“Are bears really soft? Not compared to other mammals. Brown bears like Charmin’s Leonard do possess a thick pelt and an ample (though seasonal) layer of subcutaneous fat. Still, the softness of an animal is generally thought to depend upon the density and composition of its fur — and according to these metrics, bears are middling at best…. Mammals tend to have two kinds of body hair: long, coarse guard hairs and short, downy wool hairs. The fur of a brown bear or polar bear is about two-thirds the latter.”
 — This explanation of what bears have to do with toilet paper marketing never once mentions the inevitability of their defecating in a forest, but no matter, there are important bear facts within.

“It would stretch out then coil, ready to strike, then stretch out and coil again. I said, ‘Right, next time it stretches I’m going to go for it.’ It started to stretch out and I just leapt on top of it with both hands behind its head, my knee on its back and the other chaps piled on behind me. It was a struggle for the first 30 seconds or so as it tried to move its head from side to side. It tried to scratch at us then Ash, the head guide, came round the front and grabbed it by the jaws as I lifted it up — wrapping its jaws with tape so it could no longer bite us.”
 — Welsh biologist Niall McCann describes how he and his team wrestled an 18-foot anaconda into submission with their bare hands in Guyana in 2009. It’s one of the longest snakes ever measured. Photos were recently released. Wow!

by Jessica Misener

I pushed open the door to Starbucks. Was I buying chain coffee ironically? Meta-ironically, in an attempt to escape my upper class suburban upbringing but then reconnect with it? Sincerely? My heart hammered inside me, dripping down and coating my viscera with doubt. Sometimes your twenties are like that.

What should I get? A pumpkin spice latte? It’s back, you know. I can never make up my mind. I’m indecisive but sometimes I’m decisive but then sometimes I’m indecisive and then I get decisive again. I hid this for so long, buffeted back and forth by the churning wills of the world. My parents never saw it. I kept it coiled in. I never let you see it, no, I never did. By then the line elbows past me.

I pushed my money into the barista’s hand. His name is Morgan and he has a master’s degree in art history. Pushing, always pushing. Why do I push? Is it because I’m single? I thought about how later I could post this on Facebook but would anybody even read it? Maybe I could tweet about it but would anyone see it? Would I remain a blip on someone’s newsfeed, a tiny quark in the fabric of social media time? I’m carrying my coffee over to the creamer station but who really cares?

I wanted you there. Because I did. I remembered your chiseled jawline. I wanted to touch your face gently, your face that would have looked so handsome in this carefully researched mood lighting. You would have offered to pour cream into my coffee for me. Whole milk. You always remembered. I wanted to take the packets of Splenda and rip them apart then, showering the floor with tiny grains of carcinogenic artificial sweetener like the way you shredded my heart into little carcinogenic particles, except without the cancer, because my heart is fine.

A woman is feeding a Bistro Box to her toddler. The thing is you ruined it. You broke me from the inside and shattered me and it will never go back.

I put in my iPod headphones. I’m doing that thing where the new Lady Gaga song comes out and I play it on repeat for 3 days and then I get fucking sick of it and never listen to it again. One earphone fell out. I thought about falling and not falling and rising and how I used to feel the breath of your sweaty lungs, your supple air pulsing over me that night, that last night, as you told me that earbuds always fall out and have shitty bass dynamics and I should get some real fucking headphones already.

A homeless guy fell asleep in the big comfy chair and then woke up and left and someone else unknowingly plopped down in it right after him, and don’t they realize? Don’t they realize how gross that is? Sometimes the world is a screaming rage crying out with sorrow and all we can do is keep crying and crying until you come back, because I miss you sitting inside this corporate coffeehouse and you have no idea, do you.

Jessica Misener does live in Brooklyn. Photo by Mykl Roventine.

See also: Some Pitches for Thought Catalog.

No, an actual one! Eeeeeeek! (via Sam Sifton’s LEDE-ALL Twitter)

http://player.vimeo.com/video/28366669?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0

I don’t know that I have ever seen a video that has less to do with the song it accompanies than this new one from Frank Ocean. Apparently, I mean. You never know the inner workings of an artist’s mind. But judging from this, it seems that the title of the song might have been shortened from “Thinking About You and Cowboys-and-Indians Revenge Fantasies and Meteors and Witch Doctors and Magical Gemstones and Also Maybe Time Travel.”

The best part of the GET READY FOR GAY DIVORCE stories are the anecdotes, like this couple who shared “a love of fur coats and gold jewelry”: “The two are now in the messy process of untangling their lives — a web that has grown to include four purebred Rhodesian Ridgebacks, three houses, and one financially dependent parent.” (Instead of letting them get gay-divorced, couldn’t we just exile them to Antarctica? Won’t someone think of the Ridgebacks?) Anyway, gay divorce: pro or con? Totally pro, right?

Watching The Jets At The Old Man Bar

Outside Denny’s Steak Pub, in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn, steps from the Church Avenue F stop, a would-be customer, wearing a Yankees T-shirt and a bit of a haunted look, shuffled back and forth, focused on the scratch-off lottery tickets that trailed behind him like exhaust. He ducked his head in every once in a while: “Six dollars!” His buddy called out, “Don’t come in,” and Scratcher nodded sadly, and waited for his pal on the sidewalk. “You’re still 86ed,” the bartender added, not unkindly. Scratcher was still a regular; he just wasn’t allowed to come in to this particular old man bar this particular afternoon.

Inside the bar it was loud, and tough to hear the football games we were watching. “Everybody got fucking jokes in this joint.” That was an accurate statement, made approximately halfway through the second quarter of the Jets game, already out of the Jaguars’ grasp. The speaker was lucky to get a word in edgewise. On the left hand side of the bar, five Latino men in their 30s stood around the one TV tuned to the Tennessee Panthers game (where Cam Newton alternately dazzled and threw picks); on the right sat two old smokes, one in a polo shirt, and one in what looked to be a Jets jersey but was actually a Brooklyn Cyclones promotional shirt in the same shade of green that the Jets use.

That shade of green was the source of the first controversy of the afternoon. As the game started, there were only four men in the bar: the bartender, Polo Shirt, Jets Fan, a silver-haired man in a windbreaker and me. The Jets were wearing throwback jerseys, in the blue and gold from when they were the New York Titans. Jets Fan was finding this a sacrilege, and how Jets Fan communicated this, and everything, was by yelling at the top of his lungs. “THEY’RE WEARING GREEN, THEN THEY’RE WEARING BLUE! WHY DO THEY FUCKING DO THIS FUCKING SHIT!” He was drinking, as the old smokes do, a mug of Budweiser with a shot of Jameson next to it, money in a little stack in between. “THIS IS RIDICULOUS!” Polo Shirt offered, “They’re trying to confuse the other team. They practiced all week looking for green jerseys.”

Jets Fan set the tone for the afternoon, cheering first downs, receptions, near receptions, commercials: “THE JETS! DID YOU FUCKING SEE THAT?” Every few minutes he hopped out of his stool and pranced, “J! E! T! S! JETS! JETS! JETS!” The bartender, a shop-class-teacher-looking fellow in dad jeans, started to lose his patience, amiably. “Don’t make me cut you off.” “I’m not yelling, I’m rooting,” Jets Fan responded.

Open since 1975, Denny’s is near the dead center of Brooklyn, not far from Flatbush. It’s in a working-class neighborhood, with Irish and Italian roots now mixed with Latino and South Asian communities and the even more recent Twentysomethings, pushed out of more northerly and expensive Kings County enclaves. From the inside, you could convince yourself that it was still 1975, with the drop-ceiling fixtures and the orange of the fake leather on the stools, but for the flat-screen TVs and the obligatory 9–11 memorabilia behind the bar.

According to this transcribed 1926 article from the Brooklyn Standard Union, a survey of Brooklyn bars six years after the end of Prohibition (which “takes no account of places that [were] still operating as thirst parlors or of the smaller number that have been padlocked for violations”), there were a little more than 160 bars in Brooklyn. Now, this online guide lists 156, but the Yellow Pages gives 1,378. Even though Brooklyn has a little more elbow room than Manhattan across the East River, the bar remains Brooklyn’s living room.

And Denny’s is clearly a Brooklyn bar. You’d be able to tell that with your eyes closed, as the Brooklyn accent is not dead. Jets Fan had a very loud one, Silver had it as a gravelly bass, and Polo Shirt had a silky baritone that would well suit a character actor.

The vague menace of Brooklyn is also not dead. Before the game, Silver came in, ordered his Captain Morgans, and asked the bartender, “That idiot bring back my knife? The idiot with the mouth.” Silver has a bit of a cough. “He said he was going to leave it here last night, put it in an envelope. The Spanish guy, screams a lot. He took it off my key chain. Fucking cocksucker.” This leads to a wistful conversation concerning switchblades they have known, but it turns out the knife in question is a penknife, and the Spanish guy, one of the Latinos, wearing a red sweatshirt, does indeed show up and return it. “Good thing I fucking like you,” Silver quipped.

Red was not Spanish, but Puerto Rican. This was announced by Jets Fan as soon as Red arrived: “FUCKING PUERTO RICANS!” “Stupid Micks,” Red riposted. This was a ritual greeting. Red and Jets Fan were clearly friends, and their back and forth continued for the entirety of the first half.

N-bombs were dropped too, even as a few black men stop in for a snort and some football. “Why is a white person not allowed to say nigger anymore?” Jets Fan asked. “Because you white guys have said it enough,” a black guy in a Carhart answered, which is maybe as good of an answer to the question as I’ve heard.

As if to make this an even more apt snapshot of Brooklyn at this moment in time, a few young men came in, guys who are called hipsters by the locals even if they might not be, everyone lacking a better term to describe the gentrifying agents inadvertently changing many neighborhoods in Brooklyn. One, a guy with sideburns and a soft voice, asked if the bar would be showing the game, which evoked sarcasm from the old smokes. Two came in together, and stood watching the TV over the pool table, snacking on the complimentary meatloaf left out in a chafing dish on a table in the middle of the room. (Denny’s stopped selling steak years ago, so don’t ask for it.) They got made fun of for being a black guy and a white guy together, and for the wild hair of the white guy. This was a master class in the busting of chops.

And there was me, whose chops evaded busting. I picked out this place, which is not unknown to Brooklyners both born-and-raised and recent, because it was an old man bar in a far-flung location, and because I had never been there. I intended to ask questions: how’s business, how are job prospects, how’s everyone doing? But by the second half I’m not the guy with the notebook trying to look like he’s not listening in; I’m another guy at the bar, watching football, trying to remember stats, reminiscing about decades past. I was expecting the gloom of the recession, a certain shortness of hope, a despair born of unhealthy lifestyle choices, but I found some all-right guys killing a Sunday afternoon in the way they always do. For all the chest-pounding, these men, despite their various life stories and circumstances, were friends, and if times are tight outside, you wouldn’t be able tell from inside.

The second half was relatively more sedate, mostly because Jets Fan fell asleep, and the bartender warned us to leave him that way. The bellowing back and forth gave way to game-watching and appreciation of plays. The guy next to me, about my age and Latino, was a Redskins fan growing up, and we talked about football from twenty years ago, when I was a Bills fan and therefore part of the luckiest/unluckiest fan base in the NFL. I’d planned on leaving before then, but the buyback came and the chat was pleasant, so I put the notebook away. We were not making news. We were watching football at the old man bar.

As the one o’clock games ended and I planned my departure, the bar emptied out. Now, it was just me and the bartender, Soft Voice, and a young woman in a Vikings jersey, fresh out of bed, she said. She wasn’t the only woman from the afternoon — an older woman, someone’s girlfriend, was there for a spell in the third quarter, and a few moms brought their kids in to use the bathroom — but the testosterone in the place, so thick earlier that afternoon, was cut entirely. She and Soft Voice were chatting. Maybe they were flirting? On this afternoon, once the smokes and the neighborhood guys went off back to their wives and jobs or wherever they go when they’re not at the bar, the youngsters were the only ones left at the old man bar.

Brent Cox is all over the Internet.

Liberal climate-change-believing scientists are still trying to cozy up to the horrible rapists of the sea, to get the dolphins to reveal their secrets and to finally start SPEAKING ENGLISH. (Good news: for $2,495, you can spend ten days without Internet or phone on a boat off the Bahamas hanging out with dolphins. Let’s hope you get to see lots of brutal gang behavior and gay dolphin sex! I’m really tempted actually.)

by Erica Sackin

Zuccotti Park is a well-manicured, block-long park in the heart of New York City’s financial district that, for the past two days, has been home to a few hundred squatters, anarchists, activists, students, a few drug addicts, several undercover cops and one lone man in a suit. Alternately calling themselves Occupy Wall Street or Take Wall Street or the 99%, they have set up camp, spending the night on rolls of cardboard, yoga mats and bare concrete, as a protest against the abuses carried out by various financial institutions and banks against the people of this country.

The protest, loosely organized by Adbusters and the internet activist group Anonymous — although as groups of non-hierarchical activists tend to do, many protesters claimed no group affiliation or leadership — began on Saturday. Give or take, 5000 protesters marched down into the financial district banging drums and carrying signs, chanting “Wall Street, Our Street!” The group then set up camp in Zuccotti Park — a compromise, according to one protester, between the NYPD, protesters, and private owners of the park, so that the group did not just set up camp in the middle of the actual Wall Street. They spent Saturday and Sunday night in the small square, feasting on donated peanut butter, salads and cheese. On Sunday night, supporters of the protesters ordered the group pizza — so much pizza that the nearby pizza shop announced it would have to stay open until 1 a.m. just to fulfill orders. On Monday morning the group marched down Wall Street proper, beating drums and blowing whistles, and broadcasting a live stream of the whole thing on their website.

And on Sunday afternoon, protesters gathered in small groups to scrawl slogans on spare pieces of cardboard. They lounged on benches and congregated around the mountain of cans of Skippy that dominated the free food table. A line of protesters stood silently holding signs at the front of the park, somewhat peacefully facing off a gathering of cops. There were a few police vans surrounding the park, as well as officers milling around, but they seemed, for the most part, content to watch — making sure no one was smashing the windows of Starbucks or setting anything on fire, but otherwise staying out of the way.

The group then held its “General Assembly,” the aggressively equitable open forum they use to make decisions. Five people with megaphones sat on a wall in front of the group, and encouraged the entire seated crowd to share ideas and contribute items to the agenda. The process was lengthy. It began with a review of the agenda, then suggestions for additional possible agenda items, with a chance for those who did not agree with the agenda items to dissent. Then it moved to discussion of the actual agenda items, and a conversation on whether items were to be decided by the entire group or moved to a smaller, subject-based work group that would bring their decision to the entire group, to then be further discussed. The process ensured that every single person had the chance to have their voice heard. It also meant that it took a very long time to get anything done.

“My neighbors are being pushed out of their homes through predatory lending and foreclosures, they’re having their heating and hot water being turned off, and my friends in college are so deep in student debt that they won’t pay it off for 20 years,” Justin told me. He is a fairly clean cut 25-year-old who had kicked off the megaphone portion of the day. He was monitoring the group’s food donation page on his iPad. “What we’re trying to do is trying to establish even more than we did yesterday, our encampment here, so we can achieve our ultimate goal, which is to occupy Wall Street and make our demands heard.”

Halfway through the General Assembly, a rowdy group of protesters, led by a man in tie-died spandex pants, approached the park. They were pounding drums, blowing whistles, and chanting “Wall Street, Our Street!” Their energy dissipated as they approached the more somber General Assembly, then in the process of discussing whether they should discuss a common name, if they should have a police liaison and how they could best formally recognize the disproportionate privilege of many of the protesters. Then a cry of “Welcome them!” came from the General Assembly, and the cheering, colorful band of marchers was added to the mix.

“Me personally — I don’t want to speak for everyone — but for me, it’s about getting money out of politics,” Benjamin Hitchock told me. He’s an 18 year-year-old college student who had driven down from Maine for the weekend. “It’s about getting the influence of money out of democracy. Because democracy was not made to represent the distribution of dollars, it was made to represent the distribution of beliefs.”

They had all been spending the night in the park, without tents or shelter, some more comfortably than others. Flip, a 23-year-old Queens resident with an acoustic guitar, told me that he’d forgotten a blanket the night before, so had been cold, but that everyone else had helped him get through.

“I just feel like I need to be here, you know?” Flip said. “I feel like the world is becoming a different place. That’s how it works, I guess.”

Some came from far away — Robert, a 20-something self-described professional activist who was lounging on cardboard with his girlfriend Caitlin, had hitchhiked across the country from California just to be there.

“What we’d like to change is to at least draw more attention to and hopefully phase out the financial system’s involvement in the political system,” Robert told me. “It kind of diminishes the voting power of individual people, it limits your choice to two candidates that have already been vetted by large contributors.”

Robert Segal, who said he was a 47-year-old former Wall Street employee and definitely was the lone protester there in a suit and tie, concurred. “No corporation should take home a senator for their mantelpiece, and have a congressperson on either side. When you throw money at a candidate you’re essentially casting a vote. And people should vote. Corporations shouldn’t vote. That’s a starting point.”

“After 2008, I expected wow, people are actually going to gather and go ‘what did you just do to us?’” he said. “’Why did you think you’re so vital, why don’t you take a hike? We don’t need you!’ But instead there was a resounding amount of non-noise.”

The most eventful part of the day was when a Big Apple Tour Bus pulled up, and tourists began to excitedly snap photos of the protesters in the park. At one point, a protester donned a Guy Fawkes mask — the signature of many members of Anonymous. A police officer walked up to him and, quietly, asked him to remove the mask. Wearing masks in New York City was illegal, he explained, and if the protester continued to wear it the officer would end up having to arrest him.

“I’m honestly shocked that there aren’t more people from the right,” Robert the hitchhiker said. “I’m surprised there aren’t more people from other sides. This is being spun as a very left-leaning cause, but ending the financial system’s stranglehold on our democracy is something everyone can agree on. All over the country in the Midwest, in red states, good old boys alike.”

“I know I’m making a difference,” Benjamin said. “The people who come and see this and walk by and think about it, whether it be good or bad thoughts. Plus,” he said, “If I wasn’t here, I’d just be sitting in my dorm room doing homework.”

Erica Sackin is a reporterer.

You schmucks who use ridiculous journo-terms make me crazy! Finally, someone is willing to speak out against the use of “lede” in public. Because, ha ha, sucka, there’s no reason for it! (Plus, MOST OF YOU ARE JUST BLOGGERS.) So: “’Lede’ is an invention of linotype romanticists, not something used in newsrooms of the linotype era,” writes Howard Owens. Great, that’s settled. (Also there are still bloggers who file stories with “#30#” or some variant thereof. GUESS WHAT? I know your story ends there, because the Microsoft Word or Google Doc ENDS THERE TOO.) Now, what really gets my goat is New York Times editors who use the phrase “lede-all” in public, which is a specific term for a kind of story at the Times. Twitter is outward-facing! We don’t work in your Renzo Piano building! Stop using wonky insider work terms that no one knows about or cares about! I’M LOOKING AT YOU, SAM SIFTON.