It seems that in Macedonia, you can sue an animal. So when a bear ransacked a beekeeper's hives, said beekeeper took the bear to court, suing for damages. And won. You may ask: Uh, who will pay? Don't you worry, Macedonian courts think of everything:

A court in the city of Bitola found the bear guilty, and since it had no owner and belonged to a protected species, ordered the state to pay the 140,000 denars (1,726 pounds) [roughly US$3500] damage it caused to the hives.

[more Bears In the News]

Let's just forget about what's happening in Division I football (sez this Cal fan) — direct your attention, please, to Division III! Trinity beats Millsaps 28-24 on the final play of the game. Fifteen laterals. Fifteen. Linkage: story · video (includes announcer calling the play beautifully and then losing his mind)

Money quote from the Chronicle story — the team's coach, when asked if they had practiced such a play:

"Are you kidding?" he said. "We couldn't do that against air."

I last blogged about fires in my hometown of San Diego four years ago. Seems half the area is aflame once again tonight. I've got cousins who are under evacuation orders; everyone's safe and sound.

Digression: As far back as I can remember, there's been this dude (yep, a proper dude like you only get down south) named Larry Himmel on San Diego's CBS affiliate, channel 8. He's always been the guy who does feel-good pieces about the city, its people, its institutions, et cetera. If you're the news director and you need ninety seconds on the diner out in Crest where some of the regulars have been regulars since the fifties, Larry's your man. You need a heartwarming broadcast-closer about kids picking pumpkins up at Bates Nut Farm, you put Larry on it. Larry's stuff has never been "news" or even "important," but he's very, very good at what he does: His reports have always been well-written, down-to-earth, and not the sort of saccharine drivel this material would become in the hands of some hack with an agenda. With a Larry Himmel report, you know you're going to get an honest slice of life, a breath of fresh air, and he delivers every time. more...

I'm a bit late picking this one up, but the pictures alone make it worth circling back to: A black bear recently escaped from oncoming highway traffic near Donner Summit by jumping over the side of a bridge. The poor creature spent the night trapped beneath the roadway, on the bridge's superstructure, and was hanging on for dear life by the next day. A rescue effort was mounted; a tranq dart was employed; all's well that ends well.

[more Bears In the News]

Contra Costa prosecutors say they know who killed Rex Farrance. The three men involved are already behind bars on other charges; all three are now eligible for the death penalty under California law.

A colleague of mine for eight years, Rex was shot during a home invasion robbery earlier this year. He is and will always be dearly missed. I had begun to doubt that the wheels of justice would ever begin to turn in this case, but now, here they go, doing that slow, deliberate, creaky thing that they do.

My heart goes out to the Buddhist monks of Malaysia's Hong Hock See temple, which is besieged by ants. Due to their strict adherence to principles of nonviolence, the monks won't kill the ants, and so far have been unsuccessful in relocating them.

Not long after I became a Buddhist, I stopped killing spiders in my house. These days I take a sheet of paper, get the spider to crawl onto it, and then carry the spider outside, where I set it free. Flying insects are similarly relocated using the old hand-over-a-cup technique.

That said, I still kill ants with impunity. There's no relocating ants. You arrive home to find your kitchen overrun with ants and there's only one thing to do: Spray 'em down with Windex and watch 'em die by the thousands. Stupid ants.

I have much to learn before I could ever be a monk.

...Because you're going to. Last night, as I was finishing off the greatest birthday I've ever had, a coworker of mine was murdered in his home.

If you have never heard William Shatner's glorious "You'll Have Time," please, take three minutes to put on your headphones, crank the volume up as loud as you can stand it, and have a listen on me. more...

Shopsin's has closed. I never got the chance to visit. :(

Talk about different approaches. Here on the West Coast, we recently had smellerific cookie advertisements removed from San Francisco bus shelters after complaints from folks in the "environmental illness community." (How 'bout we just call 'em scentsitives?)

Meanwhile, in Manhattan, they're spraying chemicals into the air to make city streets smell more like Christmas. Yeeesh.

I will not judge the actions of the Buddhist monk in this news story, but I am very, very glad that I do not experience similar impulses.

Here we have American troops teasing Iraqi children who are apparently desperate for a drink of fresh water. Just listen to these asshats laughing it up. A nice reminder that there are plenty of ways to treat people cruelly without resorting to torture. Our forces seem to be exploring all options.

[spotted at Fark]

The California Golden Bears blew their chance to go to the Rose Bowl for the first time since 1959, losing 23-9 to USC.

[image taken by yours truly at the San Diego Zoo last December]

Two things are clear. First, tasers are not nonlethal weapons. They kill people. Further, they bring out the worst in a particular type of bad cop: the sort that is rather too quick to inflict debilitating, nightmarish pain on anyone who doesn't immediately fall into line.

Last night, some cops repeatedly tasered a student at UCLA's Powell Library. His crime? Refusing to show ID. Does this sound right to you? It sounds scary as hell to me. It's the sort of story that makes me want to stop using the word "cops" and start using the word "pigs." I try to reject that urge, because I don't want to fall into the mindset of thinking all police officers as enemies. But these officers at UCLA? Pigs.

Another student caught the incident on video using a cell phone. Hmm. Perhaps the increasing ubiquity of video cameras in people's pockets will ultimately help curb police brutality?

(One more thought: When I was at Cal, most students I knew made a distinction between the Berkeley city police and the UC police. Berkeley cops were all right. The UC police were pigs, every last one of 'em. I had a roommate who was beaten by UC cops one night, for trespassing in a construction area on campus after dark. It was his contention that the UC police force was comprised of power-trippy assholes who couldn't pass the psych exam for a true cop job. I wonder.)

[UPDATE: discussion and interesting additional linkage at MeFi]

The Star of India is one of the jewels of my hometown of San Diego. This stately and beautiful ship has been sailing the seas since 1863. It is the oldest active sailing vessel in the world. For most of the year, the Star is docked in San Diego and serves as a fascinating walk-on-board maritime museum. But for one weekend each year, she goes sailing.

Cory Doctorow hits all the right notes with his scathing critique of the Boy Scouts' latest move — the creation of a merit badge for "respecting copyright." You guessed it, the MPAA is behind this.

(UPDATE: Wow, I didn't know this, but apparently Penn and Teller did a whole episode of their Bullshit! TV program on how the Scouts have effectively been turned into an arm of the Mormon church over the past few decades. I'm gonna have to watch this. The story is well-known to many who have been involved in Scouting during the time period, but it's a story the mainstream media won't touch with a ten foot pole. UPDATE 2: Turns out it's not a merit badge in the original story; it's an activity badge. The distinction is important, but I shan't bore non-Scouters with the details.)

Colorado Division of Wildlife officers were called to a school near Boulder on Tuesday to deal with a drunk and disorderly, bear. The wobbly bear was spotted in a neighborhood in Lyons, near Boulder, and she was having a hard time walking. Officers said the bear was probably drunk from eating fermented apples.

With video (!), so you can see for yourself: This bear was wasted!

[previous editions of Bears in the News]

This one reminds me a bit of those 90s-era feel-good Chevron commercials: Do people delay their plans to construct new power lines just so a mama bear and her cubs can sleep peacefully through the bitter Wisconsin winter? People do.

[previous editions of Bears in the News]

Ram Bahadur Bomjan, a young man of fifteen, has allegedly been "meditating at the base of a peepal tree in Nepal's Bara District, without food, water, sleep or the need to use the toilet" — for nine months now. A peepal tree is kind of a big deal in Buddhism — the Bodhi Tree, under which the Buddha sat until he achieved enlightenment, was a peepal tree.

I've been following this story as best I can for a few months now (here's an earlier story from which I cribbed the image of Ram), but still can't make up my mind whether this is an elaborate hoax or something of a miracle. I do not buy into the speculation that Ram is the new Buddha — as I understand it, the next Buddha (the tenth Buddha, the Maitreya Buddha) will not arrive until the Shakyamuni Buddha (the ninth Buddha, born Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha we refer to when we just say "the Buddha") is completely forgotten, along with his dharma. But I do know this: I feel sorry for the cynics and the hard-core scientist types who immediately respond that there is no freaking way this is on the level, that what is purported to be happening here is simply not possible, period. I think the world would be a more peaceful place if every human mind were open enough to consider the possibility of miraculous events and undertakings. As I have pointed out before, "There are things your science cannot explain, doctor." And even if this is a hoax, even if Ram is secretly chowing down and taking dumps each night, that this young man can meditate all day long, day in, day out, for months on end — that is something in and of itself, and I freely admit, there is a part of me that envies that ability. And that stillness.

Here we have a story from Hartland, Maine. Seems a distraught man tried to do himself in ... via self-crucifixion. He didn't get too far:

"When he realized that he was unable to nail his other hand to the board, he called 911," Boucher said.

The poor guy. He never read one of my all-time favorite poems, Love Song: I and Thou by Alan Dugan. I was going to quote from the oh-so-delicious ending here, but then realized that doing so would spoil the effect of the work for those who've never read it. So just go read it!

I guess I should have gone Christmas shopping in New York after all: Gothamist reports that the finest Jewish deli on the planet, the 2nd Avenue Deli, has closed and may not reopen, due to raised rent. My brother gave me the shop's cookbook for Christmas, and I was disappointed to find that their method for making pastrami was not revealed, and now it seems I may never again enjoy their luscious sandwiches. A corned beef and pastrami combo (with just a bit of brown mustard) and a Heineken (the best beer they offered) — that was Lower East Side nirvana for me. I last enjoyed such a meal almost two years ago. Sniff.

I love it when there's a bear in the news! This time we've got a 600 pound black bear up in Pennsylvania who decided he'd hibernate under some poor family's porch this winter. There's only one way this can go:

On Sunday, Sainvil sent his two children, ages 8 and 9, outside to play in the snow. "After 15 or 20 minutes, they came back screaming, 'Dad, Dad! There's a bear under the house!'" Sainvil said.

Earlier today, the bear was relocated without incident.

[previous editions of Bears in the News]

When I was at Cal, I had to take a damn physical sciences course, so as a freshman, I took Integrative Biology 33, a famed Dinosaurs 101* sort of class usually taught by one Kevin Padian, who turned out to be one of the top five professors I ever had. Padian is Mr. Paleontology at Berkeley, and his classes are absolutely electric. The dude has the kind of passion for his work that is contagious. When you hear him talk about how birds developed from raptorish dinos, you get excited, not just because he pumps the story full of wonder and energy, but because the man knows his stuff like no one else, and he manages to work every last shred of evidence for his case into the folksy talk he's giving you.

But wait, he gets better. Here's how big a cross-discipline thinker Padian is: He taught a seminar in the English department, which I had the honor and pleasure of taking. The subject of the course was something like "Darwin's ideas in literature" — it was basically a survey of how Darwin's world-shaking theory of natural selection (not "evolution" — remember, that word appears nowhere in The Origin of Species) got into people's brains and stuck there and started dripping out into art and culture. We read Tess of the D'Urbervilles and The French Lieutenant's Woman with an eye toward Darwinian ideas emerging in plot and character motivation. It was fantastic stuff. more...

Thanks to conservative know-nothing white schmuck Iowa Representative Steve King — a man who believes that Joe McCarthy was "a hero for America" — and others, Berkeley's main post office will not be renamed after local hero Maudelle Shirek. The Chronicle has the infuriating story.

The English translation offered at this Russian news site ain't exactly perfect. Excellent.

Drunk man has tried to scuffle with a bear in a zoo in Ukraine and has been heavily hit. . . . [The man] decided to show his force, jumped over the gate and started to pretend a trainer. In response, the bear weighing 270 kilograms [595 pounds] seriously hit the man. more...

[Spotted at Fark. Blurry bear photo from PDPhoto.org. Thank you for visiting mahnamahna.net, where we do the wacky measurement conversions for you.]

Animal experts in Croatia say a bear has learned how to trick people to let him in by knocking at the door. They believe the 35-stone [490-pound] brown bear probably learned the trick while nudging a door to get it to open. more...

[spotted at Follow Me Here; previous Bears In the News: here and here]