Polar Bears

"And now Edgar's gone...something's going on around here."

(A "re-enactment" of the Gary Larson cartoon, because I couldn't find the original online.)

Let's get one thing straight. You know that Coke commercial where the family of polar bears is on a hillside, and the cub slips down the slope to land amongst the astonished flock of penguins? Yes, those penguins well might be astonished, because polar bears live in the Arctic and penguins in the Antarctic (except, of course, when they go on vacation). But never mind, I had a sort of inadvertent vengeance in that I was quite certain, until my friend Shauna proved me wrong, that this was a Pepsi commercial. Oddly, this branding error of mine seemed to offend her more than the zoological faux pas of the advertising folks. But I suspect that the polar bears would be with me on this one.

And, of course, I'm perfectly willing to let the notion pass when Gary Larson uses it. Because he's funny, see?

At any rate, the real reason I am making this post is because I just spent most of the morning figuring out how to download a video from YouTube and put a new soundtrack to it. My reasons for wanting to do this have to do with using film clips in the classroom, but the video I chose to teach myself with was one I was altering on behalf of a friend, and it features a polar bear cub called Knut in the Berlin zoo who was raised by a zookeeper after his mother had rejected him. Honestly, the soundtrack really HAD to be changed. The original video had possibly the most annoying, cloying song I've ever heard attached to it, which seemed a shame because when I was not put into a homicidal state, the cub was undeniably... Well, I only wish it didn't rhyme with "Knut."