I honestly mean, good for them. Why not? They do a job - they are entertainers. They play for my pleasure and the pleasure of other baseball or other Yankee fans. When they win - great! When they lose, bad. Did they earn their money if they lost the game. According to their bosses, the only real ones who count, here ... yes, they did. I don't care that some Hollywood actors make millions of dollars a movie - why should I? That's the deal they made with their employers.Do their bosses take back the paycheck if the movie flops? Certainly not. To my mind, crabbing and grousing about how much money the baseball players make takes the joy out of the game. Watching spectator sports is one way 21st century human beings have fun. I really like watching Yankee baseball. I love it when they win and don't like it at all when they lose, like they are losing right now - but I don't give a rat's ass how much money they make. This is probably the worst outing CC Sabathia has had this season. He's now losing 6 - zip and has given up 9 hits in what is now the 7th inning.
Bill pointed out to me, not long ago, what it means to be a fan of something. He said, about people watching baseball,
for someone who doesn't care about either team, it's one team or the other, for a fan, it's "us" against "them."
He's right - for me when the Yankees win, "we won" and when they lose, "we lost." Absolutely. We sure are losing today! Onto a new subject - one that bothers me a lot.
In 2006 an American hunter from Idaho named Jim Martell, paid more than forty-five thousand dollars ($45,000.00) for a permit to shoot and kill a polar bear near Sachs Harbor in the Northwest Territories on Banks Island in the Canadian Arctic. Martell followed his Inuit guide as the guide stalked the bear and told Martel when to shoot it. He did so, killing it. When the guide got close to the kill, he noticed there was something odd about the bear. It didn't look like any other polar bear the guide had ever seen. It had brown circles around its eyes, a patch of brown on its foot and its claws were longer than a polar bear's claws should be. It also had the humped back and shallow face of a brown bear rather than a polar bear. Because he runs a business guiding hunters, the Inuit guide wanted to make sure it was a clean hunt, so he contacted the Canadian authorities. They put the dead bear on ice and sent hair samples to a lab to have the DNA checked to make sure it was a polar bear. To everyone's surprise, the bear was not a polar bear. It was a hybrid offspring of a polar bear father and a grizzly bear mother.
There have been several such bears bred in captivity, but this was the very first time one had been found living in the wild. It was lucky for Martel, if not for the bear ... he had a permit to hunt and kill a polar bear, which for some reason is legal in Canada, even though polar bears are at least a threatened species. It was not, however, legal to kill a grizzly bear in Canada in 2006. I don't know if they were considered endangered in Canada in 2006. It was not until 2008 that polar bears were even considered a "threatened" species in the USA.
http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/polar-bears/faq#q2http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/polar-bears/faq#q2
In May 2008, U.S. Department of the Interior listed the polar bear as a Threatened Species under the Endangered Species Act. Russia lists the polar bear as "a species of concern."
The Canadian government was all set to toss Mr. Martel in jail for 1 year and fine him CAN$1,000.00 for killing a grizzly bear in 2006. Since it turned out that he had killed neither a polar bear nor a grizzly bear, but a hybrid, he hadn't broken Canadian law, so he not only got away without punishment, but he actually got to keep his kill and he has it stuffed in his house.
Good for hunter Martel. Bad for the 1st hybrid polar bear/ grizzly bear every found in the wild.
In Canada, as of 2008, polar bears were classified as "in trouble, not endangered" by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. If the Canadian government agreed, they would have to take steps to protect the animals.
http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/35364
I don't know if the the Canadian Government did anything - this is the most recent information I can find.
I'd like to know who makes up these cockamamie rules. In 2006, it was legal to hunt a polar bear but not a grizzly.Do people in charge actually decide that there are too many polar bears in Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia or Russia?
I mean, I've read that the polar bear is so "threatened" that some of them die because the ice melts too early, they begin to starve so they set out swimming in the ocean searching for ice and/or food, and there just isn't any to be found. Wildlife specialists have found polar bears swimming at least 70 miles out to sea. Almost every polar bear cub on such a journey with its mother, drowns.
This year, on April 8, 2010, David Kuptana, an Inuvialuit hunter from the nearby community of Ulukhaktok on Victoria Island [http://en.wikipedia.orgwikiVictoria_Island_%28Canada%29
was hunting for polar bear, which is totally legal and reasonable for native indigenous people in Canada. He shot and killed what he thought was a polar bear, but when he inspected the bear, it looked enough not like a polar bear that he had DNA testing done. DNA testing proved that the bear's mother was a grizzly-polar hybrid and it's father was a
grizzly bear. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources for the Northwest Territories said that it ".... may be the first recorded second-generation polar-grizzly bear hybrid found in the wild." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly%E2%80%93polar_bear_hybrid
The bear had characteristics of both a polar bear and a grizzly bear. Coat of a polar bear with brown paws and patches, a grizzly-like head and claws.
There are some scientists and naturalists who think that polar bears should be considered a marine mammal because they are so adept and natural in the ocean, swimming long distances in search of food - more and more since the ice is freezing much later and then melting much earlier than even 5 years ago. Grizzly bears and other brown bears and black bears for that matter, are omnivores - they eat anything that's edible. They have adapted to their environment as their natural habitat has shrunk as humans move into what was their territory. They eat grass the same way a cow does, berries, nuts, acorns, grubs, ants and beetles, bees that get in their mouths when they eat honey, fish, shellfish, rodents, tubers, flowers and leaves. They also eat meat - moose, elk, deer, mountain goat, big horn sheep and even a buffalo, I suppose, if one could take one down and they eat moths. On one day on rocky hillsides, grizzly bears have been seen eating moths. Yes, moths. One grizzly bear can eat 40,000 moths in one day. http://www.yellowstonepark.com/moretoknow/shownewsdetails.aspx?newsid=163
Forty-thousand moths in one day, and they need as many as they can eat.
Since grizzly bears hibernate for at least four months in winter, that must fatten up during the summer and especially in the fall so that they'll survive. Brown bears, including grizzlies, and black bears do not eat, drink, urinate or defecate during the entire time they hibernate. Females of the specie's bodies can undergo an even more amazing thing while hibernating - they give birth to at least one teeny tiny cub, and sometimes, the healthier and fatter they were when they began hibernation, up to four or even five cubs. Incredible! So, it's apparent that the more they eat, the better able they are to survive the months of hibernation. Polar bears, their closest relatives, have evolved, because of their natural habitat, to eat only meat. They lost the habit of eating anything and everything edible over eons - seemingly to their detriment. They don't know what else is edible in the environment, and there's not much. Polar bears eat seals, walrus, beluga whale, when they can catch them and not much else. I guess they'd eat an arctic fox, bird, rabbit or other rodent if they could catch one, and they eat beached whales when they can find one. So, marine mammals make up almost all of their diet. If they found seaweed, or some berries, they probably wouldn't know they were good to eat.
The hybrid polar bear/grizzly bears are being called (undignified, in my opinion for the offspring of two such magnificent animals) different names in the media such as, pizzly bear, grolar bear or polizzly, but there hasn't been a concensus so far. I was delighted to learn that some Canadian wildlife officials have suggested calling the hybrids "Nanulak" which comes from the Inuit names for polar bear, Nanuk and grizzly bear, Aklak. I like that one a lot! It sounds right to me. Too bad I don't get a vote, eh? :o) There's an unwritten rule about naming hybrids: The sire or father's name comes first - so if the hybrid's sire was a polar bear and mother a grizzly, it would have to be "pizzly." Conversely, if the sire was a grizzly and the mother a polar bear, it would be a "grolar bear." While I personally like grolar bear better than the dopey-sounding, pizzly, it will be up to science to come to a conclusion as to what to call the hybrid. Although only two have recently been found in the wild, one a first generation hybrid of a polar bear/grizzly and the other, a second-generation hybrid offspring of a hybrid grizzly/polar bear and a grizzly, it is reasonable to think that there may be others. I truly hope so and I fervently wish that people would stop killing them to find out!!
So - a long day for me - the wolves (figurative ones) have been snapping more visciously at our door recently. We're not in good shape financially. Not that we ever have been - we've always sucked at finances, math, money. We spend too much and we have too much silly, unnecessary "stuff."
Actually, we have both been terrible at it since we were married, which will be 33 years, please God, in November.
We should have gotten better at it. There is hope for us, though. This summer and even more in the fall, we are going to de-clutter our home. There! I have stated it so that someone else, whomever that may be, can see it. Bill and Ellie Maziekien are going to de-clutter our home in 2010/2011. I hope we can finish in that amount of time, but I am committed. Notice, I didn't say I should be committed - heh. I am committed to going forward in getting rid of any and all unneccesary extra stuff. We will keep things that fit us, our livestyle and our dimensions. And I hope to keep things that make me happy, up to a reasonable point that Bill and I both agree on. And of course, things that make Bill happy. I have promised to get rid of most of my books (not my cookbooks) Bill agrees that I can keep my cookbooks, all if not almost all of them. But my other books - they're going. I'm researching Powell's Bookswap now, to see if that's a viable option for me. Bill would have to bring the books I swap to the Post Office, so I have to make sure he's okay with that part.
We pay our bills when we can. Bill works part time because his company, in a sneaky, scam-my way, makes it impossible for him to work enough hours by inanely not offering him enough work to fill enough hours, while not paying him for time worked. I have been disabled since 1998, "officially" disabled since 2000 and I cannot work. I passed a course to become certified as a pre-school teacher back in 1998-99, but I didn't take the final oral exam, because by that time, I couldn't physically do the job because of my disability, so it just wouldn't have mattered. You have to retake the course every two years. The whole course. That would have been wasted time for me, if I couldn't do the physical parts of the job. I found out much too late in my life that I am a very good teacher, and I loved my time as an assistant pre-school teacher. I had a wonderful rapport with my "littlies", and I was good at the job. I was so looking forward to doing it as a respected professional, rather than an assistant. But, because of what my doctor has called "crippling" arthritis and diabetes, as well as major depression and some heart problems, I am disabled and can't work.
Hopefully, one o' these days, we'll win the lottery. I keep promising one thing to God or TPtB* whomever she/he or they are: I promise to do good things with the money!"
And I will.
I'm just sayin'
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