Yoshe Yunibrau (with Glenda)

I will grant you this, upon first meeting, Yoshe Yunibrau can appear quite unprepossessing.

Even after one discovers that husky Yoshe is known far and wide throughout South Central Europe as “Yoshe, the Yiddish Yodeling Tyrolean”, he still seems — um, well— distinctly raggedly regressive and rudimentally rough about all his edges.

And, despite a formal introduction to the glamorous Glenda, his adorable and seemingly perpetual ovine companion, one still can’t help but think that this guy is a really just a throwback to some lost earlier age (say, the Pliestocene, maybe?).

Maybe it’s those nasty toenails of his. The crackerjack keratin carapace cladding Yoshe’s distal digits appears much more like the claws of Tyrannosaurus rex or Velociraptor mongoliensis than the delicate nails on the feet of his fellow Swiss sheepherders.

Or, perhaps it is the habitual public presentation of his partially exposed and pasty physique — a nearly chrome-domed tuftily-haired shirtless barefoot hulk with matching mustachios and eyebrow.

(Those hand-stitched suspenders of broadloom carpet scraps in clashing colors certainly can’t help. And, man! How they must itch!)

Trousers of razor-crinkled hammered tin sheeting bearing years of questionable patina also tend to make one quietly, yet quickly, tip-toe back to a nice safe distance (just in case this guy is in any way unstable — you never know, right?).

And, last but not least, seeing Yodeling Yoshe in constant companionship with his cuddly sheeplet sidekick tends to conjure up in a viewer’s mind some unsavory type of way too adult-rated relationship.

Well, you can stand corrected and rest assured. Yoshe is the perfect gentleman sheepherder and caretaker toward woolly little Glenda. (As he also is toward her 14 identical siblings: Gilby, Gloria, Gottfried, Gulma, Gomez, Gerber, Gentoo, Garfield, Gaspar, Gifford, Gumby, Gomer, Greta & Garbo. You see, Yoshe does not actually always have glam Glenda by his side; he’s usually about with one or another of her clone-like sibs — they just all look the same, so who knew?)

And, while we’re setting the record straight, don’t let Yoshe’s rather retro Neanderthalian appearance fool you. It seems Mr. Yunibrau is the humble holder of the first chair in the violin section of the Luzern Philharmonic. A retired professor of Linguistics & Semantics from the University of Cologne, he is the author of 27 hefty texts, ranging from “What is Up? Directionals in Drama & Fiction” to “You say ‘Tomato’, I say ‘Tomahto’: Why Pronunciation Defines Class”.

His unusual attire when out of doors and about town is merely a contrapuntal contrast to the tailored Oxford shirts, navy blazers, mohair slacks and ascots he tends to prefer when rambling about his Victorian rockpile of a castle high above the sheep meadow. Rather than tame his dense unibrow, Yoshe trims it assiduously, in memory of, and tribute to, the unibrows of his forebears going back dozens of generations to the Andalusian Court of St. John the Hirsute.

So let all of this be a gentle reminder, dear reader: Never judge a rough-hewn Yodeling Tyrolean (or anyone else, for that matter) by his decidedly downscale appearance.