Stoned Fox (Упоротая лиса)

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About

Stoned Fox (Упоротая лиса), also known as Taxidermy Fox, is a Russian photoshop meme in which a cutout image of a stuffed fox is superimposed into different base images of various humorous contexts. The nickname has been approximately translated as "Stoned Fox" and "Autistic Fox."

Origin

On October 4th, 2012, British artist and taxidermist Adele Morse placed a stuffed fox for sale on the online auction site eBay. On October 14th, the fox was sold to a resident of Manchester, England for 330 pounds. According to an interview with Morse in Wales Online,^[10] she began receiving messages from Russians within a couple of days telling her they loved the fox and wished to have one.

Spread

On November 27th, 2012, Morse published a post on her personal blog^[1], announcing that she had been contacted by several Russians informing her that the fox had become an Internet celebrity on the Russian web. The same day, Livejournal^[8] user al_stager published a post titled “A stuffed fox: Investigation,” revealing that he had informed Morse about the fox meme. On November 28th, slideshows of notable examples were featured in the Russian edition of Metro^[7] and the Russian news site Lenta, ^[4] as well as several pages on the Russian social networking site VK,^[3] one of which accumulated over 1,850 followers within the next three months (shown below).

On November 28th, the Russian news site Lenta^[4] published a slideshow of notable examples of the photoshop meme. On November 30th, Livejournal^[9] user rhunwolf published a post revealing that a woman photographed wearing a Stoned Fox t-shirt was Anna Veduta, the press secretary for Russian politician Alexsey Navalny.

The same day, the Russian television news station Russia 2 ran a report on the meme (shown below, left). On December 8th, YouTuber Ilya Korotin uploaded a slideshow of notable examples from the series (shown below, right).

On December 17th, Lenta^[5] published an article reporting that Moscow State University student Alexei Nevzorov was raising funds to purchase the Stoned Fox to display in an exhibition at the Centre for Contempary Art in Moscow. Within the next month, 24,900 rubles of the 74,000 goal had been raised.^[6] By early January 2013, the popularity of the meme had been picked up by the English-language tech news blog Read Write Web.^[2]