Why are bears moving into areas where humans live? Because they’re running out of space, says the guy from the news. Why they’re running out of space is a whole other issue, but never mind all that-at about two-and-a-half minutes into this video you will hear a tranquilized bear snore. And this bear snores like a motherfucker. This bear snores in a way to corresponds almost directly to descriptions I’ve heard of my own snoring. I’ve wondered all my life why I have such an obsession with bears, but I think I just got a little bit closer to cracking the case: I am the bear and the bear is me.

“Round or elliptical galaxies are huge and almost always reddish. Spiral galaxies are less huge but still large and almost always bluish. Galaxies that are small are almost never round and certainly not green. By July, 2008, the Zooites had found enough of these galaxies they were now calling Green Peas-their slogan, Give Peas a Chance!-that astronomers were getting seriously interested. So astronomers did what they always do with a new project, they gave it to a graduate student, this one named Carie.”

by Abe Sauer

Big changes, civic-minded cheeseheads. We hope you’re planning to vote, even if you’re one of the 20,000-odd out-of-state students at UW-Madison. The polls are open-and they’ll remain open until 8 p.m. (For all you coasties, that’s 9 p.m.!) Vote your peer-pressured conscience! You can find your Wisconsin polling place here. Not registered? Not to worry, you can register at the polling place. The ballot you receive will be in English-only, because this isn’t the frickin’ U.N. And now: to the candidates.

There is little contention within the Democratic party for Wisconsin’s top offices. Republicans (or spoiler Democrats who want to take advantage of Wisconsin’s open primary law to vote for a weaker Republican in a race with an incumbent) are faced with a platter of interesting tea party candidates.

• The Governor’s Race: Milwaukee Mayor Fightin’ Tom Barrett will be the Dem candidate to replace Jim “Eeyore” Doyle, who is leaving office to comfort-eat his way into another 40 extra pounds. Meanwhile, both Republican hopefuls have been racing to the bottom. A win by money-hiding Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker would promise a big city Milwaukee-sourced state leader all of Wisconsin could agree to resent. Thanks to Scott Walker’s recent campaign message, Wisconsin voters know that his Republican opponent Mark Neumann is the same as Nancy Pelosi. So, you know, a primary vote for Mark Neumann is a vote for Nancy Pelosi. (Should he win, what tactic will Walker turn in the general election, given he’s already blown his Pelosi wad? Vote for him to find out!)

• Those looking to make Northern Wisconsin a political laughingstock can vote for roll with former Real World: Boston castmate Sean Duffy for the 7th District seat being abandoned by David Obey. Hey ladies, he’s endorsed by Sarah Palin!

• There is a four-way Republican race in Wisconsin’s 8th District to challenge incumbent Dem, Steve Kagen. The Awl endorses Aaron Rodgers after that awesome performance against the Eagles. Bring it on Buffalo! (Does The Awl have readers in the 8th District?)

• In the senate primary, Republicans can poke their heads up and see the shadow of leading candidate Ron Johnson to guarantee six more weeks of near-slanderous ads about Russ Feingold that will plague every commercial break of every Packer game until November. The self-made married-into-money multi-millionaire is such a spectre of doom that the Cap Times broke its long-held policy of not endorsing primary elections to endorse anyone but Johnson after the candidate said of the manufacturing sector destruction caused by NAFTA and CAFTA, “Well, in a free-market capitalist system, there are always winners and losers.” (If Wisconsin teabags Feingold in favor of Johnson in November, the state will have done the nation a grave disservice.)

• Would somebody please cast a vote in the 6th District where 32-year incumbent Republican Tom Petri is running completely unchallenged on either side? Poor guy has probably forgotten all about the feeling of getting votes.

• Wisconsin’s 3rd District features a Republican primary between tea party candidate Bruce Evers and ethically challenged candidate Dan Kapanke to take on incumbent Wall Street-owned Democrat Ron Kind in the general election. The Awl endorses dusting off and nuking this district from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure.

• In the 2nd District Republicans Chad Lee and Peter Theron are battling to face a challenging general election that will test their abilities to accuse Tammy Baldwin of being a lesbian without actually using the word “lesbian.” Chad Lee seems the more wily choice, already having challenging Baldwin to a debate on the subject “The 2nd District is one of the Best Places in America to Live.” Chad Lee’s team says they will take the affirmative position, which means….

• In the 1st District, Republicans can go and cast a vote for GOP dreamboat Paul Ryan. Sure he’s an uncontested incumbent but, OMG! ISN’T HE SO YUMMY? He’s like a less ethnic Anthony Weiner! SWOON!

Don’t you just want him to take you in the closet and represent you over and over and over again?

• In the many local sheriff elections that everyone ignores to his and her detriment, please do a little research.

So Wisconsinites, and many, many Wisconsin-based students, good luck at the voting booth and remember to fully cover up, so as not to offend the octogenarian Polish Catholic woman running your polling station!

Abe Sauer is working on a book.

“Who is trying to force a decision between bad alternatives? It’s known as a ‘Sophie’s Choice’ — from the Meryl Streep portrayal of a mother cruelly forced by Nazi’s to choose only one of her children to save from a death camp. America’s economy is hurting, but must President Obama and his team of class warriors insist that some can be saved from January’s automatic tax hikes but others must not be?”
-Former Rep. Ernest Istook (R-OK) has clearly never heard of William Styron. Also, he is INSANE.

Transcript To Jude Law’s Very Short Taxi TV Anecdote About How He Learned He Had Landed A Role In Some Shakespeare Production

by Jeff Johnson

“I was… crashing… at… a… friend’s flat… which… is to… say, uh… He… this… friend… put… down… a… he… went… to… procure… a… flat… or… as… you… say… here… apartment… and… there… was… a… lease… and… he… obtained… it… and… had… a… friend… who… knew… that… I… had… traveled… by… aeroplane… to… uh… New… Amsterdam… or… New… York?… And… was… sleeping… in… my… other… friend’s… flat… and… the… guy… notified… my… one… friend… by… fax… machine… he… drew… a… picture… of… an… acting… moment… and… scanned… it… and… then… sent… it… by… registered… mail… to… my… friend… and… it… said… thank… you… and… it… was… about… something… else… he… and… drank… too… much… port… and… stepped… on… a… vase… of… belonging… to… someone… else… and… he… in… his… note… … also… said… you… have… a… friend… doing… a… Shakespeare… play… so… bid… him… a… warm… congratulations… this… news… was… somehow… transmitted… to… him… before… me… and… my… friend… received… it… and… said… splendid… it… looks… like… you… might… have… landed… a… something… you… had… auditioned… for… once… there… was… a… decision… was… made… and… you… if… you… are… in… fact… Jude… not… Hey… Jude… but Law… good… acting… so… that’s… what… took… place… on… one… day… when… I… found… out… about… this… moment…”

“White nose syndrome grows on bats’ skin during the winter and irritates them, rousing them from hibernation. Not used to being awake when it is so cold, the bats burn so much energy trying to stay warm that they deplete their fat reserves, and eventually become too weak to fly or catch food.”
–Discovery reports on the New York State Department of Health finding that fluconazole, a drug commonly used to cure athlete’s foot in humans, is effective in fighting a fungal disease that has killed more than a million bats over the past four years. Now the challenge is to figure out how to apply the anti-fungal medicine to bats’ noses. Bats eat mosquitos, so I fucking love bats. I really hope the scientists think of something quick.

by Matt Ealer

Of Montreal is wending its way up the seaboard, to Philly and Boston and New York this weekend-and yes, the exquisite Janelle Monae is opening, so get there on time. The band is doing a looparound of Michigan and Wisconsin and Chicago and Minneapolis, until they pop off to Dublin and Glasgow and London and Paris and the rest of Europe next month. In late October and early November, they’ll finish America off and arrive on the west coast. Herewith, an early report.

After years working in the milieu of the indie band switching off instruments for songs and parts of songs in order to make that infinitesimally perfect, precious little sound toward which the spirit moves, this iteration of the Of Montreal traveling carnival is an actual band.

Ringmaster Kevin Barnes played an instrument exactly once, sitting behind the piano a little over halfway through to tease new long-player False Priest’s moribund-Bowie “Casualty of You” melodrama, with little stabs pointing at that song’s piano trills and bellowing out a screed about how “even this ghetto world that has nothing doesn’t want me.” He did this shrouded and alienated from the crowd, only appearing on a large projector screen dressed up like an obsolete tube television, in grainy black and white. For the rest of the show, he was free.

As in, when the band twacked into the heavy downbeat of “Crazy Girl” after the affected cracked-sunshine Playskool opening, he actually started prancing around the stage while rapping in the way something like New Edition would have tried to rap in the early 90s, except purposefully. A willful naivety that sells the idea that this character would pick a girl up at an Al-Anon meeting and then be surprised when she threw his beta fish out the window.

One might think the New Wave crunch of “Famine Affair” would scream for Barnes to strap on a Gibson SG like he did while churning out Kinks covers for an equally roiling sea of bright young things at the Pitchfork Music Festival two years ago. But he didn’t, standing instead in a stark spotlight, arms raised in somehow shamanistic, defiant heartbreak.

He would make this pose again when the first of the Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? material clicked over. “She’s A Rejecter” was always the emotional sucker-punch of that record (even after you’d already endured the 10-minute space opera psychodrama of “The Past is a Grotesque Animal” and thought you’d mined every last cranny of Barnes’ fractured psyche), but, here? With him standing in that spotlight like some fascist ruler? With strobes strategically blasting at the “but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t” line, inducing seizures and fits? With an honest-to-God funk band-and it became clear by this song that the band was not just in some shabby drag, especially the drummer, they had gestated into a thing that could have worn James Brown in his prime down-thrashing like a well-oiled machine behind him? The thing became a revelation.

About those strobes, the production values came to the fore in the presentation. Around “Satanic Panic in the Attic,” when things started to get weird for this band, you could see them at a relatively tiny room like Falls Church, VA’s State Theater and it would take on the affect of some community theater troupe taking on a Schoenberg opera with some whack ideas from an interpretive dance studio. The house lights always seemed turned way up, you could see the ladder Barnes stood on as he appeared to be impersonating a Christmas tree or a gigantic pope. The changes of costume always peeked out of the top layer. It almost seemed purposefully ramshackle.

Here, in the dim and din of a genuine “rock venue,” Washington DC’s 9:30 Club, and with a cutting-edge video set-up sending live feeds of the band in action to large projector screens behind them, touched by digital effects to fit the songs’ demands and accompanying commissioned video works, it felt very different. The costumes were of a higher quality, they seemed more coherent, to flow with each other and the music. Barnes rode out on a human camel constructed of various dancers, making a comment on his own infamous near-naked white horse ride on stage while touring the previous “Skeletal Lamping” record. He came out in a dull gold Batman cowl that formed a sun out of his head. There were silver wings on dancers that could’ve passed Circe de Sole muster and looked like they would have cut you if you stepped in their path. The “History”-era Micheal Jackson world peace coda of “Do You Mutilate?” was delivered by a bulbous, towering robot out of a 50s scifi fantasia that moved with stunning (if robotic) alacrity. While the older version may have been technically closer to what went on at a Sun Ra Arkestra performance in their prime, this was closer to the rapturous praise you read of same in deliriously remembered accounts.

Now, this is not all some narrative of Aristotelian telelogy. Do we want or need a band that started as the most Beatles/mod-squad-leaning of Athens, Georgia’s mid-90s Elephant Six music collective to smooth it out so much that it starts to sound as if they could be backing George Benson? On a Solange-less “Sex Karma,” the purple bed of 90s Prince funk felt more warm and pillowy than ass-shaking, and Barnes seemed to lean on it as he listlessly moved through the lyrics with a frog in his throat. The crowd, most of which was unfamiliar with the material that wouldn’t get an official release until today, began to feel groggy, bamboozled.

This all fell moot by the encore, though. After playing one last “Hissing Fauna” favorite, the band ripped into a precise, loving medley culled from Micheal Jackson’s Thriller, moving confidently from the title track to “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” and finishing with “P.Y.T.” with Kevin not sarcastically yelping “hee-hee’s” as one might expect the leader of an literary indie-pop outfit to do.

Earnestly, reverently singing every word, hitting every note in a hot pink headband, white cashmere hoodie, black sparkling miniskirt, and hot pink tights. It was a statement on pop culture, race, fashion, celebrity and gender that no other band of this ilk would dare to make but at the same time it wasn’t. Or it didn’t matter that it was. Because when they finished and he raised his arms once more and thanked the crowd, it was obvious that they felt like they were getting away with something. They just nailed a bunch of songs that everyone in the universe loves but for a crowd that still, due to its own snobbish baggage, was blown away by the juxtaposition. They were reveling it. And so was everyone else.

Matt Ealer fetishizes the archetype.

“The poll worker told Mr. Rojas not to worry; every ballot was generating the ‘system error.’” Well, sure sounds like the new voting machines are performing terrifically! But wait, there’s more! “Hundreds turned away in Queens,” broken scanners on the UWS.

I’m assuming you’ve seen the performance from Sunday night’s VMA award show already, so here’s the recorded version of Kanye West’s new song, “Runaway.” What’s to say? It’s great. Most of the music we’ve heard in the past few months, as Kanye has emerged from his quiet year of repentance after making an ass of himself at last year’s VMAs, has been great. It stands with rest of his catalogue, and his catalogue stands with that of any other artist currently working on his level. And well above most of them. But more than that, he understands that to be on that level-the big giant world-stage let-me-hear-you-scream level-he needs to be thinking about way more than just music. Clearly, he does. (How much time he must spend choosing his outfits!) He goes for the big show, the big statement, pretty much always. And pretty much always pulls off something special. XXL has a nice round-up of the big TV performances of Kanye’s career.

He knows that in today’s media climate, if you’re going to embrace being famous, privacy and quiet self-reflection are privileges almost impossibly hard to maintain. So he doesn’t try. This is a different tack than that taken by a Jay-Z, who says, “I’m so cool, you’ll never know the real me.” Or a Lady Gaga, who suggests “everything is artifice, there is no real me.” Instead he says “there is very much a real me, and I’m not cool enough to keep it hidden, so here it is, all the time.” (How exhausting this must be!) He throws everything out there, exposing himself over various platforms in some kind of exhibitionist reality star performance art thing. Emoting, emoting, emoting, joking sometimes, taking himself extremely seriously others, completely unafraid to try new things, opening himself to his audience in ways sometimes off-putting, sometimes endearing, but very rarely boring, he stays beating commenters and pundits to the punch, and backing it up with music that, whether or not it’s to one’s liking, is hard to experience as anything other than bold and adventurous and, yes, artistic. So here’s to Kanye, showing everyone how to be a pop star in the 21st Century.

“Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Explorer Pipeline had a ‘small leak’ of diesel from a tank line at its Fauna petroleum products terminal in Houston on Monday, a company spokesman said on Tuesday.” But there’s no need to worry: “Smallscale fuel or crude leaks are not uncommon at fuel terminals.” Pretty soon everyone in this country is going to be able to see a giant, blazing fireball explode just feet away from them and not even blink an eyelid.