Why is "Rooster613" my ID? What does the 613 mean?

Or, some say, he was a turkey -- but I first heard it as a rooster... Besides, I'm not about to call myself a TURKEY!   

The original reference in the story was to the "Indian Cock" which some scholars claim is the turkey (because people apparently mistook it for a peacock) and others say it is the Red Jungle Fowl of India, which is the original ancestor of all breeds of chickens.

Wouldn't this make a really great Purim debate -- was it a turkey or was it a rooster???? We Jews can agree on the big things, such as One God, Ten Commandments... it's those annoying little details that really get us going.

Not to egg you on about this dispute, but folk tales do have a habit of mutating. Did you know that the "goose that laid the golden egg" was originally a chicken, too? So nu, what is this? A revisionist plot to deny chickens their rightful place in history? There's fowl play afoot, that's for sure... Anyway, the exact species of barnyard bird doesn't really affect the story, which I frequently tell, and which is my personal model for teaching Yiddishkeit (Judaism).

Plus, my wife and I like chickens, which we keep as pets on our farm. We also had chickens when we lived in the boundaries of Sandstone. MN -- until the town got uppity and passed an ordinance saying we could not have chickens in the backyard anymore. (My my, aren't we getting gentrified out here -- must be that "huge" population explosion from 1500 to 2500 over the last decade...)

Well, our birds are pets and we refused to kill them or give them away. We finally succeeded in getting them "grandfathered in" and were able to keep them until we moved to the farm in 1997.  Still, there are some folks in town who still think of me as "the guy with that darned rooster!" All this was happening around the time when I opened my website account, so I chose "rooster" and my ID there and well, it grew...  I guess using rooster613 as my nickname is my way of thumbing my nose at a dumb law!

So -- beware of angry roosters -- they use fowl language!

As for the number 613, that refers to the 613 mitzvot (commandments) in the Torah.  (They are communal -- no one person can do all 613, because some are for men, some for women, some for farmers, teachers, merchants, priests, soldiers, or whomever -- ALTOGETHER, the Jewish community has 613 commandments.)  "613" is a shorthand way that many Jews use on the Net to let each other know that they are Orthodox or Hasidic, similar to the way Christians use WWJD to identify themselves to each other.    BTW, I own the domain name "rooster613.com" which used to point to my website, but now points to my ebay store -- The Happy Rooster!