco. Either way, it was gonna be a hot ticket for nothing tweaks the show-stackers like imperiled animals or troubadours in guy-liner. Me, I'm for anything that'll get me to the end of a digital timeline, be it a little elbow fiesta in a courthouse hallway or a triple-lit sit-down with Bigfoot's sister. Yes, when it comes to assignments, I got no rock-bottom. The producer staff seems to test this theory at every juncture, which is how I came to recite bad movie lines to a three week old calf with two extra legs hanging off his haunches. At no time during my spiel did a young Jon Bon Jovi wander out dressed like some Anglo-American Indian and warbling about drawing first blood, but... truthbetold, had the chick metal heartthrob sprung forth from a rhododendron bush singing 'YMCA', it would have made the day stranger by only a couple of degrees...

But enough of MY drivel. It's YOUR turn to be severely weirded out: