Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

• The other morning, a fox apparently urinated on my Wall Street Journal (oh, the irony!) which I did not discover until I went out to pick up the paper from the driveway and got fox pee all over my left hand. We see the little guy dashing in and out of the 24" drain pipe that runs under Stanwell St. next to the house, and he has a very distinct odor, not anything like a cat but closer to skunk. Even though the paper was in a plastic bag, it smelled so badly that we had to pitch it. And my left hand still smells.
• A "turtle shop" apparently is a turtle shop; i. e., a place where you buy live pet turtles. Bruce Schneier unsheathed his Occam's Razor and cut a good guess, and Michael Covington nailed it by posing the question to Jesse Sheidlower, one of the editors of the OED, who would know if anybody would. This was Jesse's response: "In the '30s-'50s or so, small turtles were popular pets, and one could buy them at souvenir stores in Times Square (where the Capote passage is set). Usually they had a name painted on the shell. The stores weren't generally called 'turtle shops,' i.e. this phrase is descriptive, not lexicalized." Thanks to all who contributed to the debate. This is one of the things that makes me glad I live in the era of ubiquitous networking!
• While we're still talking turtles, Michael Covington forwarded this piece laying out some additional insights on the turtles-as-Salmonella-threats debate. I especially like the sentence giving the advice, "Do not kiss reptiles..." Roger. Wilco.
• From Mark Moss comes a pointer to a slightly weird hack: A downloadable program that will modify your installation of Windows XP to make it look like Vista. I'm not entirely sure that I will try the Vista Transformation Pack, since I have no idea where it's been, but if I were Microsoft I would let this guy quietly do his thing, and reap the benefits of what we hope is the good kind of "viral" marketing. (Maybe in a virtual machine. I'll give it some thought.)
• Another thought: It occurs to me that I should be able to write a small program in Delphi that intercepts the CapsLock key and makes it a Ctrl key. (When was the last time that I—or anybody—actually used the CapsLock key to lock caps? PEOPLE YELL AT YOU FOR USING ALL CAPS!!!!!!!) It's humbling to realize that I have long since forgotten what I knew about hooking the keyboard interrupt. Time to go digging.
• This slipped past me a year ago: On January 26, 2006, Western Union quietly ceased its telegram service. Telegrams are history. I don't recall ever dealing much with telegrams (I think we sent one from Baltimore in 1985 to counter an offer on our house in Rochester, NY) but they are very much a part of our culture, like steam trains and dial telephones, that now exist in cultural memory rather than in the culture of daily life.

We got a couple of inches of puffy snow yesterday afternoon and evening, and this morning there was a set of tracks from the drain pipe under Stanwell St. to the rock where we have seen our fox hang out a number of times. We've long suspected that he lives under the street in the corrugated steel pipe (24" diameter) that bridges the drain gullies above and below the street. I took a closer look at the tracks in the snow and yup, those are fox tracks. (I was in the Fox Patrol in Boy Scouts. It's all coming back to me now.)

We photographed the fox this past July while we were tending the plants on our terrace that overlooks the drainage gully. Handsome creature, and relatively unafraid of humans, which (as with most wild animals) is a mixed blessing. Someone might be feeding him, or maybe there's just a lot of local wildlife. I've seen plenty of things here that a fox could bring down, from wild turkeys to rabbits to (alas) house cats. We saw the fox sit on the stones below our kitchen window once and gaze longingly at QBit, who was looking down and yapping. (That's only one reason we're very careful not to let him off leash here. The traffic on Stanwell is the other.)

By sheer chance I caught the fox in the middle of a yawn (see the photo at right) and it's an interesting way to see the inside of a fox's mouth without having to pry the poor thing's mouth open, losing a couple of fingers in the process. It's a very pointed, narrow mouth with a lot of teeth.

Apart from a fleeting glimpse of a fox on a highway embankment in Surrey, UK, this is the first live fox I ever saw outside of a zoo. Back in 1963, when my farm-cousin John Price learned that I had joined the Fox Patrol, he did the unexpected: Went out with his brothers and shot a fox, cut the tail off, and mailed it to me wrapped up in shirt cardboard, with dried blood all over it. (Farmers consider fox harmful predators, and there's no love lost between them.) We tied a string to the last vertebra and hung it from our patrol flag, with a lot of the blood still on it. (My fellow Fox Patrollers thought it was a little cool, though blood never sits well with me.) We haven't seen our fox in winter yet, but if I can I'll catch another photo against the snow, which should show up much better than against a dark background of scrub oak, as here.