Your Friday Panda Dacker Sliders

I confess; I couldn't find any monkey articles or videos, so I settled for these Pandas.  They're cute, too.

Flood Helps Polar Bear Escape in Duluth Zoo

Where's Berlin?   "I know nussing"

People evacuate homes, animals flee zoo pens as heavy rains bring floods to Minnesota city

Jeb, the black and brown dwarfed goat at Lake Superior Zoo, sought out Brad Jago every day for a little love, attention and a gentle scratch on the forehead where his horns once stood. On Wednesday it was Jago seeking Jeb, as the groundskeeper and the rest of the zoo staff scrambled to find and recapture animals that escaped during torrential overnight flooding that forced the evacuation of some homes in a low-lying neighborhood in the port city of Duluth.

Floods fed by a steady torrential downpour have forced residents to evacuate their homes and animals to flee their pens at a zoo in a northeast Minnesota city.

Zoo workers safely recovered two seals and a polar bear that had managed to escape their enclosures but Jeb and a dozen or so other animals from the zoo’s barnyard exhibit — including other goats, sheep and a miniature donkey — drowned. “That was a tough loss,” said Jago, one of several employees who spent Wednesday afternoon grieving and regrouping after the exhausting search that began before dawn.

Hmm; I wonder if that storm is headed our way?

Voytek, the Polish Ammo Bear

"He liked a cigarette, he liked a bottle of beer - he drank a bottle of beer like any man." - Badass of the Week

...On their trip through Iran, the men of the Polish 22nd Transport Artillery Supply Company came across a young Iranian boy wandering through the desert like Jim Morrison tripping balls, and carrying a large cloth sack. The men thought the boy looked tired and hungry, so they gave him some food and a Crunch bar or some shit. When the kid thanked them, the Poles asked what was in the bag. The boy opened it up and revealed a tiny, malnourished brown bear cub. Since the soldiers knew the little cub was in very poor health and needed attention quickly, they bought the bear from the kid for a few bucks (or whatever the hell they used for money in 1940’s Iran – I can’t be bothered to look it up), and fed it some condensed milk from a makeshift bottle. For the next several days, they nursed the bear back to health, giving it food, water, and a warm place to sleep.

Over the long journey from Iran to Palestine, the bear, now named Voytek (it’s spelled Wojtek in Polish but pronounced "Voytek” because Polish is a crazy fucking language) quickly became the unofficial mascot of the 22nd Company. The bear would sit around the campfire with the men, eating, drinking, and sleeping in tents with the rest of the soldiers. The bear loved smoking cigarettes, drank beer right out of the bottle like a regular infantryman, and got a kick out of wrestling and play-fighting with the other soldiers. Of course, he was the most badass asskicking wrester in the entire company, thanks in part to the fact that he grew to be six feet tall, weighed roughly five hundred pounds, and could knock small trees over with a single swing of his massive, clawed paw. He grew to be a part of the unit, improving the morale of men who had spent several years getting their asses kicked in slave labor camps, and was treated as though he were just another hard-drinkin’, hard-smoking’, hard-fightin’, hair-growin’ soldier in the Company. When the unit marched out on a mission, Voytek would stand up on his hind legs and march alongside them. When the motorized convoy was on the move, Voytek sat in the passenger seat of one of the jeeps, hanging his head out the window and shocking the shit out of people walking down the street...

The Poles’ Finest Hour of the war came in the incredibly bloody battle for Monte Cassino. By the time II Corps arrived, the Germans were deeply entrenched in the hilltop monastery, and three previous Allied assaults on the position had all proved more fruitless than a South Florida orange tree in the middle of a worldwide Nuclear Winter. The campaign was proving to be one of the bloodiest battles of the Western Front, and the Poles were brought in to make the final push to capture the fortress. During the fighting, Voytek the Hero Bear actually hand-carried boxes of ammunition, some weighing in at over 100 pounds, from supply trucks to artillery positions on the front lines. He worked tirelessly, day and night, bringing supplies to his friends who were bravely battling the Nazis. He never rested, never dropped a single artillery shell, and never showed any fear despite his position being under constant enemy fire and heavy shelling. His actions were so inspiring to his fellow soldiers that after the battle the official insignia of the 22nd Artillery was changed to a picture of Voytek carrying an armful of howitzer ammunition. In the same vein, you have to assume that it was pretty fucking demoralizing to the Germans to see that the Poles had a fucking GIANT GODDAMNED BROWN BEAR fighting on their side...

The idea of a fucking alcoholic Nazi-fighting bear is so awesome that you’d think it was something out of a bizarre cartoon or a Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie. It’s the sort of shit that, even with all of the historical evidence, seems too totally awesome to be true. The bear was a hero of World War II, and there are statues of him and plaques memorializing his brave service in Poland, Edinburgh, the Imperial War Museum in London, and the Canadian War Museum.

Bears are notoriously bad pets, but maybe a diet of cigarettes and beer helps keep them docile.

It all sounds unlikely to me, but hey, it's in Wikipedia, so it must be right...

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