or maybe a 3-D model to supplement razib’s latest scientific findings… the horns resemble a double helix, to me

With your eating prowess I am sure, you can swallow down a whole goat – horns and all.

I bow before thee, O bottomless pit!

Imagine eating that goat. Mmmm…endangered mutton.

Arcadia, the scene of Pan’s “movements” was/is both an actual locale of rustic, simple peace and an imagined utopia.

It occurs to me that the topographies of Arcadia and Kashmir must share similarities in that they provide suitable habitats for goat populations. There seems to be a thread/theme here: Arcadia as a synonynm for peace, the situation in Kashmir, and goats.

In any case your blog reminded me of Gary Wills article, “The Real Arcadia”, the lead essay in the summer 1998 American Scholar.

I pulled it off the shelf (this is why I keep these things around)and skimmed through it. Here are two quotes:

What I found this first evening while walking I would afterward experience whenever I drove the rough little back roads of Arcadia: one must be prepared, early and late in the day, to wait for sheep or goats to get where they are going. On the very next morning, while stopped behind a bickering flow of horned billies and and hornless kids, I glanced to the right, into the low sun of morning, and felt my heart stop a second as Pan himself returned my gaze. A careful second look reminded me of something I once knew but had long forgotten-that goats can stand on their hind feet, like dogs. But they have a higher, slimmer profile when they do. What I had seen was a kid on its hind legs slowly pawing a branch as it grazed its buds. This trick of turning biped, along with the sly look some goats contrive at times, no doubt contributed to a vivid apprehension of Pan’s nearness in the Arcadian cult. In the iconography of the god, he is often shown as “spying Pan,” turning a quick intense glance on the viewer, lifting at times a hand (or hoof) to shade his eyes from the bright sun. He has the sprightliness of his half-goat nature. The Homeric Hymn to Pan called him Quick on the cliffs where scampering goats are seen.

There is no doubt about Pan’s “talent”. Here’s another short paragraph:

Pan was no Disney creature frisking about. He was majestic in his willfulness, slyness, and anger. One of his cult titles was Goatboy-Penetrator Pan – a title illustrated on a famous vase now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where Pan swoops after a goatherd preceded by several feet of his own phallus.

Those aren’t horns, those are pasta. Or maybe spirulina.

Going to Munnar I recall seeing the Nilgiri tahr(1,2,3) which although not as impressive as the Markhor, did give new meaning to the phrase “as sure-footed as a mountain goat”(1,2,3).

That’s a goat?! A six foot tall goat? I mean, I accept the fact that India is bigger (overbearingly) than the rest of its piddly South Asian neighbours…but I didn’t know its goats felt that way too…

I just did the math and that comes out to 4.4 goats a “herd.” Maybe they should have said 35 “families.”