Question for Jim and others, “Yes or No, does the bear ever go away?”

[meg_evonne]

Question for Jim or others who have published, “Yes or No, does the bear ever go away?”

There is a bear that lives in my room.
As I write, he's tiny & small in the corner.
Sometimes so large, I can’t get in.

He asks things-- I try to ignore,
“You don’t know the craft, you never will.
Give up, go away. Leave. me. in. peace…”

Not nice, not cute; I battle him daily.
If he wins, my ideas would cease.
And my heart would be shattered.

How I hate that gosh darn bear…

Jim, will he always be there, just out of sight, in the corner of my room…
Will he forever hold the power to terrify me? Or does he finally, finally go away?

[Mickey Finn]

My bear is a panda.

He's cute and distracts me.

[trboturtle]

My bear is a panda.

He's cute and distracts me.

Is his name Gema? 

Craig

[Josh]

Panda huh?

[Rashad 117]

My bear is pink with a heart on her chest and she smiles a lot. She scares me.

[blgarver]

My bear keeps stealing my pick-a-nic basket.

And no, I don't think he'll ever go away.

[BookLover♥]

Is he smarter than your average bear?

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I think mine is a polar bear, which aren't actually bears.  It perches on the porch outside my apartment and gets me with that same scooping motion they use in the wild for flipping seals out of the water through holes in the ice.  Fortunately, it's only metaphorical, because real polar bears kill people every year this way in Churchill. {Note; when building a town in the middle of nowhere to take advantage of huge untapped mineral deposits, it's worth checking you're not right in the middle of the annual polar bear migration route.)

[Zygoptera]

Polar bears are not real bears? They're genetically very closely related to brown bears. What research are you looking at, just curiously?

[Orissa]

mine are all pandas, and they're real bears.  I see them everywhere too...

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

Polar bears are not real bears? They're genetically very closely related to brown bears. What research are you looking at, just curiously?

Last I saw - and do please remind me to look this up if I don't come back to it - polar bears are genetically closer to weasels, ferrets and so forth than to other bears. Convergent evolution to some extent.

[blgarver]

Last I saw - and do please remind me to look this up if I don't come back to it - polar bears are genetically closer to weasels, ferrets and so forth than to other bears. Convergent evolution to some extent.

They do sort of look weasel-esque in the face I guess.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

They do sort of look weasel-esque in the face I guess.

There are a fairly tightly defined set of solutions to the problem of how best to move fast in water, which is why fish, whales and ichthyosaurs are all roughly the same shape despite coming from differently-shaped direct ancestors.  I've been in a couple of zoo-type things with polar bear enclosures where one could see them on land and in water, and that face from above is strikingly streamlined.

[Stuart1512]

Bear?

[Zygoptera]

Last I saw - and do please remind me to look this up if I don't come back to it - polar bears are genetically closer to weasels, ferrets and so forth than to other bears. Convergent evolution to some extent.

From what I've quickly read up on Google Scholar, all evidence points to polar bears being actual bears.
Phylogenetic Relationships of North American Ursids Based on Analysis of Mitochondrial DNA
Mitochondrial DNA Sequence Evolution in the Arctoidea (full text avail)
An Empirical Evaluation of Genetic Distance.....From Bear (Ursidae) Populations (full text avail)