This week, another entry courtesy the unbelievably cool private tour given Team Pudu by the Los Angeles Zoodu: the exceedingly rare (in fact, it’s classified as "Completely Imaginary") English Zebudu:

The Zebudu is a cross between a horse, a pedestrian walkway, two pudus, and a UPC scanner. Sometimes there is another Zebudu involved, but not always.

You really don’t want to know the mechanics of mating, but it should not be attempted at rush hour. Also, everyone always winds up on the other side of the road, with no idea how they got there.

Fortunately, the upside comes when you try to buy a Zebudu in a convenience store. Through a miracle of nature, the stripes are already encoded to come up as "Zebudu" in most checkout systems. (Unless the store has recently upgraded to Vista. Then all bets are off, and the store probably has bigger problems anyway. I hear that Microsoft’s next OS upgrade will even ship with a small fire extinguisher, just in case.)

The only real question, then, is how to get your Zebudu up onto the checkout counter in the first place. The ancient Greeks developed several acceptable techniques involving the five basic machines, and Archimedes was fond of floating his Zebudu up onto the counter, which offered the side benefit of a gentle cleansing action. The only shortcoming, for the Greeks, was needing to wait another 2000 years for the laser to be invented, a puzzle they only recently got around.

Fortunately, modern zoologists have discovered a much simpler approach: just put another Zebudu on the other side of the cash register, a horse in the pedestrian crossing, and two pudus across the street. Ten minutes later, there will be a receipt in your hand, a Zebudu in your car, and two confused-looking pudus riding a horse into the sunset, holding hands and looking for something to eat.