Tag Archives: bear
Mike the fearless brown bear shot by Swiss gamekeepers
A handout picture shows a brown bear dubbed Mike by its fans in the eastern Swiss Val Mustair valley on June 30, 2012. The bear, known as M13 by authorities, has been shot and killed by gamekeepers in a mountainous border region in southeastern Switzerland after several run-ins with locals, Swiss officials said on February 20, 2013. How to deal with the bear had sparked controversy between gamekeepers and environmentalists far outside the Graubuenden canton, which borders on Italy and Austria and where the animal was most often spotted. Picture taken June 30, 2012.
Credit: Reuters/Amt fuer Jagd und Fischerei des Kantons Graubuenden/Handout
Berlin’s beloved polar bear Knut returns on show
1 of 7. The full-sized polar bear Knut model covered with the original fur is pictured during the presentation to the media at the natural history museum in Berlin February 15, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Fabrizio Bensch
BERLIN |
BERLIN (Reuters) – Knut, the hand-reared polar bear who captured Germans’ hearts before his early death in 2011, returned to his adoring Berlin public on Friday as a life-sized model bearing the animal’s real fur.
Knut will stand for a month in the entrance foyer of the city’s natural history museum, which has modified its entrance for the anticipated rush of visitors, a museum spokeswoman said.
The museum is keen to stress that Knut has not been stuffed. Rather, a replica of the bear was made, based on Knut’s skeleton, in one of his favorite poses, and this was covered with the creature’s pelt, in a procedure known as dermoplasty.
The model has expressive eyes and a damp nose, museum director Johannes Vogel said.
“I think people will accept Knut, because this is a very dignified model.. People who knew Knut very well while he was alive recognize their Knut here again.”
Knut was the star attraction of Berlin zoo during his four-year life. His mother rejected him as a new-born leaving the fluffy white cub to be reared by a zookeeper. Thousands of visitors queued for hours to watch him frolic in his enclosure, and he inspired a dizzying array of merchandise.
Other German zoos have tried in vain to create celebrity animals. None have ever come close to matching Knut’s fame.
The bear died suddenly of an epileptic fit in March 2011.
(Reporting by Reuters television; writing by Alexandra Hudson, editing by Paul Casciato)
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More Enduring Than the Average Bear
This week marks the 52nd anniversary of the premiere of The Yogi Bear Show on television, and it would seem that the smarter-than-the-average bear is busier now than he has been in decades. The 2010 feature Yogi Bear turned out to be a box office hit, and next year will see the big screen release of the live-action/animated film Yogi’s Gang: The Great College Rescue, which follows by a half-century Yogi’s big-screen debut in 1964?s Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear! Not bad for a middle-aged toon.
Everybody knows that Yogi Bear first appeared in 1958 as a supporting character on The Huckleberry Hound Show, but not everyone knows that the boastful bruin was the character that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera originally pitched to the sponsor instead of Huckleberry Hound…in fact, in an earlier developmental incarnation, he was known as “Huckleberry Bear!” The reason for shifting the title character to a dog was said to be the belief on the part of the sponsor, Kellogg’s Cereal, that Smokey Bear’s prominence on television at that time would eclipse a new ursine character. Three years later, though, Yogi’s popularity made it a moot point.
Yogi also had the distinction of being the favorite character of Bill Hanna. Bill made this confession to me in 1998, a time when he was suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, which wreaked havoc on his short-term memory. His long-term memory, however, was still on call, so much so, in fact, that he sang the entire theme song to Yogi Bear for me. He knew the lyrics well because he had written it.
The Yogi Bear Show
It was through Bill’s wife, Violet, though, that I learned the song had been composed in a most unusual place:
“Know where I first heard the Yogi Bear song? You [she was addressing Bill] were in the bathroom, and you’d showered, and you were in your tee-shirt and shorts, and you were shaving, and you called me in. I sat on the edge of the bathtub and listened to Yogi Bear.”
When I asked Bill how he felt about seeing his work with Joe Barbera become so iconic, he had a characteristic response. “I don’t know,” he said, “I’ve never felt that way about it.” He went on:
“If we sold a series of cartoons, I was more wrapped up in the development of it, getting the right people involved in it, and if I needed to be involved in some of the productions, I’d do it. But I guess I was more involved in the operations of the cartoon studio. I don’t feel anything except that I enjoy what I’m doing and I’m working with my friends, and we have fun. If we make a cartoon and it’s good, I’m pleased with it and proud. The more I had to do with it, I guess, the prouder I feel.”
Bill’s memory might have been flagging, but his sense of humor remained intact. When I asked if he came into work every day at the age of 85 because he was still having fun, he laughed and replied: “No, it’s because my wife drives me!”
Bill Hanna
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Xbox 360 | Naughty Bear: Panic in Paradise Review
If you weren’t expecting the psychotic teddy bear Naughty to make a return after 2010′s disappointing Naughty Bear, you’re not alone. If anything, his comeback in Panic in Paradise comes as a greater surprise to his legion of fluffy companions, who made the woeful mistake of booking a trip to Paradise Island without inviting Naughty–for what may be obvious reasons. The story never gets any more complex than that, and with that simple premise out of the way, it’s not long before Naughty is up to his old tricks, such as ramming the nozzle from a gasoline pump down the throat of one of his cuddly friends and then flicking a burning match on him. Panic in Paradise makes strides toward being more appealing than its forebear, but it ultimately offers more of the same.
Each level still involves stalking ursine bystanders and subjecting them to cruelly detailed punishments with weapons and environmental perils like bamboo sticks. Panic in Paradise aims to enhance the experience with an emphasis on costumes, similar to the Hitman series. Not only do you have the option to sneak up on unsuspecting bears and bash their stuffing out as before, but you can also drag them into nearby woods and steal their duds. It’s a smart move that adds some much-needed variety, both in the way specific costumes let you get close to targets without being noticed and the way you can unlock them for further use after completing a level.
Buying costumes piece by piece with the gold you’ve accumulated from your sprees now determines how quickly you level up. Each costume piece for the slots available for Naughty’s head, face, torso, arms, and feet levels separately, and thus you need to switch out maxed items if you want to continue leveling up. The costumes are worthwhile investments in themselves since some grant massive boosts to Naughty’s stats, allowing him to withstand a few more hits when his target is surrounded by bears. Naughty’s vastly improved arsenal benefits from this system as well, although it’s disappointing that many of the weapons use the same animations despite their differing textures. All this takes place in a much larger world than we saw before, complete with a vastly improved camera and 36 new bears to torture spread across 11 separate levels that should last well over 15 hours for completionists.
But even with the additions, this gameplay gets painfully old after a couple of hours. Behavior Interactive put forth some clear effort to avoid this criticism by including varied settings, such as power plants and laboratories, along with requirements to kill bears while wielding specific weapons or wearing specific costumes, but inevitably every level falls into the same tired pattern of sneaking through bushes, trashing the scenery, stealing costumes, and braining the few bears who refuse to approach your hiding place.
At times the objectives aren’t even clear, so you wander around wondering if you’ve picked up the right weapon or if you’re staring at the object you’re supposed to kill your main victim with. The action is made worse by the clunky melee combat that’s a little too awkward without a target lock, and the mediocre graphics never achieve any greater significance than providing a sense of place for the action. All of these ingredients combine to make Panic in Paradise a game that’s best played in short bursts rather than extended sessions.
Even then, Panic in Paradise suffers from an annoying tendency to crash at the most inopportune moments, such as when you’ve spent 30 minutes completing all the secondary objectives and nabbing every costume in one of the larger levels. After the crash, you have no choice but to start all over, which can be a pain since getting the most out of every level entails tackling at least three secondary objectives and bashing all the scenery for extra gold. If that’s not bad enough, the bears themselves tend to die too soon, particularly if you accidentally spook them into committing suicide by running into the ubiquitous cacti when the level requires you to shove them into an interdimensional portal instead. Worst of all, Naughty sometimes gets stuck in his attack animations, and you’re powerless until his deathblow decides to come down several minutes later.
Despite these stumbles, Panic in Paradise is still a better game than 2010′s Naughty Bear in terms of content, but ultimately the same awareness of a hundred missed opportunities settles in. As before, the charm of the unhinged British narrator and the sight of cutesy bears getting impaled on bamboo wears off before long, and the new nods to variety can’t mask the feeling that you’re doing the same thing over and over for more than 30 levels. Still, restricting this meatier entry to a downloadable game at a fraction of the original’s cost allows you to stretch your dollars, and the ability to revisit each level for higher scores and better costumes allows for substantial replayability–presuming you want to replay it in the first place. A word of warning to parents, though: Naughty is even more violent this time around, and while there’s technically no blood or swearing, some of the sights are far more gruesome than its kid-friendly rating would have you believe.
Driver swerves to avoid moose, hits bear instead
OSLO |
OSLO (Reuters) – A Norwegian driver who swerved his car on a rural road to avoid running into a moose hit a bear instead, authorities said on Thursday.
The driver spotted the moose on a country road near Hanestad, 225 kilometers north of Oslo, around midnight on Wednesday, and tried to go around the animal, not realizing that a bear was also nearby.
“The driver had lost a bit of speed as he tried to avoid the moose before hitting the bear,” said Svein Erik Bjorke of the local wildlife authority, who was out in the forest searching for the wounded animal.
“We are currently tracking the bear and we have found traces of blood indicating internal injuries,” he said.
The driver escaped uninjured while his car suffered some damage.
Norway’s rugged mountains are sparsely populated and full of wildlife. The country, nearly the size of Germany but home to just five million people, has around 100,000 moose and 150 brown bears, authorities said.
(Reporting By Vegard Botterli; editing by Mike Collett-White)
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