The National Geographic Photo Contest...

... 33 entries here... each seemingly better than one before.

AND: Now are the foxes.

The 25-year-old man who leapt from the zoo monorail into the tiger enclosure...

... had — on his Facebook page — this picture of a tigress licking the head of a tiger cub.

The Daily News calls it a "crazed bid to kill himself."

“He’s amazing and he loves everybody,” said the victim’s sister, who declined to give her name. “I really don’t know what happened.”

The Facebook page is full of sentimental notions about animals and the environment:

An image of foxes with the message, “We have more to fear from other people than from other animals” was also posted Thursday. In other posts he promotes a vegetarian diet.

Another image posted Thursday bears the message, “We need to stop being victims and living out of fear. We need to stop preparing for disaster, instead to anticipate a glorious future.”

UPDATE: The Daily News has now aligned its reporting with what I'm saying above: "Mauled man wanted to be 'one with the tiger' and was not  trying to commit suicide when he invaded Bronx Zoo den."

[David] Villalobos said he even petted the 400-pound beast after it tried to drag him off — and that he broke a leg and ankle when he landed after leaping from the zoo’s monorail on all fours, [Paul Browne, the NYPD’s chief spokesman] said.

“No one should be surprised he landed on all fours considering his passion for cats,” Browne added.

"Unknown animals are appearing all over the place you know, global warming and all that."

Wrote Chip Ahoy in the comments to last night's post "Fox news," about our sighting of a fox running across the frozen Lake Mendota. Chip added, "Still, whatever it is, clearly between wolves, coyotes, bobcats, and humans, it is bobcats that pose the greatest hazard to survival in the wild." He linked to this:



Now, Chip Ahoy is an amazingly great commenter. We are blessed with his exalted presence. But there was another commenter who impressed me greatly yesterday. It was Mr. Forward, who invented — as far as I can tell — a whole new commenting game. He wrote:

One year ago today at the Wisconsin protests, Fox News utters a bizarre sentence played over the years, "We can not afford to indulge this madness, everything Mark Twain wanted to eat when he arrived home at Meadhouse."

Apologize, atheists, accusing others of taking pills at the Snowhill Cafe. It's completely bizarre, a symbolic victory, one year ago today.

Do you get it? He's pasted together bits from my blog posts of the last few days into a fanciful vignette. I'd love to see more of these, I thought, and then I did. For there was Chip Ahoy, in the very next comment — 3 hours later, in the middle of the night — and he's all:

Oh Mr. Forward I'm afraid you have that misread. It's like hieroglyphics, they're read the way they face, in this case they go bottom to top. Strange, I know.

So something like,

The Snowhill cranes ate breaded flounder strips called fingers at the cafe and then delivered pills to Maureen Dawd's recreational porpoise. The atheists are timid in their charges that religion wears contaminated contact lenses but that is surpassed by Glenn retweeting Wright's column about Breitbart dancing with glow sticks at a Rave. A blogger drank mead at the alehouse and casted about and married a broad. Mark Twain traveled around America and ate France and Italy. It was widely known he indulged his madness and engaged in a same sex marriage with a Cardinal and they argue about what words mean and Cardinal said Twain just wanted a sex slave. And Twain said,"I'll always have Erica who is very erotica. So he threw in his keys and left with the frizzy-hair Schultz and said, "Hey, check out my stone foxy lady. Where can I lay this pipe?" And Schultz was all, "Yeah, I wonduh about duh rotunda."

Scampering fox, and — whoa! — the Bobcat!

ADDED: I'm just seeing that Mr. Forward read from the top to the bottom, in order, from one "year ago today" post to the previous day's "year ago today" post, and then Chip did the same thing from bottom to top.

Fox news.

We saw a fox run across Lake Mendota today.

Enlarge to find the fox.

Fox News.

Really.

Lunch at the Butterhorn Bakery & Cafe in Frisco.

Frisco, Colorado. Where I was seated under a picture of a fox and back-to-back with a tattooed lady.



We overheard the waitress talking about her birthday, and my not-quite-yet-husband subsequently wished her a happy birthday and said other Hoosierly things to her, leading her to advise me "He's a keeper." Indeed!

ADDED: Chip Ahoy animates not the tattoo, nor the batik of my shirt but...



... the fox.

"Jogger runs mile with rabid fox locked on her arm."

Jogger runs mile with rabid fox locked on her arm!

***

After the fox bit her on the foot, she decided to catch it and bring it in for testing. This led to additional biting. That was a bad move. She had some hope of avoiding rabies shots, if she successfully brought the animal in for testing and it was not rabid, but do you know that if you are bitten badly enough, the rabies shots might not save your life? I learned this from expert doctors who interviewed me at the UW Hospital after I was bitten by a bat. I wanted to know if the shots ever failed, and they cited some cases in which a person received large, tearing bites from a wolf. Don't tangle with a wild animal. Just get the shots. They are not that bad.

5-year-old boy, bitten by a rabid fox, holds the animal down for more than a minute to protect 6 other children...

Rayshun McDowell. Very impressive.

Rayshun's stepfather, Ryan Thompson, pulled the boy off the animal and kicked it. A neighbor fired a handgun three times but the fox continued to advance.

Thompson, wearing a cast because of a broken leg, said he used a stick and his crutch to beat the fox to death.

This story should be on Fox News, but I got it from CNN.

IN THE COMMENTS: Politics! This seems to be a political story for some reason.

... We have met the rabid animal, and he is us.

MORE: Video of the boy.