Orso it may seem…
These jokes are all ours.
But they arctos horribilis.
Is it true a bear won’t attack you if you carry a flashlight?
Depends how fast you carry the flashlight.
Does a bear shit flashlights in the woods?
It does if you’re too slow.
Seeing them in the wild is always a Kodiak moment.
As long as you don’t get too close-- it may become the Ursidae you ever have.
Bravo! 
Q: If you see a polar bear eating a penguin where are you?
A:At a zoo. Better hope the penguin escaped; not the bear.
I was gonna say before I clicked the spoiler, if that bear is in Antarctica, it must be a bi-polar bear.
Well, polar bears may have eaten penguins in the wild at one point - the original penguin, not the unrelated southern version.
OK. I guess I do have a bear story… but I’m not sure that it’s mine.
Long ago ( and far away ) in a place in NH that was a short driving distance from both Mt. Washington and Clark’s Trading Post ( I swear to God that those are Real Places! You can check) I was driving my family to a restaurant in a Ford Explorer. I was driving, my wife had called shotgun, and both my kids were in the back. My youngest was talking to us, my wife was reading directions and my oldest was fully engrossed in his ( Gameboy? ). I admit that I was going about 45 mph, which is a little fast for NH two lane roads with thick forrest on each side.
Suddenly… ( the piano player plays a musical crescendo ) a medium to small sized bear lopes across the road in front of us. I slammed on the brakes… my wife and youngest stopped talking… and the big Explorer locked up its wheels and fish-tailed to a stop.
As the bear scooted away, my youngest said, “Wow!”.
My wife, slowly regaining her composure, said, “Did you see that bear?”
My oldest… was diligently saving his game and carefully by the numbers powering down his Gameboy. When he (and it) was done, he finally looked up and said,
“What bear…?”
We all stared at him.
His younger brother said that he couldn’t see bears, that they were his Kryptonite.
I teased him and said that his Indian name must be “What Bear?”. He was not amused.
Years later he has asked that this story never come up, because he was embarrassed by it. That said, when he grew up and got a job in the real world, his bosses consistently said that he was one of the finest and most focused coders that they have ever employed.
Go Figure.
He might not be able to see bears, but clearly he can find bugs.
Can we have a long paws on the bear puns?
PS- I forgot to ask you: Was this a good employer? Look, sometimes a good job is just one that pays the bills. That said, some employers can be unscrupulous in the ways they use to squeeze more productivity out of their workers.
TL:DR - Are you sure that that the employer didn’t spike that bear meat with cocaine…?
I liked working there, and liked my colleagues (at least most of them). The company which had been owned by one person was sold. Only 2 or 3 people were let go. A year later, the company decided to purchase their next bit of software (library automation) rather than develop it in house. they went from 16 developers to 6 – I was one of the 10 to be let go.
I found new employment fairly quickly – unlike my current situation (laid off since Dec 1 – 4 phone interviews and 2 video ones but no offers)
The bear was shot by one of the managers (I honestly don’t remember if he was my boss) – as far as I know no drugs involved. I’m not exactly sure where he went bear hunting.
Brian
(end of story only loosly related to bears)
“Those molars clearly show it was a Northern Bengal Tiger.”
Pictures of bear in Glacier. I was Going-to-the-Sun road, and IIRC this is the entrance to Rising Sun Dock Road (possibly Rising Sun picnic area)
Brian
Went back up today to look for his footprints:
That’s the thing and I may have posted about it before. With wild game, you need to know where it came from before you take a bite because the meat really could be tainted and a threat to your health. I know that on The Outdoors Channel they’re always bragging about this that & the other, but they are only hunting in places with clean fresh water, plants that make the hunting area game clean and strong, and no garbage/plastics/micro plastics that the animals might eat. For bear, they go up into Canada and AK and they pay for their licenses and tags and they follow strict rules. This is so that you know what you are ingesting.
Now, in NH… I’m not going to lie: One night I ordered the fresh game plate at a restaurant, and it was very good… but the area around there was so crisp and garbage free, I felt that there wasn’t a risk.
Now, I had a boss once with a house way up near the NJ/NY line. He shared a story about a bear that had been knocking over his garbage cans… so one weekend he sent his wife and kids to LBI while he turned off all of his house lights, loaded his rifle, and waited. Sure enough, some time in the AM, the bear came after his garbage cans.
He shot it, one-shot-kill, gutted it to take out the organs, carved all of the fur off of the meat and bone, threw all of the Ofal and leftover bits into a garbage bag, and he hauled it 10 miles down the road to a dumpster behind a gas station and ditched the garbage bags. He had already cut and wrapped the meat, put it in ziplocks, and dropped it in a his garage deep freezer. The next day he used a hose to hose down any mess he had made in his yard.
To get to the point, he bragged he was was handing out bear steaks to his friends and buddies for grilling all the rest of that summer. He never said ( and I didn’t ask ) how all those friends and buddies would have felt about grilling and eating with their families meat from a “garbage bear” who had been eating plastic wrapping paper that smelled good to eat as well as garbage food… and drinking non-potable water.
It can be scary when you think about it.
There are restaurants in NJ that offer some wild game, but I’d never risk it.