Monday, February 1, 2010

Doodle Penance: "karton zorro"

This week's "Doodle Penance" is a simple two-word search term that for some reason we haven't addressed on the site. As usual, the search request yielded zero seconds of reading time from our searcher. Let's see if we can remedy that and provide some more helpful information for the next person who searches for "karton zorro."

Right away, I had a hunch what the Googler was looking for: you see, one of my colleagues who lives out in the countryside (a couple of towns away) was telling me recently that she and her neighbors regularly stage mock fox hunts. They rent a pack of foxhounds and ride after them on horses in pursuit of a mock fox. This mock fox, sometimes played by my colleague's husband if I'm getting the story right, carries something that's been soaked in fox pheromones or fox urine, to attract the dogged pursuit.

I figured that this colleague and her compeers, or some similar association, might have been looking on Google for some cut-rate South-of-the-Border fox pheromones. (Zorro, you see, is Spanish for "fox.") Getting a half-gallon of the stuff seems excessive, but if that's what our search term log wants...




Mike explains his own "doodle" thus this week:

—Since "karton" is Yiddish for "cardboard" and "zorro" is Spanish for fox, I have naturally cut an adorable cartoon fox out of a piece of cardboard. Herewith is a silhouette image of Fenwick Fuchs, the fennec fox.



... and adorable it is. (If that's not enough fox-cute for you, try scrolling down this page a little bit until you get to the fennecs.)


As long as we're on the subject of foxen, let me show you a couple of photos I took from the kitchen window this past October. This fellow (or perhaps she's a vixen?) made his way across our back yard just slowly enough for me to paparazzi him (her?) twice.





Yes, even in the city, here in Vermont, there's wildlife once in a while. Let's hope my colleague and her neighbors don't get wind of this.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Great foxes. I have learned a lot from this post! Isaac, I can't believe you had a fox in your YARD. She's a little shaggy, but still beautiful.

Isaac said...

Thanks, Karin! I hope that your learnings from this post included (along with the linguistic minutiae) the fact that fennec foxes are adorable.