Speaker 1: Guess what, mango, what's that? Well? Did you know there's
Speaker 1: a polar bear jail in Churchill, Canada? So I do
Speaker 1: know that Churchill is considered the polar bear capital of
Speaker 1: the world because my mom has wanted to make a
Speaker 1: pilgrimage there forever. And I'd also heard that people there
Speaker 1: leave their cars unlocked in case you ever need to
Speaker 1: make like a quick escape from a wayward bear. White,
Speaker 1: are you serious about that? You can actually just hop
Speaker 1: into stranger's car and take shelter, which is such a
Speaker 1: weird thing. And I'm sure you can only get so
Speaker 1: much protection from a crazed bear in a car. But
Speaker 1: tell me about polar bear jail. Well, according to the Atlantic,
Speaker 1: it was built in nWo and it has space for
Speaker 1: twenty eight fuzzy inmates. Basically, as the town has so
Speaker 1: many bears wandering through, officials have set up a hotline
Speaker 1: for locals. It's just six seven five Bear, So if
Speaker 1: you see a bear on the outskirts of town, officials
Speaker 1: will come and try to scare it away with whatever
Speaker 1: they can use, whether it's firecrackers or sometimes rubber bullets
Speaker 1: or paintballs, and generally the bears get the hint. But
Speaker 1: if a bear decides he still wants to visit, or
Speaker 1: or worse, if a bear starts loitering in places that
Speaker 1: they shouldn't be. That's often what juvenile bears will do.
Speaker 1: That's when the threat of jail time kicks in. So
Speaker 1: the bear patrol tries to lure these big delinquents into
Speaker 1: a giant cylindrical trap baited with seal meat, and when
Speaker 1: the cage snaps shut, they truck them off to the
Speaker 1: polar bear jail. Of course, sometimes the bears aren't hungry
Speaker 1: and they just have to use tranquilizers. But the system
Speaker 1: actually works pretty well, so this doesn't sound like do process.
Speaker 1: But how long do these bears get sentenced for? Generally
Speaker 1: it actually is a few months, and they keep them
Speaker 1: there until the weather gets colder or the water freezes over,
Speaker 1: and then the older and hopefully wiser bears get sprung
Speaker 1: back to their old neighborhoods and they'll hopefully turn over
Speaker 1: a new leaf in the process. But that's just the
Speaker 1: first of nine facts on bears we're covering today, So
Speaker 1: let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to part
Speaker 1: time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always, I'm joined
Speaker 1: by my good friend mansh Ticketter and sitting behind the
Speaker 1: soundproof glass wearing two big lobster claws and a shirt
Speaker 1: that says what does it say? Says? Sometimes I share?
Speaker 1: Sometimes I'm allfish. That's our Palin producer Tristan McNeil what
Speaker 1: I love interesting, gets all dressed off as usual. But
Speaker 1: I think we forgot to tell him that we were
Speaker 1: changing the topic from lobsters bears things. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1: Tristan will update the calendar soon. He just looks so
Speaker 1: sad pinching those lobster claws and lean. Do you have
Speaker 1: at least one lobster fact you could share to make
Speaker 1: him feel a little better? You know I don't? Okay,
Speaker 1: well me either, I do have some air facts the trick.
Speaker 1: So I know you started with a story on a
Speaker 1: polar bears, but do you know there's actually a bear
Speaker 1: known as a Pizzley bear. Sometimes it's also called a
Speaker 1: groller bear, and basically it's a polar bear grizzly bear
Speaker 1: combination or hybrid, and mostly the sort of breeding has
Speaker 1: occurred in captivity. It produces like a really beautiful white
Speaker 1: bear with light brown patches, but Canadian hunters have been
Speaker 1: finding more and more of these Pizzlis in the wild,
Speaker 1: and they think that the inner bear romances trend will
Speaker 1: continue because of global warming, though actually the two bears
Speaker 1: have actually lived in overlapping territories for a while. That's
Speaker 1: pretty interesting. I've never heard of either of those, that
Speaker 1: the Pisli or the groller bears. So what are these
Speaker 1: hybrid bears like in terms of their behaviors, because those
Speaker 1: are two pretty different types of bears. Do we know
Speaker 1: much about them? Well, you know, some hybrids can't mate,
Speaker 1: but these are definitely not sterile. They can continue to mate,
Speaker 1: which is pretty interesting. They actually tend to take on
Speaker 1: the polar bears hunting skills, so they can be aggressive
Speaker 1: and and pretty skilled hunters, but they're not actually as
Speaker 1: good at swimming is pure bred polars. So you know,
Speaker 1: polar bears can actually swim for a hundred miles continuously,
Speaker 1: and and they can't go that far. But in the
Speaker 1: long run, scientists actually think these Pizlis will probably be
Speaker 1: successful by mating more and more with grizzly bears than
Speaker 1: polar bears. And that's just because the numbers favor that,
Speaker 1: and also how the environment seems to be going. What
Speaker 1: is interesting, though, this isn't the only hybrid species that
Speaker 1: comes out of climate change. Pacific Standard magazine has written
Speaker 1: that bluga whales are mating with nar walls to create
Speaker 1: nar lugas. At the very least fun to say. I mean,
Speaker 1: that definitely sounds made up. I think I was probably
Speaker 1: in my twenties before somebody convinced me that nar walls
Speaker 1: were actually a real thing. Anyway, So these nar lugas,
Speaker 1: that's crazy. I do think it's funny when you get
Speaker 1: these names like Leger's and bee flows. They're kind of
Speaker 1: fun to say. But there's some that are just terrible,
Speaker 1: like jag lions and dog wolves, which honestly just feels
Speaker 1: lazy to be all right. So here's a strange one,
Speaker 1: and it sounds like an urban legend, but it's actually true.
Speaker 1: There was this man in China who bought two puppies
Speaker 1: on the border of China and Vietnam, and then he
Speaker 1: took them home. I guess they looked like little black
Speaker 1: chow chows, and so he fed them and he groomed them,
Speaker 1: and then things started to get a little weird. They
Speaker 1: wanted more and more food. They started feasting on his chickens,
Speaker 1: and then they grew to a hundred pounds. But he
Speaker 1: only fully realized he'd been duped when he read a
Speaker 1: government flyer about bear safety, and then he recognized the
Speaker 1: animals in the picture. It became pretty clear to them
Speaker 1: that he was actually the proud owner of two Asian
Speaker 1: black bear cubs. So now they live in a sanctuary
Speaker 1: where they get to eat more than just dog food, thankfully.
Speaker 1: That's pretty funny. Actually, this is super weird, and I'm
Speaker 1: sure I've told you this before, but my my grandfather
Speaker 1: was in the forestry service. Then one day when he
Speaker 1: was on tour, he found these three bear cubs whose
Speaker 1: mother had been shot. I think the mom and bear
Speaker 1: couldn't give milk, so she was aggressive and attacking the town.
Speaker 1: But he and his colleagues found these bears, so he
Speaker 1: brought one of them back with him. And the story
Speaker 1: was that my mom had a pet bear for a
Speaker 1: little bit until they good place into sanctuary. And so like,
Speaker 1: my mom is unafraid of any animal. But the funny part,
Speaker 1: and the thing we always used to tease my grandmother
Speaker 1: about was like, how did she let a pet bear
Speaker 1: in the house And She always just said like she
Speaker 1: thought it was a dog, and I guess there must
Speaker 1: be some sort of resemblance. She was just like willfully
Speaker 1: ignoring the fact that my grandfather was bringing these ridiculous
Speaker 1: baby animals home for the water is great, but my fact. So,
Speaker 1: since we're talking about Cubs, here's the fact about the
Speaker 1: Chicago Cubs and how they got their name. So you know,
Speaker 1: even though I'm not a huge baseball fan, I do
Speaker 1: love the strange team names that stick around for little
Speaker 1: bits of time. Like in Brooklyn, the baseball team was
Speaker 1: called the Brooklyn Bridegrooms for a season, and I guess
Speaker 1: this is because like a number of them all got
Speaker 1: married in one season and that's just the nickname they
Speaker 1: took on. Similarly, the Cubs used to be called the
Speaker 1: White Stockings, which you know isn't particularly useful since they
Speaker 1: also have the White Sox in Chicago. And then they
Speaker 1: lost their manager whose contract wasn't renewed, I guess, and
Speaker 1: the team went by the name the Chicago go Orphan,
Speaker 1: so sad, you know, it's sad, and they were horrible
Speaker 1: because obviously teams aren't great when they don't have managers.
Speaker 1: But then they started rebuilding the team with these super
Speaker 1: talented players, but all of them were really really young,
Speaker 1: and that's how they got the name the Cubs. You know,
Speaker 1: it wasn't like the super formal name. Apparently there's the
Speaker 1: site Wrigley IVY and it says that young players were
Speaker 1: commonly called cubs or cults or you know, other young
Speaker 1: animal names. But then this type set are in Chicago
Speaker 1: may have accidentally like capitalized the description in print, and
Speaker 1: that nickname stuck. I do like this idea that a
Speaker 1: team could have a different name every couple of years,
Speaker 1: just based on something the team has been up to,
Speaker 1: or like this idea if they all got married so
Speaker 1: they were the bride groups. But actually I looked up
Speaker 1: to Chicago Bears and I've got a quick one about
Speaker 1: the Super Bowls shuffle. So did you realize it was
Speaker 1: nominated for a Grammy. I mean, it is such a
Speaker 1: novelty song and it's hard to imagine any critics actually
Speaker 1: liking it. Well, the strangest part is that it was
Speaker 1: beat out by Prince and the Revolutions us. Thank thank goodness,
Speaker 1: it was beat that. If it had beaten that song,
Speaker 1: that's ridiculous and it's crazy to think that they were
Speaker 1: even in the same category. But one other thing I
Speaker 1: didn't realize, but the year the Bears won the Super
Speaker 1: Bowl was also the year of the Challenger disaster, and
Speaker 1: that happened around the same time. So the team actually
Speaker 1: never got to visit the White House for for understandable reasons.
Speaker 1: But they did eventually get to go when fellow Chicago
Speaker 1: and Barack Obama invited the team to the White House
Speaker 1: twenty five years later. I mean, that is crazy that
Speaker 1: they had to wait twenty five years, kind of amazing
Speaker 1: that it happened. Well, since we've moved into sports and
Speaker 1: pop culture, there's a Fozzy Bear fact. I was trying
Speaker 1: to slip into the Sesame Street episode. We did a
Speaker 1: couple of episodes back, but h I couldn't do it
Speaker 1: because he's more of a muppet. Is the fact that
Speaker 1: that you keep sending me Fozzy Bear jokes from Twitter?
Speaker 1: Is that? Is that what your fact is? I mean,
Speaker 1: they're so corny. Actually, have you seen that Mike Particularly
Speaker 1: special where he talks about the one time he had
Speaker 1: to follow Fozzy Bear on a comedy tour, like Fozzy
Speaker 1: Bear open for him, and he said it was so
Speaker 1: oh difficult because you know, any bad joke Fozzy tells
Speaker 1: he's beloved because of his waca waca walker, the audience
Speaker 1: just eats it up, and he's a friendly a hard
Speaker 1: act to follow up. The one thing I was going
Speaker 1: to say was that on the original Muppet Show, the
Speaker 1: gag was that Fozzy Bear would tell jokes that were
Speaker 1: so bad that he'd then get no reaction and he
Speaker 1: gets so upset that he get depressed or even start
Speaker 1: to cry. And you know, that sounds funny and theory,
Speaker 1: but apparently the audiences didn't know what to do, like,
Speaker 1: they mostly just felt bad for him, and it made
Speaker 1: the segments really really awkward. So when Henson and Frank
Speaker 1: Oz were retooling the character, they played down the sympathy
Speaker 1: aspects and just made him this sort of eternally optimistic,
Speaker 1: gluted bear who you know, still gets tomatoes and tomatoes
Speaker 1: soup thrown at him, but he believes he's crushing it
Speaker 1: on stage every time. Also, they friendly retooled his eyebrows
Speaker 1: in the process, because they used to make Fozzy Bear
Speaker 1: frown more, you know, when he was getting upset, and
Speaker 1: they had this apparatus built in the puppet that frank
Speaker 1: Oz could like pull so that the eyebrows shifted down,
Speaker 1: but then the hat mostly covered them up and they
Speaker 1: retooled the characters, so then they dropped that element Alright,
Speaker 1: so I'm gonna try to bring this back to real bears.
Speaker 1: Nothing gets fozzy, right, But I actually like reading about
Speaker 1: all the unusual skills that they have. They have this
Speaker 1: incredible sense of smell, and this is how extreme it gets.
Speaker 1: So there's seven times better smelling than a bloodhound. A
Speaker 1: polar bear can actually smell seals from twenty miles away,
Speaker 1: and can smell a seal under the ice through its
Speaker 1: breathing hole from a mile over. At it really is.
Speaker 1: And so they're also pretty crafty. This is according to
Speaker 1: metal Flaws. They will roll rocks into a bear trap
Speaker 1: in order to set them off. But the most intriguing
Speaker 1: thing to me was that bears are apparently good at math.
Speaker 1: Now this comes from nat Geo, and it says bears
Speaker 1: actually have the largest brain of any carnivore, and scientists
Speaker 1: wanted to find out whether they could count, so they
Speaker 1: set up these side by side touch screens where bears
Speaker 1: would have to paw or touch their nose to this
Speaker 1: green with more dots on them, and when they picked
Speaker 1: the screen with more dots, they got a little treat.
Speaker 1: Apparently bears are very motivated by treats. And as scientists
Speaker 1: kept varying the size and the colors of the dots,
Speaker 1: you know, there might have been fifteen tiny dots on
Speaker 1: one screen and twelve on another, these genius bears kept
Speaker 1: picking the right one. In fact, the biggest problem with
Speaker 1: the study ended up being that all the bears wanted
Speaker 1: to participate at the same time, and the scientists didn't
Speaker 1: have enough testing stations for them. You know, like I said,
Speaker 1: they are very motivated by treats. Well, we've still got
Speaker 1: two more bear facts as you get to but before
Speaker 1: we do, let's take a quick break. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: partime Genius. So you know, well, I was thinking about
Speaker 1: that story you told about that dude who bought two
Speaker 1: dogs and they turned out to be bears, and uh,
Speaker 1: it reminded me of this great story about Lord by
Speaker 1: Iron at college. Apparently, the rule at Cambridge was that
Speaker 1: you couldn't have dogs on campus, and Byron was so
Speaker 1: irritated that he decided to like skirt the rules, and
Speaker 1: he decided to go out and get himself a bear
Speaker 1: like a team bear, and there were of course no
Speaker 1: explicit rules about having a bear on campus, though I
Speaker 1: guess he got away with it, and he had actually
Speaker 1: frequently walking around campus on a leash. But the funniest
Speaker 1: part is that people kept asking him what are you
Speaker 1: going to do with that bear? And his standard reply
Speaker 1: was he was going to try to get him enrolled
Speaker 1: at the school and have him sit for a fellowship.
Speaker 1: Apparently that part of the plan never came through. Wow,
Speaker 1: that's pretty crazy. So is that what you're using for
Speaker 1: your last fact? Actually, I've got another one here I
Speaker 1: want to do, so I actually think this is pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: And I realized this when I was reading a Barnstein
Speaker 1: Bears book about Easter to my daughter. And as I
Speaker 1: was reading it, I realized it was less about the
Speaker 1: chocolate bunnies and Easter egg hunt, and there was a
Speaker 1: little more overt religion in there than I was expecting.
Speaker 1: You know, it was more explicit than I had remembered,
Speaker 1: And I guess I was a little confused because I
Speaker 1: started wondering, like, had the Berenstein Bears always been talking
Speaker 1: about religion like jars of clay? And I just hadn't
Speaker 1: picked up on it, you know, And I've been confused
Speaker 1: about this stuff in the past year, like not growing
Speaker 1: up Christian. I didn't realize that Aslan and Lyon, The
Speaker 1: Witch and the Wardrobe was supposed to be christ until
Speaker 1: one of my best friends pointed out to me. Or
Speaker 1: I remember finding Archie comics online and there's this one
Speaker 1: where Archie gets religious and uh he converts a hippie. Really, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was because the comic got licensed to a Christian
Speaker 1: publisher for a bit. Anyway, I was curious that the
Speaker 1: Berenstein Bears had like some sort of similar agreement. But
Speaker 1: it turns out that it's Jen and Stan Berenstein's son Michael,
Speaker 1: who's been inserting more religious titles in the mix. And
Speaker 1: apparently when stand passed away, Michael actually stepped in to
Speaker 1: help his mom keep writing books, and he'd apparently made
Speaker 1: his name by writing Christian themed books for about thirty years. So,
Speaker 1: according to mental Floss, when you see a title like
Speaker 1: the Berenstein Bears Show God's Love, the Berenstein Bears say
Speaker 1: their prayers, or the Steam Bears go to Sunday School,
Speaker 1: that generally indicates he's the one who wrote it. That's interesting.
Speaker 1: All right. Well, since we're sticking with fictional bears here,
Speaker 1: I'm going to join you with a Paddington facts. So
Speaker 1: did you know that Paddington was originally written to be
Speaker 1: from Africa? Um? I mean, the only recent thing I
Speaker 1: know about Hanington was a he switched from eating marmalade
Speaker 1: to marmite sandwiches for this ad camin and people were pissed.
Speaker 1: I bet they were. They felt like Packington was a sellout.
Speaker 1: I mean, I knew that Payington's from Darkest Peru, but
Speaker 1: why was he from Africa before that? Well, this was
Speaker 1: a last minute adjustment and it was pointed out to
Speaker 1: author Michael Bond that bears don't really live in Africa,
Speaker 1: so he pivoted to Darkness Peru and that's where he
Speaker 1: based his creature on this spectacled bear. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: I liked a lot of these bear facts. I've got
Speaker 1: to say my favorite was that bears can do math problems.
Speaker 1: So I think you're gonna take the trophy this week.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, thank you very much. It's an honor,
Speaker 1: and thank you guys for listening. We'll be back with
Speaker 1: a full length episode tomorrow. The U