Grisly, Man.
Mrs. R and I started watching Grizzly Man last night. This is a documentary about a man who lived every summer for 13 years in Alaska among Grizzly bears. 13 turned out to be his unlucky number, as he (and his girlfriend) got ate up.

One of the helicopter pilots who assisted in the post-mauling cleanup is interviewed on camera ("I must have hauled four bags of... people"). He said the obvious - that as much as some people feel a kinship with the bears, as much as they want to make them into something spiritual or something else that they are not, the bears remain bears. And they will eat you, no matter how much you like them or want to understand them.

I turned to Mrs. R and said, "That sounds exactly like a description of terrorist sympathizers*." She replied, "I was going to say the same thing." I love that woman.

On a very related note: When I was a kid, my favorite animal was the Giant Panda. I had a stuffed animal collection and several books about these animals (I didn't say I was a popular kid). And what any Panda expert could tell you back then was, Pandas aren't bears. They're actually a relative of the raccoon. We Panda lovers scoffed at the term "Panda Bear." They were nothing of the sort!

In the early 2000s, I took my own kids to the National Zoo in D.C. to see the pandas. A zookeeper stood outside the exhibit with some education items, such as a skull and some, um, panda poop. I asked the zookeeper, for the benefit of the kids, "Isn't it true that the panda is not a bear, and is actually related to the raccoon?" "Actually," she replied, "recent DNA analysis shows that they are bears, after all."

Imagine that! This big creature, that looked like a regular old bear except for its coloring... turns out to be a bear! I felt like quite an idiot. And then I thought, hey, sounds just like Arafat... the experts keep saying he's a statesman, he's a diplomat... but in the end he's still just a terrorist.

*Or, as I like to call them, the Terrorati - served up by Ralphie @ 2:04 PM