Guess what, mango? What's that? Will?
Did you know there's a polar bear jail in Churchill, Canada?
So I do know that Churchill is considered the polar bear capital of the world because my mom has wanted to make a pilgrimage there forever. And I'd also heard that people there leave their cars unlocked in case you ever need to make like a quick escape from a wayward bear. White too serious about that. You can actually just hop in a stranger's car and take shelter, which is such a weird things. I'm sure you can only get so much protection from a crazed bear in a car.
But tell me about polar bear jail.
Well, according to the Atlantic, it was built in nineteen eighty two and it has space for twenty eight fuzzy inmates.
Basically, the town has so.
Many bears wandering through officials have set up a hotline for locals. It's just six seventy five bear. So if you see a bear on the outskirts of town, officials will come and try to scare it away with whatever they can use, whether it's firecrackers or sometimes rubber bullets or paintballs, and generally the bears get the hint. But if a bear decides he still wants to visit, or worse, if a bear starts loitering in places that they shouldn't be.
That's often what juvenile bears will do. That's when the threat of jail time kicks in. So the bear patrol tries to lure these big delinquents into a giant cylindrical trap baited with seal meat, and when the cage snaps shut, they truck them off to the polar bear jail. Of course, sometimes the bears aren't hungry and they just have to use tranquilizers. But the system actually works pretty well.
So this doesn't sound like due process. But how long do these bears get sentenced for?
Generally it actually is a few months, and they keep them there until the weather gets colder or the water freezes over, and then the older and hopefully wiser bears get sprung back to their old neighborhoods and they'll hopefully turn over a new leaf in the process. But that's just the first of nine facts on bears we're covering today, So let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to
part time genius. I'm Will Pearson. And as always, I'm joined by my good friend Mangush hot Ticketer and sitting behind the soundproof glass wearing two big lobster claws and a shirt that says what does it say? It says Sometimes I share. Sometimes I'm a fellyfish. That's our Palin producer, Tristan McNeil. What.
I love that Tristan gets all dressed off as usual, But I think we forgot to tell him that we were changing the topic from lobsters to bears these things. I'm so sorry. Tristan will update the calendar soon.
He just looks so sad pinching those lobster claws of that mean, do you have at least one lobster fact you could share to make him feel little better?
You know? I don't. Oh, okay, well me either. I do have some facts the trick. So I know you started with a story on polar bears, but do you know there's actually a bear known as a pisly bear. Sometimes it's also called a groller bear, and basically it's a polar bear grizzly bear combination or hybrid, and mostly the sort of breeding has occurred in captivity. It produces like a really beautiful white bear with light brown patches.
But Canadian hunters have been finding more and more of these pizzlies in the wild, and they think that the inner bear romance's trend will continue because of global warming, though actually the two bears have actually lived in overlapping territories for a while. That's pretty interesting.
I've never heard of either of those, the pizly or the grollar bear. So what are these hybrid bears like in terms of their behaviors, because those are two pretty different types of bears.
Do we know much about them? Well, you know, some hybrids can't mate, but these are definitely not sterile. They can continue to mate, which is pretty interesting. They actually tend to take on the polar bears hunting skills, so they can be aggressive and pretty skilled hunters, but they're not actually as good at swimming as purebred polars. So you know, polar bears can actually swim for one hundred
miles continuously, and they can't go that far. But in the long run, scientists actually think these pizzlies will probably be successful by mating more and more with grizzly bears than polar bears. And that's just because the numbers favor that, and also how the environment seems to be going. What is interesting, though, this isn't the only hybrid species that comes out of climate change. Pacific Standard magazine has ridden that luga whales are mating with narwals to create nar lugas.
At the very least fun to say, I mean, that definitely sounds made up.
I think I was probably in my twenties before somebody convinced me that nar wals were actually.
A real thing. Anyway, So these nar lugas, that's crazy.
I do think it's funny when you get these names like ligers and beefalows. They're kind of fun to say, but there are some that are just terrible, like jag lions and dog wolves, which honestly just feels lazy to me. All Right, So here's a strange one, and it sounds like an urban legend, but.
It's actually true.
There was this man in China who bought two puppies on the border of China and Vietnam, and then he took them home. I guess they looked like little black chowchows, and so he fed them and he groomed them, and then things.
Started to get a little weird. They wanted more and more food.
They started feasting on his chickens, and then they grew to one hundred pounds. But he only fully realized he'd been duped when he read a government flyer about bear safety, and then he recognized the animals in the picture. It became pretty clear to him that he was actually the proud owner of two Asian.
Black bear cups.
So now they live in a sanctuary where they get to eat more than just dog food, thankfully.
That's pretty funny. Actually, this is super weird, and I'm sure I've told you this before, but my grandfather was in the forestry service, and one day when he was on tour, he found these three bear cubs whose mother had been shot. I think the mom of bear couldn't give milk, so she was aggressive in attacking the town. But he and his colleagues found these bears, so he brought one of them back with him. And the story was that my mom had a pet bear for a
little bit until they good place in the sanctuary. And so like my mom is unafraid of any animal. But the funny part, and the thing we always used to tease my grandmother about, was like how did she let a pet bear in the house, And she always just said like she thought it was a dog, And I guess there must be some sort of resemblers. She was just like willfully ignoring the fact that my grandfather would bring these ridiculous baby animals home for the whiter That
is great, but my fact. So since we're talking about Cubs, here's the fact about the Chicago Cubs and how they got their name. So you know, even though I'm not a huge baseball fan, I do love the strange team names that stick around for a little bits of time. Like in Brooklyn, the baseball team was called the Brooklyn Bridegrooms for a season, and I guess this is because like a number of them all got married in one
season and that's just the nickname they took on. Similarly, the Cubs used to be called the White Stockings, which you know isn't particularly useful since they also have the
White Sox in Chicago. And then they lost their manager whose contract wasn't renewed, I guess, and the team went by the name the Chicago Orphan, So I know it's ad and they were horrible because obviously teams aren't great when they don't have managers, right, But then they started rebuilding the team with these super talented players, but all of them were really really young, and that's how they got the name the Cubs. You know, it wasn't like
the super formal name. Apparently, there's the site Wrigley Ivy and it says that young players were commonly called cubs or cults or you know, other young animal names. But then this typesetter in Chicago may have accidentally like capitalized the description in print, and that nickname stuck.
I do like this idea that a team could have a different name every couple of years, just based on something the team's been up to, or like this idea of they all got married so they were the bride groups. But actually I looked up to Chicago Bears and I've got a quick one about the Super Bowls shuffle. So did you realize it was nominated for a Grammy.
I mean, it is such a novelty song and it's hard to imagine any critics actually liking it.
Well, the strangest part is that it was beat out by Prints and the Revolution's k Thank goodness, it was beat out. If it had beaten that song, that's ridiculous and it's crazy to think that they were even in the same category. But one other thing I didn't realize, but the year the Bears won the Super Bowl was also the year of the Challenger disaster, and that happened around the same time. So the team actually never got
to visit the White House for understandable reasons. But they did eventually get to go when fellow Chicago and Barack Obama invited the team to the White House twenty five years later.
I mean, that is crazy that they had to wait twenty five years for the kind of amazing that it happened. Well, since we've moved into sports and pop culture, there's a Fozzy Bear fact. I was trying to slip into the Sesame Street episode. We did a couple episodes back, but I couldn't do it because he's more of a muppet.
Is the fact that you keep sending me Fazzy Bear jokes from Twitter?
Is that what your fact is? I mean, they're so corny. Actually, have you seen that Mike Probiculi a special where he talks about the one time he had to follow Fozzy Bear on a comedy tour, Like Fozzy Bear opened for him and he said it was so so difficult because you know, any bad joke Fozzy tells he's loved because of his Waka walka walka, the audience just eats it up and he's a friendly a hard act to follow up.
But the one thing I was gonna say was that on the original Muppet Show, the gag was that Fazzy Bear would tell jokes that were so bad that he'd then get no reaction and he gets so upset that he'd get depressed or even start to cry. And you know, that sounds funny in theory, but apparently the audiences didn't know what to do, like, they mostly just felt bad for him, and it made the segments really, really awkward.
So when Henson and Frank Oz were retooling the character, they played down the sympathy aspects and just made him this sort of eternally optimistic, diluted bear who you know still gets tomatoes and tomato soup thrown at him, but
he believes he's crushing it on stage every time. Also, they friendly retooled his eyebrows in the process because they used to make Fazzy Bear frown more, you know, when he was getting upset, right and they had this apparatus built in the puppet that frank Oz could like pull so that the eyebrows shifted down, but then the hat mostly covered them up and they retool the character, so then they drop that element.
Huh, all right, so I'm going to try to bring this back to real bears.
Nothing gets fozzy.
He's great, But I actually like reading about all the unusual skills that they have. They have this incredible sense of smell, and this is how extreme it gets. So they're seven times better at smelling than a bloodhound. A polar bear can actually smell seals from twenty miles away, and can smell a seal under the ice through its breathing hole from a mile Awaybelievable, it really is. And so they're also pretty crafty. This is according to metal Flaws.
They will roll rocks into a bear trap in order to set them off. But the most intriguing thing to me was that bears are apparently good at math. Now this comes from nat Geo, and it says bears actually have the largest brain of any carnivore, and scientists wanted to find out whether they could count, so they set up these side by side touch screens where bears would have to paw or touch their nose to this with more dots on them, And when they picked the screen
with more dots, they got a little treat. Apparently bears are very motivated by trees. And as scientists kept varying the size and the colors of the dots, you know, there might have been fifteen tiny dots on one screen and twelve on another, these genius bears kept picking the right one. In fact, the biggest problem with the study ended up being that all the bears wanted to participate at the same time, and the scientists didn't have enough
testing stations for them. You know, like I said, they are very motivated by treats.
Well, we've still got two more bear factors you get too, But before we do, let's take a quick break. Welcome back to Part time Genius. So, you know, Will, I was thinking about that story you told about that dude who bought two dogs and they turned out to be bears, and it reminded me of this great story about Lord
Iron at college. Apparently, the rule at Cambridge was that you couldn't have dogs on campus, and Byron was so irritated that he decided to like skirt the rules, and he decided to go out and get himself a bear, like a team bear. And there were, of course no explicit rules about having a bear on campus, so I guess he got away with it, and he'd actually frequently walk it around campus on a leash. But the funniest part is that people kept asking him what are you
going to do with that bear? And his standard reply was he was going to try to get him enrolled at the school and have him sit for a Fellowshit. Apparently that part of the plan never all came through. Wow, that's pretty crazy. So is that what you're using for your last fact? Actually, I've got another one I want to use, So I actually think this is pretty interesting. And I realized this when I was reading a Berenstein
Bear's book about Easter to my daughter. And as I was reading it, I realized it was less about the chocolate bunnies and an Easter icon, and there was a little more overt religion in there than I was expecting. You know, it was more explicit than I'd remembered, and I guess I was a little confused because I started wondering, like, had the Berenstein Bears always been talking about religion like jars of clay, and I just hadn't picked up on it, you know. And I've been confused about this stuff in
the past two like not growing up Christian. I didn't realize that Asthla and Line the Witch in the Wardrobe was supposed to be christ until one of my best friends pointed out to me. Or I remember finding Archie comics online and there's this one where Archie gets religious and he converts a hippie. Really, yeah, it was because the comic got licensed to a Christian publisher for a bit. Anyway, I was curious that the Berenstein Bears had like some
sort of similar agreement. But it turns out that it's Jen and Stan Berenstein's son Michael, who's been inserting more religious titles in the mix. And apparently when Stan passed away, Michael actually stepped in to help his mom keep writing books, and he'd apparently made his name by writing Christian theme books for about thirty years. So, according to mental class, when you see a title like the Berenstein Bears Show God's Love, the Berenstein Bears say their prayers or the
Bear Bears go to Sunday School. That generally indicates he's the one who wrote it. Huh, that's interesting. All right.
Well, since we're sticking with fictional bears here, I'm going to join you with a Paddington fact. So did you know that Paddington was originally written to be from Africa?
I mean, the only recent thing I know about Hackington was a he switched from eating marmalade to marmite sandwiches for this ad campaign, and people were pissed. I bet they were. They felt like Pangton was a sellout. Yeah, seriously, I mean I knew that Pangington's from Darkest Peru, but why was he from Africa before that?
Well, this was a last minute adjustment and it was pointed out to author Michael Bond that bears don't really live in Africa, so he pivoted to Darkest Peru and that's where he based his creature on this spectacled bear.
Well, I mean, I liked a lot of these bear facts. I've got to say my favorite was that bears can do math problems. I think you're going to take the trophy this week. All right, Well, thank you very much. It's an honor, and thank you guys for listening. We'll be back with a full length episode tomorrow. The