By Matthew Cobb
In the UK (and perhaps in other parts of the ex-empire) 26 December is a holiday – Boxing Day. When I were a lad, preparing for Xmas was like preparing for a siege as all shops were closed on 25 and 26, and if 27 was a Sunday, there’d be three days-worth of supplies to stock up. That’s changed, but Boxing Day is still a holiday, although shops are open and the sales start. Nevertheless, many of us are blearily post-prandial and about to start again on another round of over-eating and over-drinking. Whether you’re about to stuff yourself silly, or go to work, here’s some great footage of maternal love from the northern hemisphere’s top terrestrial predator.
It’s Boxing Day here. New Zealand has it too and so does India. Not sure about the rest. Love the baby bears.
Here (in NZ) it’s the Boxing Day sales and apparently it was massively crowded, people were allegedly taking up to an hour to find a parking space in the hot sun. I just went to the beach which was nicely uncrowded (because everyone was at the sales? they’re welcome to it!) And the water was warm.
Boxing Day here in Canada as well. New Years will see some dedicated souls jumping in the chuk (localism) and usually right back out. It’s even called a polar bear swim.
Ocean temperature is currently 7ºC.
Yeah and now it is called “Boxing Week” and the sales start on the 24th. It’s crazy. I have exchanges that I want to do on the 30th when I hope most will be back at work.
Hmmm, doing a polar bears swim. sounds like a good idea to me. I must remember to not tell the wife, because she’d tear strips off me.
I shall take a thermometer with me and give you a North Sea reading. “Decidedly sub-tropical” is a safe bet.
Boxing day in the UK is a mad rush to the exceptional sales when appliances, furniture and other expensive stuff are sold at half-price. Here in Switzerland, it is not a holiday, shops are open and streets half-empty as most people have gone to the mountains for the holidays (they take the days off between Christmas and the New Year).
Female polar bears have the toughest maternal job of all mammals, keeping their cubs safe from predators (especially male polar bears and wolves), trying to find food, and teaching the cubs all the skills they will need to survive — all this for three years.
Thanks, Matthew: my 13 year-old loved the video. Me too. Best wishes for the New Year.
When I were a lad? Were?
Usually said with a northern accent, as the opening statement of a tale of childhood hardship.
Strangely, it appears to be missing from the archetypal tale of childhood woe sketch.
Looooooooooxury!!
That’s how Northern is spoken. But you’re right, it ain’t grammatical.
Wouldn’t it be “how northern is spoke”?
I smell a Lancastrian. Where’s my faggots and fag lighter?
It’s a steal by Monty P of Bounderby in Dickens’ ‘Hard Times’: set in Lancashire, the only one of his novels set mainly in the north.
Slaínte.
20 years old, I was living on the outskirts of London. My mate and I asked Jake, an incomprehensible, hard and monosyllabic working-class Lancashire cotton-mill town lad down in The Smoke, if we’d see him up The Pheasant in the West End later that night.
“’Appen,” he replied. We had no idea if he meant, “Yes”, “No”, or “Maybe”. He was too bloody frightening to ask for a clarification.
He didn’t turn up.
Slaínte.
One of these days I’ll have to read some more Dickens. But he’s a long way down my list ; I know that I’ve read some, because I remember thinking “This Dostoyevsky guy is even more turgid than Dickens.” Even Kafka is more fun (and I’ve never finished a Kafka book, either).
FFS, GAA, Dickens is the funniest, most vital, most human, most ironic novelist writer who ever lived.
Believe me, I’ve tried to write a novel. And the reason why mine is crap is because it’s too cynical. Dickens is life-affirming, like the Beatles.
Very often, as Orwell, who deeply admired him, pointed out, his prose is incoherent, but his writings are obviously of a man who loved every minute of his waking life.
Where to find funny in Dickens? Well. everywhere. But if you really want to see modern humorous, go to Nicholas Nickleby, his first ‘failure’, his Magical Mystery Tour.
Stick with Dickens, Aidan, I’ve read all of him: he’s obviously one of the peaks of civilisation. I am proud just to have read him.
Don’t worry, I don’t generally bother with the Beatles either (or music generally – though I’ll grant Lennon some decent lyrics).
Life is short ; I’ll save the Dickens for when I’ve no other choices.
Hi Aidan, I agree absolutely about Dickens. We had to ‘do’ him at school, with the same effect on me as Bible Studies did – turned me into a vehement unbeliever. (Oddly enough, I still like Shakespear).
Tear-jerking, sentimental, unsubtle, heavy-handed, stereoyped, tedious – those are the adjectives I’d use.
With reference to ‘no other choices’ I once (when my car was broken down at the side of the road) spent three hours reading the Motorsport Car Construction Regulations (translated clumsily from the French). I think, if the only reading matter I had in such circumstances was Dickens, I’d try meditation instead.
Under those circumstances, I might try the Dickens. But yes, again it was one of those things of being forced to “analyse” Dickens ad nauseam at school which left an indelible impression. But that was before I realised the important point about English Literature : you don’t need it to get into Uni, so it becomes a good time to do your Physics homework.Shakespeare was bizarre – we had to “do” Julius Caesar … but it wasn’t until revision time (just before the exam) that we were shown the play as it was meant to be done (Larry’s ca. 1948 version). If they’d done it the other way, I might have paid attention. There is a tide in the affairs of schoolchildren which, if taken at the flood leads onto something, but if you fluff it up, it’s all a complete WOMBAT.
At school, we were forced to read and analyze Jane Austen’s books, and I detested them. When I became an adult and rediscovered her books, I absolutely loved them. I reckon that this was due to accumulated life experience which made these books far more interesting and understandable than when I was a schoolgirl. Dickens had that same effect. Perhaps you should begin with his first novel, The Pickwick Papers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pickwick_Papers
Yeah, I’m not a Dickens fan but I don’t really like anything Victorian, especially the poetry save for one or two poems.
Faggots and mushy peas, surely?
Here in Vienna, it was Stephanstag, rather than Boxing Day.
Mushy peas, chips ‘n’ gravy. Luxeury.
It’s not advertised in the main Gospel of the ESM, but the Apcrypha mention a mushy pea fumarole on the flanks of the beer volcano. Or they will soon.
“…the northern hemisphere’s top terrestrial predator.”
Is there a terrestrial predator in the Southern Hemisphere that you think beats it?
Fair point. My bad geography. A female tiger would beat a polar bear I reckon, but they are primarily northern hemisphere. A lion wouldn’t stand a chance. I fear the Romans may have tried out such thought experiments. Any classicists out there?
I can say for sure but I strongly suspect bets and lions were put against each other since Romans captured both and bear baiting was common. Silly, cruel Romans.
Can say = Can’t say
I can’t cite anything, but I’ve heard that the Romans stopped pitting bears against lions as the fights were too one-sided. Lions lost.
“A female tiger would beat a polar bear I reckon, but they are primarily northern hemisphere. A lion wouldn’t stand a chance.”
I’m a zoologist that has studied felids and ursids, I simply must respond to the above !
– goodness me, where to start ! Why would a lioness* ‘not stand a chance’ whilst a tigress at only 10-20% larger would beat the sow ?! *talking female, as you stated a female tiger. I agree that a tigress is superior to a lioness, but not to the point where one beats the polar bear and the other has no chance – the size difference is not enough to bridge that gap !
– moreover, I want to address you saying the tigress would beat a polar bear – sloth bears coexist with Bengal tigers and they frequently confront each other. For females of each; neither wish to fight and will mutually back off. Boars DRIVE OFF tigresses quite easily from kill disputes (for example). And sloth bears are 1/4 – 1/3 the size of polar bears…
– But, there is precedent anyway – brown bears and Siberian tigers (sibs from now on) coexist in the Russian far east/Siberia. 2 subspecies encounter sibs; U.a. collaris & U.a. beringianus. Sibs are the largest of all tigers, so this comparison is a good as it gets for your claim. Boars of U.a. collaris and U.a. beringianus are observed to have NO issue with even male tigers in territory and kill disputes. Male sibs avoid them at all cost. The point here is that both these brown bears are smaller than polars on average, and even male tigers avoid them, never mind tigresses.
– you made no mention as to which polar bear sex you thought the tigress would beat, though as the clip was a sow, I assumed that. Nonetheless, you simply said “A female tiger would beat a polar bear I reckon”. Well, a boar polar bear typically weighs 1200lbs (a good size, but far from the upper limit, though not small either) and stands 9 feet tall, whilst a tigress is about 300 lbs. You should really look at the size of a male polar bear and consider it is 4 times the weight of your tigress…your claim is hollow.
Apropos not a lot : wasn’t someone – Richard Burton (NOT the actor)? – reputed to have killed a leopard with his bear (sorry!) hands?
I’d put my denarii on the polar bear. Against several tiggers, simultaneously.
I’ve never heard hint that the Romans knew of polar bears, and only vague hints of them knowing of the Nordic countries. I think they knew of narwhals (there are several WEITs about narwhals, IIRC), but only as tusks. Come to think of it, though I’ve heard of repeated instances of Nordic (proto-viking) artefacts of walrus ivory, I’ve never heard of such artefacts in a Roman context ; another (weak) argument against the Romans having substantial contact with Inuit (Nenets/ Chuchkii), or polar bears.
Yeah. I’m no expert, but I’d guess that polar bears would be the top terrestrial predator in the world, not just northern hemisphere. The better question is what’s the top predator in the Southern Hemisphere? Jaguar? Anaconda? Lion?
And sea predator? Adult sperm whale? What a killing method!
The thread reminds me of a WEIT post about the BBC releasing to the web its Natural History archive: and the programmes of Steve Backshall, aimed at kids, nevertheless brilliantly produced, showing dangerous animals.
He gets up very close to polar bears, walruses etc. A very materialist and Darwinian teacher of what ‘awe’ really means. He’s a great naturalist communicator and especially to lower abilities, like my 13 year-old youngest.
She loves him.
Slaínte.
During the Californian Gold Rush, those involved would often seek some bizarre and cruel means of entertainment. Grizzly bears were in good supply, so matches were set up between bears and, say, bulls. The bulls were clearly no match, so more fearsome opponents were introduced, up to and including male African lions. In such matches, the bear won every time, usually crushing the lion’s skull.
Evolution has provided the bear with extremely powerful and strong limbs and claws, but has given even the largest of felids relatively thin skulls. The bear would always prove able to land at least one blow to the lion’s skull long before the cat had been able to get to the bear’s throat (the cat’s usual method of dispatch.
Even if the bear’s first blow missed the skull and made, say, a glancing blow to to the lion’s shoulder, this was usually enough to cripple the cat.
Did you hear about the Russian immigrant who wanted to become a lumberjack? When he arrived in a distant village set in the wooded wilderness, he was told that to be accepted as a lumberjack he would have to drink a barrel of whisky, kill a grizzly and rape a squaw.
He took the barrel of whisky, downed it, and went off into the forest. A few days later, he returned to the village with deep gashes all over his body, and, still in a drunken state, he asked “Now, where is that squaw I must kill?”
😉
Polar bears can be referred to as marine predators. They spend the majority of their lives on or in the ocean.
They spend all summer on land where they cannot hunt and go hungry for months. They spend the rest of the time on the ice, catching seals. They will swim to land when the ice melts and back to the ice when winter comes and ice is formed again. These swims can be hundreds of miles long, during which there is little for them to hunt.
See this documentary
But you are right, polar bears are marine animals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_mammal#Taxonomy
sub
It is Boxing Day here in the USA, too! But nobody knows it.
Boxing Day? Is that the day you give the cats a new box to sleep/play in? 🙂
And here I was expecting a mummified bear.
“Boxing Day”. I had to look that up (again).
Here in Sweden it is, as Wikipedia rightly claims [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_Day ] a traditional holiday of “Second Christmas Day”.
But with an unforgettable name of the “Other-day Yule” [sw: “Annandag Jul”], which may be an old perversion into a conflation [from sw: andra (en: second) into sw: annan (en: other)] or simply a funny.
Proves you can learn something new everyday.I’ve never heard of boxing day not until today.