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Fat Bear Week

October 4-10 is Fat Bear Week! Your vote decides who wins. The single elimination tournament contestants will be revealed 10/02/23, on explore.org’s Brooks Live Chat Channel. Vote for your favorites.

Fat Bear Week is a subjective competition. Many factors lead to success in brown bears. Cubs and subadult (teenage) bears grow proportionally more each year than even the biggest adults. Mother bears must feed themselves and their cubs so the family can survive winter. An older bear can have difficulty finding access to its preferred fishing spots due to competition with larger and younger bears.

The bears you are watching on the cams in Katmai National Park, Alaska, are brown bears. Grizzly bears and brown bears are the same species (Ursus arctos), but grizzly bears are currently considered to be a separate subspecies (U. a. horribilis). The difference between a grizzly bear and a brown bear is fairly arbitrary. In North America, brown bears are generally considered to be those of the species that have access to coastal food resources like salmon. Grizzly bears live further inland and typically do not have access to marine-derived food resources.

Besides habitat and diet, there are physical and (arguably) temperamental differences between brown and grizzly bears. Large male brown bears in Katmai can routinely weigh over 1000 pounds (454 kg) in the fall. In contrast, grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park weigh far less on average. There have been no documented cases of grizzly bears weighing over 900 pounds (408 kg) in Yellowstone.

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These Guys Are Doing Gonerfest Saturday

Guys who can play – pretending they can’t – while dressed as monsters is fucking genius.

The Mummies are an American garage punk band formed in San Bruno, California, in 1988. Exhibiting a defiantly raw and lo-fi sound, dubbed “budget rock”, the Mummies’ rebellious attitude and distinctive performance costumes exerted a major influence on garage punk and garage rock revival acts later in the decade, as well as in the 1990s. Their recorded output was intentionally completed with poor, cheap equipment, including their first and only studio album Never Been Caught, which was released after the group’s initial break-up. Since then, the Mummies have engaged in several positively-received reunion concerts and tours, including appearances in Europe and the US sporadically through to recent years. The band is currently working on a movie.

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Gerhardt Leigh Ludvig!

Thanks to G for mentioning this album in the Nashville Teens comments, which got me to finally listen to it.  If you haven’t heard it, it’s a smoker.  Jerry Lee’s in top form, and the Nashville Teens are red-hot.

There’s something funny about Germans going apeshit over Jerry Lee Lewis.

Many Memphians have Jerry Lee stories.  Mine might be unique, as it does not involve sex, drugs, or guns (maybe because I never encountered him personally).  Anyway, back in the mid-80’s I dated a girl for a while who lived downtown at the Waterford, which overlooks the Mississippi.  Her apartment was a couple of stories down from the penthouse, where JL was living at the time.  I never saw him (although said girl claimed he hit on her in the elevator a couple of times–he was in his 50’s and she was 19 or 20), but sometimes we could hear him playing.  On nice evenings we’d hang out on her balcony.  He must have had his balcony door open to catch the river breeze, because we could very clearly hear him practicing and noodling around.  So I have this sort of magical memory of our lounging on the balcony, drinking beer, watching the sunset over the river, enjoying the breeze, and eavesdropping on the great JL playing the piano.  A good time for sure.