Creek Running North

You might have seen those little icons next to individual blog comments on other blogs — I had them here for a while, and may well again if I ever figure out how to work the CSS formatting so that they work the way I want them to. They’re called gravatars, and they’re free, and you can get one too if you so desire.

I’ve been using a head-shot of a short-faced bear as mine for a while. The short-faced bear, Arctodus simus, was the largest, nastiest carnivore in North America up until about ten thousand years ago, when it went extinct.

I cropped my gravatar image from the painting you see here (click the thumbnail for a larger view.) And there’s no easy way to provide credit information in a gravatar without messing up the design with little hard-to-read text, so I’m doing it here. The painting is the work of Carl Dennis Buell, a regular commenter here (with the handle OGeorge). Carl, aside from being a hell of a guy, is an insanely talented illustrator whose work has appeared all over the place, in books by Carl Zimmer, Ernest Callenbach, even John Muir (in reprint, silly.) He’s also in a recent issue of Earth Island Journal.

Carl’s a busy guy these days, which has meant a delay in an art and writing blog he’s wanted to put together for some time. I can’t wait, myself. In the meantime, we his fans can check out more of his work in the rotating upper left corner of PZ Myers’ blog Pharyngula — and in PZ’s gravatar. Thanks, Carl, for letting me use the bear.