Foxy Foxes

`Look at this sly fox. Most would think that it is adorable.  Well when I first moved to London, I probably would have thought so too.  However, it was not until I was awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of blood curdling screams that sounded as if someone was being murdered right outside my bedroom window.  After looking around and finding nothing and realizing I was safe as I was on the 3rd floor (or was it the 2nd), I summized that it was sometype of animal as my grad student housing was right next to Richmond Park and nothing was going to get me.  After talking to some of my other international friends, they also admitted that they were terrified by the horrible screams.  Once again, one of my fellow British classmates explained and assured us that it was only the foxes as it was mating season.  

 I wish I would have known as I woke up with nightmares for about of week, dreaming that I was being attacked or witnessing something horrible.  The advisory in the travel guides should state something like this " beware of the crazy fox sex sounds that actually sound like a woman being murdered...get used to it as you will have to sleep with your window open for air circulation and heaven forbid that do not go to bed early on the night before rubbish pick up!" 

So they even go thru the rubbish (aka trash) and will tear apart and strew everything around if your rubbish is not secure in a bin (aka can).  This has also woken me up several times as they will fight over your rubbish.  All you hear is the riping sounds and the eerie crackling of plastic and scraping sounds and all your brain can think of is an intruder.

So you think that I am exaggerating a bit?  Check out these you tube videos especially in a dark room and half asleep.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az80KVbVUSs  and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6NuhlibHsM  (this one explains the various vocalizaitons)

The website buzzfeed.com also show confirms how scary and annoying these noises by listing them as #29 and #30 most enraging things about living in London.  http://www.buzzfeed.com/ailbhemalone/the-most-enraging-things-about-living-in-london

With that being described and highly admitt that it is annoying, I do not wish or agree that they should be harmed as we, as humans, have enroached upon their habitat and territory and the foxes are just adapting to what is the mass human urban sprawl. 

So be forewarned these fox noises are crazy sounding! 

Zero, nought, oh, nill.... whatever you call it, it is still a big fat ZERO!!!

So after reminescing with my dear American friend on our experiences in a particular stats class at a British University, I find it hilarious how naive we were to the various different versions to say "zero".  For several classes us North Americans (as there were several Canadians) along with other international students were highly confused not only because it was a statistics class but trying to figure out why the signifcance level of 0.05 had changed to "knot point knot five".   Seriously, the professor should have known it would be lost in translation and should have at least wrote it out.

May be I had not fully adjusted to the time difference and still had a serious case of jet lag, but I honestly thought it had been so long that I had been out of school that perhaps statistics had changed or I perhaps totally missed something the first time around that I took that class as an undergraduate.  Nope, come to find out the other international students were right with me in the confusion of calling "0" a "nought" (not the spelling of k-n-o-t like I wrote out in my notes) and wondered why it was the word zero was not used.  It was a silly and embarassing misunderstanding, as come to find out that there are several British terms for all sorts of things and zero is one of them.  So to clearify, "oh" - for telephone numbers (they like to say double "oh" for 00), "nought"  - for stats and other mathematics, "zero" - for temperatures, nill - for sports.  Oh, and don't forget that it is not naughty when they refer to the early 2000's as the "noughties".