Wednesday, July 10, 2002

Like most websearchers, I will from time to time enter my own name into Google to see what my doppelganger is up to. Over the years, I've found several sites by and about Onken's and decided to collect them at Onken.org, which I maintain and of which I am the sole visitor. One of my favorite Onken sites is Uwe Onken Fishing Tours. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the site, beside my longing to go on one of his tours, is his icon.
Sure he's got pictures of people with salmon, trout, pollack, and pike (and lots of halibut), but his icon has a picture of a fish's head that doesn't look very good to eat. After searching through his site, I finally found pictures of guests who had caught the ugly beast, which he referred to as Steinbeißer ("rock-biter"). I looked it up in my German-English dictionary, which translated Steinbeißer as "loach." Now I had a tropical fish tank years back, and I never saw a loach as large and ugly as that thing! So, I did some more searching and found another German site that gave Seewolf as an alternate name for Steinbeißer. The head turned out to be that of a wolf fish, a coldwater blenny that can grow to a meter in length. I'm told they are delicious and make handsome purses.

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