Bizarre Mac Bugs #1: The Horse-head Hard Drive

Stranger than the visage of Saint Aquinas on a hoagie bun is a Mac hard drive icon in the clear shape of a horse head. OMG, is this what they mean by a Trojan malware attack? 

No, most OS X users will recognize something familiar in that shape: It's clearly the silhouette of the venerable OS X Chess application (aka the intellectual aesthete's Minesweeper). All right, but what's that doing there? 

I can't say for sure. I've heard of such errors before, in which an icon doesn't just fail to appear, it actually appears as the wrong icon or even appears as one icon inside the silhouette of another. Sorry, I couldn't begin to explain the cause behind it; I would love to hear from a knowledgeable reader. All I knew was that I had reason to be paranoid. When the oddity persisted after a restart, I ran a check in Disk Utility, which returned this scare:

Yikes. I can't say that this error is connected to the error, but I wouldn't be surprised. Maybe OS X wanted that disk repair badly and sent a message to tell me – Sicilian style. I repaired the disk, restarted, and was relieved to find my hard disk icon released unharmed and the horse head gone. So all is well – but hey, Mac, no need to scare me; a simple alert message would have worked!