まさかクロはノラであるハズだったんだ...

I recently named my awesome owl hat Kuro after learning that the Japanese word for owl is fukurou, courtesy of friend-A. As I was thinking up an ID for an account today, I decided to go along the line of fukurou and did a look up on Wikipedia Japan...

...horned owls are not called fukurou in Japanese. orz

They are actually called mimizuku, though it's not taxonomically separated from the fukurou. Judging from the images on Wikipedia (I'm too lazy to look up the different species on Google), I think Kuro is closest to the Eurasian eagle owl.

To summarize, the Japanese for the Order of Strigiformes (Owl) is フクロウ目/梟目, which contains the Families of Strigidae (typical owl) and Tytonidae (barn owl), the Japanese of which are フクロウ科 and メンフクロウ科 respectively. Under the フクロウ科 (owl family), the Japanese calls the regular owl フクロウ(fukurou) and the horned type ミミズク(mimizuku). The scientific name of the Eurasian eagle owl is Bubo bubo; it's called ワシミミズク(washimimizuku) in Japanese under the ワシミミズク属.

See, I get my science(?) fix outside of anime, too. XD

So why was Kuro supposed to be Nora?
ミミズク --> のらみみ (never watched/read it, only knew the title) --> ノラ　(take a wild guess where I get this from... that's right, FF XIII)

Kuro was a no-brainer: フクロウ --> クロ

Kuro shall continue to be Kuro. I'll just name my next horned owl (if there will be one) object Nora. XD

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Thought I'll just quickly document it here for future reference. I won't deny that my laziness of not wanting to write a detailed account in a separate post plays a factor here.

My stupid Vista was under a confused spell a week or so ago, so I (after some painstaking trouble shooting to determine the culprit) uninstalled some Windows updates to salvage the beyond-all-hope OS (I'm waiting for my Windows 7 shipment) without doing a format & reinstall. Vista dragged Winamp down with it during the poorly organized rebellion so I ended up having to download the latest version of Winamp and do a fresh install.

I completely forgot that Winamp and Google Talk try to kill each other when I display the current music track on Google Talk. orz

Here's the fix copy&paste from the Google forum post:
Step 1: Go to the root directory of Winamp which is usually in C:\Program Files\Winamp\
Step 2: Now create an empty file (Right click the mouse -> New -> Text document), so the default file would be like “New Text Document.txt”.
Step 3: Rename the above file to “winamp.m3u” and save.
Step 4: Close Winamp and Google Talk. Now open again and Your Show Current music track status should work like a charm !

There! Time to go back to my pudding ice bar...