It would be cool to jazz up the standard error...
Let's see what cowsay can do. First, let us set up a fifo:

$ mkfifo cowfifo

Now we'll need something that runs in the background, reads the fifo and outputs it through cowsay. Fire up your editor and write these lines. Save as cowrunner.sh

#!/bin/bash
while (( 1 ))
do
    read txt <cowfifo
    sleep 0.1
    echo ""
    cowsay -d $txt
done

Make this executable and start it in the background

$ chmod u+x cowrunner.sh
$ ./cowrunner.sh &

Now we're almost there. You can easily make the cow tell the errors

$ ls allmypreciousdata 2>cowfifo
$
 _________________________________________
/ ls: cannot access allmypreciousdata: No \
\ such file or directory                  /
 -----------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (xx)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
             U  ||----w |
                ||     ||

$
I still need to figure out, how to make this the default stderr...

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