A Modest Election Proposal

Well, there's only one day left in the presidential election and I don't know about you guys but I couldn't be happier to have it over. If you're like me, and being an average joe (with bear leanings) I'm sure you are, you waited to the last minute to learn anything about propositions, candidate stances, electoral colleges, democracy, or what country you live in. This unpreparedness is reflected in Google's most popular searches for the past week, which mirror my own (Source):

1: what is a president
2: who are the final president challengers finalists
3: what are the requirements for a visa to Canada
4: what are the requirements for a visa to Mexico
5: what are the requirements for a visa to Somalia

I don't know about you, but ever since my extensive research into the slimy, gritty, inner gears of this year's presidential election, I'll never be the same. I twitch nervously every time I delete emails at work. No matter how hard I rub oranges on my face I can't seem to get that gentle orange glow I've been craving so badly. Needless to say, many Americans are still left disillusioned and unsure about their confidence in the two primary candidates and the future of this country. Well, my friends, I'm hear to help. While naysayers might say "voting for a third party candidate is throwing away your vote" I say "Throw your vote away into the coolest trash can possible" 

2016 VOTE THE BEAR PARTY

The Bear Party throws away hard to remember morals or values. Just four simple pillars hold up the majesty of Bear Party:

B: Berries
E: Eviscerate deer/fish/bunnies
A: Asleep (for months)
R: Rest or eat more or whatever.....

Taxes, interest rates, trade deals, and the headache of of those other government branches, done away with! The Bear Party understands as long as you have enough food, superfluous amount of sleep, and the opportunity to maul woodland creatures, what really are you missing?  So let's meet the exciting candidates!

Bart the Bear 2

 

Who doesn't know Bart 2, Hollywood fame of Game of Thrones, Dr Doolittle 2, and Into the Wild?? I remember seeing the critically acclaimed Into the Grizzly Maze and having to pick my eyeballs right off the sticky theater floor out of the genius of Bart 2's performance. But enough about his way-beyond-Reagan acting ability. Let's get down to the ISSUES.

BART THE BEAR 2 STANDS FOR:
-making Dr Doolittle 4
-no work Nov-Apr
-berries



Brutus

 

Brutus reached fame through his BFF, Casey Anderson, and their NatGeo show Expedition Grizzly. Actually, more accurately, Casey Anderson reached fame through Brutus because who gives an f about another unshaven 'naturalist' if they're not having dinner with a huge violent grizzly. In any case, Brutus brings his obvious people skills to the table as a Presidential Candidate.

BRUTUS STANDS FOR:
-not mauling everyone in close proximity
-berries

Bear 141

 

Bear 141 reached fame also through knowing a naturalist, but oh my they were not bffs. Bear 141 killed and devoured filmmaker Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard, documented in Werner Herzog's film Grizzly Man. Definitely the bellicose choice, history students everywhere can't deny history loves its brutal killers.

BEAR 141 STANDS FOR:
-likely mauling everyone in close proximity
-berries


Old Ephraim

 

Experience talks, and no bear has more experience in Bear/People relations than "Old Three Toes" Ephraim. Being a California resident during the early 1900s, a time of great population influx into the state, Ephraim was  a lead proponent of the widely unpopular CA State Bill 56, dubbed "Berries only for Ephraim." Since then, and despite being dead for 93 years, Ephraim could still be the the right Bearisdent for the job. Trump supporters in particular may find a common voice with Ephraim, with his "Maul Immigrants" platform (not to be confused with his equally vehemently promoted "Maul Locals"  platform)
 

OLD EPHRAIM SUPPORTS:
-widespread mauling
-berries (but only for Ephraim)





So you all remember, when you're pulling that lever, striking that box, throwing that stone, that a vote for BEAR is a vote for Bearmerica!!!!!!!!!!!!

A Spring Bear Music Celebration

The Bear Blog wakes up from hibernation to lumber on lazily! Time to fatten up with a post about spring celebration and dancing and music with my favorite music videos featuring bears. First, the Exciters, who taught us there is no love stronger than the love between three women and a grizzly (not sure what the dude's game is...):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah-tui1ubnU

Next come a bunch of nerds from California who apparently got shipwrecked on an island with a freighter of baby zoo animals. Look pleasant to you? Carefully listen to the lyrics of Weezer's "Island in the Sun" and it may open your eyes. What you thought was a pleasant tale about some lame vacay to Italy or some shit like that is actually a harrowing tale a holiday cruise shipwrecked. As the food supplies diminish dementia combined with the inevitable malaria set in and he "can't control my brain". Then baby animals start appearing and no one is sure if these are hallucinations brought on from extreme guilt (cause they had to eat three band members already) or if they are actually there and the horde of angry mothers is a moment away from their own feast. Kinda Gilligan's Island/Lord of the Flies. Oh yeah, and there's bears. (or is there???)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C3zgYW_FAM

English alt rock band Muse's most successful US hit "Uprising" speaks to a deep fear within all of us: A total and coordinated uprising of bears against humanity and civilization. This video features no real bears. In lieu of, bear insurgents are replaced by the manifestations of the band's bear fears: large reptilian eyed, fanged teddy bears. In an interview with lead vocalist Matthew Bellamy that I just made up, the singer states "Nothing is scarier than bears. This song is supposed to display their primal glory and to remind humanity that human civilization is temporary. Bears are forever."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8KQmps-Sog

Lastly and most definitely leastly, it leaves me with great disgust and shame to offer you my final selection: Miley Cyrus' performance of "We Can't Stop" at the MTV Video Music Awards with a bunch of people in bear suits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFLv9Ns1EuQ

While I do not like this video very much, it does encompass all the bearemotions of the previous videos: doomed love, dementia, and primal fear. Ol' girl Miley jumps out of a big bear's belly as if being born as a tiny bear. But as a human stripper, she realizes she will never be part of bearomance. This sadness, nay, despair, sends her into a spiral of insanity as bears around her shamelessly flaunt their loins, displaying what she may never possess. Her mental stability degrades into paranoia and fear (I mean just look at her face) until she hits rock bottom and starts hanging out with people like Robin Thicke and other recently hired NFL refs. Email me something scarier than this and I will mail you a bear statue. And did you see that part where she killed and ate bunch of salmon? It was there.

So you can probably guess from that last video that after two videos I was already scraping the bottom of the barrel for bear videos, especially with real bears. Why is this? Is it fear? Certainly we can forgive Muse for this since they are obviously and justifiably terrified of bears and thus rely on cg. Or is it that artists think bears have no rhythm and thus no place in music videos? Where are the Nelly videos of bears in thong bikinis hanging out by the pools of mansions? Does Nelly have a black and white view of bears e.g. awesome at catching salmon/suck at tip drills? COUNTERPOINTS FUCKERS:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiKWDliOTtc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCjXLvmeOIo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqKPswqyPrc

So what are your favourite bear music videos???

A Round of Applause to Skittles

Way to go Skittles for being accepting of alternate bear lifestyles! Now if only a certain Bearepulican presidential nominee would show the same acceptance...

A Plea for Concern

It's been a while beariends since we've talked about anything. It's easy to get distracted in life with work and money and loose sight of the things that really matter in life: bears.

Fellow bear lovers, we have a lot to worry about these days. Our majestic furry bear friends face dangers today they never had to face during the famous Bearmpire years when bears built beautiful cities around the world 32,000 to 14,000 years ago. Climate change is destroying the habitat of the powerful northern polar bears. Deforestation is restricting the roaming grounds of the majestic western North American brown bears. Cute panda bears don't want to screw in zoos. And I'm pretty sure those sun bears in southeast asia are getting into smoking crack. All bear species seem to be dwindling. All except the ridiculous prolific and successful black bear of North America. But bear enthusiast Mike Waud (thanks for your bearigilance, Mike!) has recently alerted me to a far more sinister danger on the horizon for black bears, one sneaking below the radar of bear authorities: Bearcoholism.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/family-four-bears-breaks-cabin-drink-100-beers-181034427.html

This is by no means the first case recorded of bears rough-housing due to their need for a good buzz. Incidents as far back as 1873 have been recorded. The first incident on record (from the newspaper the Pennsylvania Bamboozler Sentinel, April 23 1873) records an incident when local farmer Wilbur Jehosephat MacBlargy found a stash of a bear's whiskey in a hollow in a tree near his farm. The elated  farmer took the spirits back to his wife as a Valentine's day gift hoping to get lucky. Results were brutal and hilarious:

That is a bear who likes his whiskey. Bearcoholism has gone widely unreported for decades, being disregarded as a healthy form of the bears blowing off steam from the stressful eating and mauling of their 9 to 5. The few bearcoholism studies done have been more market research oriented than preventative, such as the often hushed study done by US Fish and Wildlife, finding teenage bears prefer local brews to mass produced Busch.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5756809/ns/us_news-weird_news/t/bear-downs-beers-passes-out-campground/

No one likes Busch. I needed no study fueled by a fat ol' slice of Uncle Sam's budget to tell me this. Instead, I decided to do my own research armed with tequila, a search engine, and little regard for internet copyright laws. The information I found made me queasy with the depth and long reaching effects of bearcoholism, so I present you with the short list so we may all be queasy together. Prepare to place your hands on your face lest your eyes pop out of your skull in disbelief:

Passing out in public places...

Drunk calling ex-bearfriends...

Getting sloppy with Kid from Kid 'n Play (during his lipstick years), an angry Melissa Etheridge, and French Afropean band Les Nubians...

Hibernating preemptively...

Underage drinking...

Watching daytime tv instead of getting a job...

I know you are all furious as I am at society's blind eye to this problem. The course is clear. If you love your bear friends, and want them to drink only in responsible manners with a proper designated hibernator, then write to your congressman today. DEMAND a grant of at least 2.4 million dollars to be given to William Burns to conduct proper research and rehabilitation of our bear friends.

The 4 Days of Bearsmas!

Day 2....1....

Day 1/2: Post Apocalyptic Bears

So I thought what with everyone being all crazy about 2012 being the apocalypse or something like that I thought to myself "Billy, what would bears doing after the apocalypse, provided of course they aren't the cause of it." So, as the internet provides, here are a bunch of pictures that, in my mind as least, are representative of bears in Post-Apocalyptia:




Also, interestingly, an entire small video series entitled "The Apocalypse Bear Stories"

http://www.theapocalypsebear.com/Stories.htm

The 4 Days of Bearsmas!

Day 3:
Fertility Drug-using Bears

Bear fertility drugs are hitting the bear market! While bears typically have 2 cubs, this mother decided to bolster the ranks of the Great Bear Army forming and have 5 CUBS.


http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/rare-black-bear-quintuplets-caught-on-film.html

The 4 Days of Bearsmas!

Yep! We're celebrating it again! Just like a bear, you never know when this blog is going jump out of hibernation and spring out of a bush!



Day 4: Polite Bear

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Xo21L0ybE

A Bear Update for John

This is a bear update especially for John Kelly. Here's a bunch of bears waving at you, John.









Keep on trucking!

Day 3: Siberian Corpse Eaters

Today is a continuation of yesterday's Siberian Yeti Fighting Bears. The amazing adaptive powers of these Siberian bears have caused them them to turn lemons into lemonade, or an exodus to human lands from yeti defeat into exploiting an excellent human related food source, cemeteries! All you can buffet!!! Thanks to Rebecca Kelly and Laney DiGiovanni for the links!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/26/russia-bears-eat-corpses-graveyards

http://io9.com/5673768/russian-bears-use-local-cemeteries-as-their-personal-refrigerators

Day 2: The Siberian Yeti Fighters

Sadly, while bears are impressive creatures, they are still human. Er, mortal. Or whatever. What I'm trying to say is that bears can lose too. While they fight valiantly, not even bears are a match for Siberian yetis. According to Russian authorities that is. So this small guerrilla band of bears, trying to find a place between fighting yetis and eating villagers, have earned their place on the Bear Days of Christmas so that we may all hope for their future happiness:

http://io9.com/5662175/in-the-forests-of-siberia-yetis-are-fighting-bears

The 23 Days of Bear Christmas! Day 1: The Bear Baron of Rhode Island

Welcome to the Bear Days of Christmas! This holiday season we are celebrating not just types of bears, but actual particular bears that have proven themselves to be bearelebrities in the bear world, bears whose bearness shines brighter than the Star of Bethlehem and leads us through the desert of boring mediocre animals (such as earthworms and possums) lacking majestic powerful animal qualities (also known as 'Bearalities') to the manger overflowing with a cornucopia of bear.

To start off, what better than a bear's story from the state tattooed to my back, Rhode Island. This bear has no name, so I've given him one: Roger. The talented journalists at the Providence Journal have written up his account better than I ever could so I shall just link it, but let me summarize just by saying that Roger defeated and entire state agency in his mission to eat sheep. I salute you, Roger!

http://newsblog.projo.com/2010/11/score-bear-1-de.html

Bear Comics!!!

Fun Post! No serious posts of bearilemmas or bearoblems this week. No this week we will once again celebrate bears' role in artwork, but more in the humor realm than the previous posts. Thanks to anyone who's sent some to me, here's some classics!

Historical Bear Injustice in the Midlands

Been a while, difficult to do a dissertation and keep up with bear news at the same time. But in my wanderings I came across some bear related history that you all may find SHOCKING. Hence I must report on....

BEAR ENSLAVEMENT OF WARWICK CASTLE

Warwick Castle, located in the Midlands of England was a fortress originally built by William the Conquerer, then expanded on in blah, blah, blah....
Look, none of that matters. What matters is THIS:


The coat of arms of Warwick Castle is a, enslaved bear, in chains, tied to a tree. Ridiculous but true. You see it all over the castle.

Furniture:

Plaques:


There is even a tower there named Bear Tower, no doubt where bears were flogged just for wanting those bear necessities they keep singing about. So why? Why does Warwick Castle promote this image of foolhardiness? Well, it is difficult to say due to the long history we are dealing with. The most famous ruler of the castle was Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick (nicknamed the 'Kingmaker") who fought for the House of Lancaster during the War of the Roses. I suspect, and as a student of history I'm never wrong on these things, that ol' Dick Neville wanted to advertise his power and battle prowess as greater than it actually was, and spread the image of a bear in chains as proof that he was mightier than a bear. I know, it's stupid and ridiculous, but you have to understand this was the 15th century, and people during those times were very stupid. No one even knew how to drive a car, an activity that can be performed by Nicholas Cage (presumably). So Neville spread this image everywhere:


Bears as servants:


Bears even being shown as weak enough to be controlled by babies of Neville:


Yes, I know what you are thinking. How could bears stand for this? Well, they didn't. As I was leaving the castle in disgust, I heard screams, looked back for one glorious photos and ran myself, knowing that bears never forget, never forgive, and justice had been served:

Sky Bears

Clouds share my bear obsession:

http://bellflower.elfle.com/bear-in-the-sky.html

thanks for Tim O'Connor for the link

Bears are Evolving

It's true, we are in an mental evolutionary arms race with bears. Over food. Bears are insatiable beast of eating and in the past humans have had difficult times keeping our hairy brothers out of our meat sheds and granaries. Until the amazing invention of the BearVault 500 Canister:

http://www.bearvault.com/

These amazing containers utilize space age materials with intricate locking puzzles that are only able to be opened by humans with dexterous fingers and years of study. Certainly not a clumsy, roly-poly bear. Or so we thought:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/25/nyregion/25bear.html?_r=1

That's right, people. Yellow-Yellow, originally though to be an average run-of-the-mill bear, has cracked our code and is now teaching other bears to do it. This bear-messiah is undoubtedly going to lead a Bearevolution against our smug attitude towards trail mix, beef jerky, fruits, chocolate bar, and other lovely hiking foods. And I for one am happy. I welcome our well-fed bear-lords. We have rested on our laurels ever since we made some rock into a knife. It's time to put in our dues and start building giant Bear-pyramids to honor our super-intelligent bear-pharaohs. You heard it here first, bears! I support you and expect your support when the time comes!

Bears in Art

For Ages, ever since an idiot caveman could smear mud on his hands and make marks on a cave wall, people have been obsessed and fascinated with bears and how to represent them in pictures. The current state of human civilization has made advances in practically all fields of human interest, and Bear Art is no exception. Here are some fine examples

1. Impressionist painting teaching young girls that bears are totally safe and make adorable companions:



2. Wall relief depicting bears' ninja-like ability to blend into surroundings to attack foes



3. Sometimes bears are huge and inquisitive



4. This illustration shows the not-so-talked-about inter-species bear warefare, which has advanced to the level of spies



5. This is, uh, well, Barack Obama naked attacking a bear from a unicorn. I, gee, I wish I knew the artist, because he's a genius.