Wisconsin is the Badger State. Historians disagree on the exact explanation for the Wisconsin thing, except for one detail: it has nothing to do with Taxidea taxus, the American Badger. But everyone just takes "Badger State" at face value, without bothering to think the thing through. (A whole state teeming with badgers? How could that happen? Wouldn’t anyone notice?) But in fact, us badgers seem never to have been particularly common in the place at all.
The University of Wisconsin intercollegiate athletes are also known as Badgers. Another fraud: this badger can testify that in three decades he’s never seen a single "Badger", male or female, that was remotely taxoid.
It’s a mystery. Like so many things.
The deponent didn’t always live in Wisconsin. He was born in Seattle, long ago. His family moved a lot in those days, and his earliest recollection is of his mother gathering him and his brother up, setting fire to the standing crops, dynamiting the levee, and fleeing on the next choo-choo east.
Skipping over the usual schoolboy blur, we get to college. And get through college. The photo to the right shows Badger a month or so after his 21st birthday, and a month or so before graduating from a posh Ivy League establishment. He did a little modeling on the side, at the time, and is shown here dressed for his day job. (His night job required no clothes at all, except for the necktie, of course. Badger always worked with the necktie, it was a kind of signature. Besides, some of his, uh, clients found it spicy; others found it soothing. All found it something useful to hold onto.) As you can see, one drawback to all that testosterone, though, is that your body gets too big for your head. The portrait by Nakira, though recent, evokes this stage in Badger's career.
Lack of imagination has always been Badger’s best friend. Unable to think of anything except more of the same, after college he entered graduate school in the same field as his undergraduate major, thinking it would give him time to decide what he really wanted to do.
Spring 1999. More than three decades later. Badger is retiring. (All badgers are retiring, if not downright solitary; that’s not what he means.) He’s no longer exactly like the photo. He wears clothes, for example (see the portraits by Charon2 and TheWolf). His pelt is silvery; his vision assisted by spectacles out of a barrel in the five-and-dime. The lean-and-hungry look has given way to a pudgy-and-hungry look; and (as the dramatic drawing by Grimal in Badger’s Gallery also reveals) he has turned into an animal and is now nine feet tall.
Badger discovered furry quite by accident in January of 1998 while trying to amuse himself with the Internet, which is something like trying to amuse yourself in a bus station. Furry hits you or it doesn’t. Badger’s mate, when he bothers to make the effort to be tactful, calls it "weird". Other friends, when Badger has tried to tell them about furry, have cut short the explanation by such desperate measures as hurrying into a public bathroom of the wrong gender, darting into heavy traffic, or setting their hair on fire.
Badger also likes Martinis, classical music, typography (the Information Super-Highway is a stench in the typographic nostril), and traveling by train. And there are other, similarly shameful, secrets.