"People called her impulsive. Reckless. Even other rescuers — people who should’ve stood beside her — joined the mob.... The rescue world cannot keep cannibalizing its own."

Said a statement from KJ Farms Animal Rescue, quoted in "Mikayla Raines, Who Rescued Foxes and Other Animals, Is Dead at 30/She founded Save a Fox Rescue to care for foxes that had been abandoned or bred for their pelts on fur farms. She gained millions of social media followers along the way" (NYT).

We're told "Her husband, Ethan Frankcamp, said the cause of death was suicide."

Still too cold to go out, but from my window, I'm watching a fox pick its way through the snow.

At the Turnaround Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

That's yesterday's fox. Today it looked like this (in a photo by Meade):

It was nice to see the sun today, after snow again last night. Tonight, they're saying 8 to 13 more inches, with wind gusting to 35 mph. They're predicting 3 days of snow, followed by a week of very cold weather, as low as minus 13°. We stocked up on food today, with plans to make a lot of soup and pot roast and potatoes. 

Oh, and tomorrow is my birthday. I'm proud to turn 73.

Just now, from my window.

"Many of the changes to Dahl’s books seem minor: 'I’d knock her flat' becomes the much more diplomatic 'I’d give her a right talking to,' for instance."

"'You saucy beast!' becomes 'You trickster!' Other changes are just patronising. The Witches once imagined a woman 'working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman.' Now she might be 'working as a top scientist or running a business.' Are there no women cashiers now? Rather than going  white as a shee,' the Queen’s maid in The BFG now goes 'still as a statue.' Dahl can’t even poke fun at a tortoise any more. In Esio Trot, tortoises can only read backwards because they are 'very backwards creatures.' How rude! Now they can only read backwards ... just because. And when Boggis, Bunce and Bean set out on their tractors to destroy the foxes’ home once and for all in Fantastic Mr Fox, the animals once noted in terror that 'The machines were black. They were murderous, brutal-looking monsters.' The tractors are no longer black, just in case a fox was being racist."

Writes Laura Hackett, in "Censoring Roald Dahl? I’ll be keeping my original copies/The author’s books have been edited for fear of offending. Kids should be allowed to read them in their full, nasty, colourful glory" (London Times).

I already blogged about this travesty yesterday. I'm blogging again because this has new examples of the awful wreckage.

At the Old One Café...

... you don't have to shake/get cute/run. You can write about whatever you want.

"Shakes... cute! That's a young one."

Just now, at Meadhouse.

Beasts of Wisconsin.

1. There are 24,000 bears in Wisconsin: "The DNR said in 1989 there were only about 9,000 black bears in the state. Now the population is up to 24,000. 'Our bear population has been steadily increasing and expanding southward'...."

2. They found an alligator in Long Lake in Fond du Lac County. 

3. We spotted 6 foxes romping together in our neighbor's lawn just before sunrise the other day. They were very active, even trying to run up a tree. The next day, same time and place, I saw them again. At what point do you say, now, there are too many foxes?

4. Seen today in great numbers: very tiny toads/frogs (about a half inch long), extremely nervous chipmunks, rabbits (doing their best to look like rocks), turkeys.

Here is my new selection of TikTok videos — 8, this time — hand-selected by me, with my preferences, which are mostly, but not entirely, for delight.

1. Kiss the hand.

2. Bear on a wire.

3. Approximating the English expression "skyscraper." 

4. The cat plays rhythm.

5. Did he call her fat?

6. Impression of a decomposing fox.

7. A gentle Alzheimer's patient shows great interest in meeting her daughter's mother.

8. A memorial to the smoke the rose within Grand Central Station over the years.

Do not approach the fox! I see "The tale of a wild fox on Capitol Hill had captivated those who live and work there."

In the NYT: "The Capitol Fox, Euthanized After Attacks, Tests Positive for Rabies/The tale of a wild fox on Capitol Hill had captivated those who live and work there. Then a congressman and several others were bitten, the fox was captured and she turned out to be rabid."

Oh, humans of Washington — you who think you know what's good for us people who live outside your charmed circle —  what do you know of how the world works? Did you think you were lucky that a cute fox was happy to walk up to you? Did you experience it as a testament to your charisma?

Here's an article from April 5th, before the fox tested positive: "'Have You Seen the Capitol Fox?'Animal control officers descended on Capitol Hill after reports of lawmakers, staff members and reporters being attacked by a wild fox believed to have been nesting on the Capitol grounds" (NYT).

At the Backyard Fox Café...

 

... you can talk about whatever you want.

Glanced up from my work and saw a fox in the backyard, grabbed my camera, and caught him pouncing — twice!

 

ADDED: Got up from my reading chair and looked out the window. The fox was back. I like his style, how he waits and thinks — looks around — then hightails it:

Wildness in one's own yard.

I just needed to walk around to the back... 

The fox reappears...

 

Next time... I plan to get a better picture. I've got to reach for my old time-y camera. I'm keeping it right here on my desk. It's a mistake to grab the iPhone. What a fumbling idiot I become when suddenly excited by a chance to photograph the fox! Too many button images to look at and emphatically touch. I got that one picture and then — even though the beastie paused to take a shit — I could not get a second shot.

UPDATE: Meade texts from the backyard:

"I found the fox."

Says one reader of my "Find the fox" post. He sends this: 

That throwback to simpler times comes from Robert Szkolnicki (in Winnipeg, MB).

Find the fox.

 

 

Sitting at my window this morning, I've seen a big beautiful fox run through the backyard twice, but it's impossible to get the iPhone ready and working quickly enough to get a picture of these full views. So you see what I got. There is a fox in both pictures, I assure you.

"It’s tempting to see our attention economy as purely dystopian. It is nightmarish, after all, to compete with one another via avatars..."

"... for work, for sex, for companionship, for cash to pay our medical bills. But the rise of the attention economy also reveals a truth that the dandies of the café terrace did not realize: of course our selfhood is defined by the attention, and with it the love, of others. Even in the disembodied terrain of the Internet, we are utterly contingent creatures: not just self-makers or, God forbid, influencers, but beings dependent on the attention of others, an attention that, at its core, is not so unlike love. (As Simone Weil famously put it: 'Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.')"

From "Eat Me, Drink Me, Like Me /Is love in the attention economy unreal?" by Tara Isabella Burton (in The New Atlantis, Winter 2020).

This is a very interesting article. Highly recommended. But I got totally sidetracked wanting to understand that Simone Weil quote — "Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love."

It doesn't really fit the idea Burton is talking about, which is the urge and effort to grab attention. The article title "Eat me, drink me, love me" comes from this Christina Rossetti poem, "Goblin Market." Excerpt:

“Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeez’d from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.”

But the Simone Weil quote seems as though it must mean not clamoring for attention but paying attention.  Read the Weil quote in context here, then — if you're with me this far — apply it to what we are doing or failing to do when we experience what Burton calls "purely dystopian... in the disembodied terrain of the Internet."

As for "the dandies of the café terrace":

At the Departing Fox Café...

... you don't have to go.

And you don't have to use the Althouse Portal to Amazon, but it would be nice if you did.

A big fox in our yard this morning.

He's walking on the path Meade created for people to walk and mountain bike. I was just calling it "The Bunny Trail" — the place referenced in the old song "Here Comes Peter Cottontail" — because I saw a big rabbit using it. And — as if on cue, to top my joke — a big fox takes the same route. I had a dramatic reaction, but no camera at hand. Five minutes later, the fox was back, and he stopped right in the middle of the yard, as if he knew I'd wanted to get a shot of him. Actually, he seemed a little slow and confused, and we worried that he was sick. Then he ducked down the alleyway between the two garages.

What the new editor of Vanity Fair — Radhika Jones — wore to her first meeting with staff.

A navy blue dress that Women's Wear Daily described as "strewn with zippers" and tights "covered with illustrated, cartoon foxes."

WWD retreats into quoting Anna Wintour (who is not only the editor of Vogue editor but also the artistic Director of Condé Nast of which Vanity Fair is a part). Wintour only made a gentle gibe, "I’m not sure if I should include a new pair of tights in her welcome basket."

I'm more interested in interpreting the metaphors. What can you say about a navy blue dress strewn with zippers? It says women have the power now. The zipper's strongest association is with the fly on a man's pants. We might say a man with uncontrolled sexual compulsions has a "zipper problem," as in "Jackie Collins Knew Bill Clinton Had A ‘Zipper Problem’" (HuffPo, 2011)("I remember, before Clinton was president, I was sitting at a dinner in Beverly Hills and one of his aides was there and told me that he was definitely going to be president, except for one problem: the zipper problem.... They knew way before he was elected!").

And then a navy blue dress... I think of Monica Lewinsky.



That dress was strewn with Bill Clinton's genetic material.

Therefore I interpret Radhika Jones's dress as wry political commentary: the end of the political subjugation of women, the end of silencing — zip your lip, not mine — and a new era of female domination.

Now, let's consider the item of clothing that was even more attention-getting and metaphor-pushing than a blue dress strewn with zippers: tights covered in foxes.

What do foxes mean? When the political website FiveThirtyEight chose a fox as its corporate logo, Nate Silver quoted the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

So there were many zippers on the dress and many foxes on the tights, which is a message of multiplicity already. But each of the many foxes is also a symbol of knowing many things.

There is, of course, the idea of women as "foxes," which was already laughably sexist when Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin played Festrunk Brothers in 1978 (and Garrett Morris had to explain that you can't talk about American women like that):



I'd say the foxes on Radhika Jones's tights represent a reclaiming of an old diminishment, amplified and multiplied, and complicated by zippers. Foxes run around, finding out about everything, uncovering what is hidden, and zippers enclose while suggesting a sudden, perhaps shocking disclosure. That's all very apt as a message about journalism, and it's an exciting way to say that a woman is now in charge.

ADDED: Also consider that the top-rated meaning for "zipper" at Urban Dictionary is: "A death trap for your dick."

And I created a "zippers" tag and went back and applied it to old posts. I was amused by how many times over the years I've talked about the Brian Regan comedy bit about Zipper, the bad dolphin (in contrast to Flipper) — "Zipper's surly. He is uncaring."

Meade, reading this post, said his first association with zipper was the "zipless fuck" (in Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying"). I had to do some additional retroactive tagging, because I'd only searched for "zipper." Searching for "zipless," I found places where I'd talked about Erica Jong's idea, including one in the context Trump's "Access Hollywood" remarks, from October 8, 2016 (the day after the sudden, shocking disclosure of the tape):

[I]f you watch the whole video, you see him winning with another woman, Arianne Zucker, the one who, in Trump's words, is "hot as shit, in the purple." Zucker is the one who inspired him to say "I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

And in fact, you see the female version of that power trip: The woman plays on the man's sexual interest. Grab them by the crotch. Zucker looks entirely pleased with herself, demands to walk in the center and grabs the arms of both men. If that is what is expected and that is the norm in your workplace, how can you be the cold one who keeps her sexuality to herself?

I invite you to contemplate why this got me thinking about Erica Jong's concept of the "zipless fuck":

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.