2011: Year of the Hedgehog, Harbinger of Doom

In the spirit of cultural immersion, I partook in some molybdomancy on New Year's Eve.  Molybdomancy is a popular New Year's ritual in Germany, where you melt a small piece of tin, then cool it in water and interpret the resulting shape to predict how the coming year will turn out.  This is what I got:

I don't know what it looks like to you, but all of the Germans in the room blurted out almost automatically, "Oh, it's a hedgehog!" (Actually they said, "Oh, ein Igel!"  But you get the idea).  However, after Bernd's daughter looked up the divination in the molybdomancy booklet, she said, "Maybe it's not a hedgehog."  And Bernd, reading over her shoulder agreed that it was no longer a hedgehog, but perhaps a dragon.  A dragon?

Don't get me wrong, I always appreciate when people care enough about me to lie to protect my feelings, but I am an adult and a rational one at that (the majority of the time).  I can handle getting the Hedgehog of Doom.  I don't place much faith in the accurate forecasting abilities of tin, anyway.

That being said, the third time I slipped on the ice walking back to my apartment, I thought, "Damn that hedgehog."  Once I made it home, I iced my knee and caved into the temptation to google all the possible molybdomanic interpretations of the hedgehog to see what I was dealing with.  Because there are several levels of doom.  You can be doomed to die a horrifically painful death or you can be doomed to have frizzy hair.  And then there's a bunch of levels of doom in between.  And it seems to me that a hedgehog, which is actually quite a cute little animal, would be more likely to signify bad hair doom, which I've dealt with for the past 20 or so years, so what's one more?

There's not really much out there for the combination of molybdomancy and hedgehogs, but a general hedgehog search brings up multiple critters with broken limbs...

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

...And this hedgehog, who is prepared for chemical warfare:

So, yeah, the more I look at it, I think my little figurine does look like a dragon.