Fat Bear Week was marred by tragedy before it even began with the ‘fatal river mauling’ of one of the contestants that was streamed live on a webcam set up for the purpose of monitoring the competition. Bear 469, sometimes known as Digger or Patches, attacked and drowned female Bear 402 who was almost his size and then dragged her corpse away to store in a food cache.
At least Nancy Kerrigan was able to recover in time for the 1994 Winter Olympics.
The demise of Bear 402 was a real downer for the thousands of people each year who cheer on the hungriest of bears and urge them to bulk up for the freezing Alaskan winter. Eat, by all means, but not like this, Patches, not like this. This was not the flavour of competition Fat Bear Week acolytes were going for, one imagines. It was unsportsmanlike, for a start. Everyone else is eating Salmon, Patches. Salmon not good enough for you?
This seems the bear equivalent of booking lunch at a Sizzler buffet and watching while a member of the party kills the maître d’. Just eat the fucken cheesy toast, man.
Patches was not rewarded for his reverse baptism. An even larger and more dominant bear called Chunk muscled in on the food cache in the woods and stole it from Patches which just goes to show things that were bad yesterday can always be ursidae.
Safe to infer Chunk stopped reading Marx after ‘from each according to his means’.
Now, they say there is no point in anthropomorphising wild animals but I was raised on a diet of media that included a talking hot water bottle, Thomas the Tank Engine and eventually the films Babe (beautiful) and Babe 2: Pig in the City (haunting, psychologically destabilising). Incidentally I recently found out Thomas the Tank Engine has a Welsh cousin / knock-off called Ivor the Engine whose little furnace is staffed by a small dragon and when I went searching to see if there was any connection between the two came across this comment on an online forum: ‘Ivor has a fucking dragon and the backing of a Welsh male choir. Thomas is a dickhead.’
Needless to say, my generation does not find it such a leap from verbal accordion (above) to personal investment in Fat Bear Week. I don’t want Patches to suffer for his decision to murder Bear 402, but I do hope he is judged by a jury of his peers. Not punished but accountable.
Perhaps he will learn. Others in the competition have already adapted in interesting ways.
Take Bear 856, for example, the long-term king of Brooks Falls in Alaska’s Katmai National Park & Preserve. Between 2011 and 2023, the big unit was the ‘most consistently dominant bear’ at the river but this northern summer he was displaced for the first time by a Bear 747 who really does conform to the dimensions of the iconic airliner. Rather than mope about it, Bear 856 — who also used to date our murdered friend 402 — simply loosened up a little and decided there was more to life than fighting every interloper.
‘He became more patient in his attempts to access productive fishing spots, and he yielded space to other large bears instead of standing his ground,’ the National Parks Service says. Beautiful, isn’t it? Some may interpret this as a bear past his prime who has simply given up. Not me, though. A lifetime’s worth of anthropmorphic television programming has rendered this as a philosophical ideation within the mind of the creature itself. A hammer blow to the manacle of existence.
Intriguingly, some of the bears seem to benefit from inter-generational wealth that is unevenly distributed within the population.
909 Jnr was two-and-a-half-years-old when her Mum did what most bear mothers do around this age and punted her to the wilderness. But Junior wasn’t finished with the familial largesse. Promptly adopted by her mother’s sister, Junior stayed in the loving embrace of a stable family for another two seasons. As the NPS says:
‘909 Junior has remained with the 910 family since, which has provided her with an uncommon advantage. She’s experienced two extra summers with a mother. That’s two extra summers of guidance and protection plus two extra winters of warmth in the den. She’s grown large for her age, yet she’s still very much a cub and never shy about trying to eat the fish caught by her adopted mom. She appears well positioned to succeed during her future transition to independence, which is likely to come next spring.
Now, I’d like to say that Junior, having grown fat on the love and material resources of her kin, will struggle when she gets to college and actually has to fend for herself for a little bit but she won’t, because she is a bear, and she has exactly what all bears in her position might want: dat ass. Our hefty princess knows that proximity to salmon is an equation best solved with density. And, as with gravity, the more you have the more you can bend a space to your will. The Grattan Institute pretty much did a report on exactly this.
While 909 Jnr won the Fat Bear Week Junior competition in 2022 and 2024 because of her unearned advantages, poor gangly dork 903 has taken to ambushing seagulls on the river and eating birds because he just doesn’t have the stage presence afforded by bulk. Even if he were offered an academic scholarship to Junior’s college the gulls aren’t going to make rent and he’d have to turn it down.
I was reminded this week of the saga of Hank the Tank, a 250kg (female!) American black bear who once terrorised residents of Lake Tahoe and was mistakenly accused of invading 30 homes looking for food before later being cleared by DNA evidence. Still, she’d broken into 20 homes and was what authorities there referred to as a ‘conflict bear’. She and her cubs were on the run from wildlife agents for more than a year before she was captured last year and moved to a sanctuary where she could live out her days having food delivered to her 230 acre home.
I’m on her side, obviously, and though her cubs were removed and sent to a re-education camp I think this is a form of victory. Hank, now known as Henrietta, played the long PR game and came out on top.
In a way, Henrietta was a busy working Mum in a society atomised by the bear Industrial revolution. She didn’t want to be in the city working instead of hooking salmon on the Alaskan peninsula where there are more bears than people, but when the canneries come to town and force workers from the land what’s a humble mother to do?
I do wonder whether the marauding Hank* the Tank ever came across tinned salmon in her efforts and whether the deep irony of its existence, and her being there to paw at it, may have occurred to her in the diaphanous ligament between moments of survival.
Observations
The Votes Are The Votes
I found myself watching the condensed (but still 10+ minute) sentencing remarks of Judge Matthew Barrett where he sets out and demolishes every argument that might have persuaded him to leniency in his decision to send Tina Peters to jail for almost a decade for the abuse of her position as a county clerk to buy into and propagate the stolen votes conspiracy of the 2020 US election. Incredible though they are, the remarks are depressing purely because they seem unlikely in this current era of appeasement and ideological malingering. Peters was a particularly special case, Barrett is clear, but an especially egregious one because she simply never once conceded she had done anything wrong in allowing Trump-affiliated multi-millionaires proxy access to county systems to advance the voter fraud conspiracy started by Trump. It’s an astonishingly clear judgment and sentencing.
It's just more lies. No objective person believes them. No, at the end of the day, you cared about the jets, the podcasts and people fawning over you. I am convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You're as defiant as any defendant this court has ever seen. You are no hero. You abused your position and you're a charlatan.
Because I am a tech luddite these days, I intended for this video to start around the 7.15 minute mark but you can just skip there yourself because I failed.
Des Oeufs
From time to time one stumbles across a little nugget of the online ecosystem that — were things slightly different or the moment slightly more febrile than it is even now — might have sparked one of those famous revolutions the French are always going on about. One that has never left me, way back when I worked (incongruously, perhaps) for a women’s website, was in the then up-and-coming Gwyneth Paltrow Goop newsletter which was often discussed in the office.
Paltrow, a wealthy celebrity and busy Mum like Hank the Tank, was offering her readers insights into how they, too, might save time in the modern crush of life, work, exercise and love. I don’t remember anything else about the list except this singular piece of advice that had me in stitches: ‘Find a fishmonger who delivers’. True, I was considerably less worldly then but even since, at the height of my cosmopolitan powers and earning capacity, I have never had a fishmonger. The closest I’ve come to having one that delivers is that time a storm sucked up fish from a creek on the cattle station where I was raised and dropped them on the earth around the homestead.
The particular set of feelings I felt back in 2011 when I read the Goop advice visited again this weekend when I saw this on Instagram: ‘Our reporter’s 6-year-old son hates eggs. They travelled to Paris to see if a dozen French chefs could change that’.
I would watch the Ratatouille sequel where chef Remy has grown into a grizzled Gordon Ramsay type who spends 15-minutes yelling unbroken obscenities at the parents of this kid for their extravagant fuckwittery. Take it to Cannes, 18-minute standing ovation (no relation to ovum).
Melbourne Mean Streak Event
The link is now live for the Melbourne launch (?) of the Robodebt book on Monday 21 October at The Sun Theatre in Yarraville. If you’d like to book to come along and say hi and listen to me waffle on and get the book signed then you can do so here. Thank you!
Jack the Wonder Dog
He’s as good as new, even for a 14-year-old. Now if we could find a way to hook him up to power while he’s sat in the sun like this absorbing tremendous amounts of heat we might actually get him to work off some of that astronomical vet bill lol
I am so glad Jack is better, and I am using 'extravagant fuckwittery' as often as possible now, thank you.
I'm scared to look, but I wonder if the murder of Bear 402 has affected the recent discourse on women's preference for coming across a male bear in the woods rather than a male human.