Residents of Madawaska, Maine, near the state’s northernmost border with Quebec, look forward every July to the arrival of the famed Singing Bears.

The three bears, Jimmy, Hank, and Hungry Pierre, began their singing career in 1967, when a local talent scout named Roger Cornoyer discovered them rummaging through his trash and singing “Three Coins In The Fountain” in three-part harmony. Sensing an opportunity, Cornoyer was able to get the bears onto a Saturday afternoon talent show on local Canadian television, where they were an instant hit. Because Hank refused to fly, the bears turned down an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in the spring of 1969, thwarting Cornoyer’s hopes of going national with his act. Nevertheless, they remained very popular in Maine, Quebec and the Maritime Provinces for years, recording a wide range of albums. A 1977 single, “Beehive Boogie” rose to a middling place on the Billboard Top 100 of that year as part of the sudden craze for disco music and Hungry Pierre’s catchy bass riff.

Following an appearance at a Montreal Canadiens hockey game to sing the Canadian National Anthem, the bears apparently got into an argument over who would get to devour star Canadiens player Guy LaFleur. Accusations flew, pots of honey were smashed in the dressing room, and Hungry Pierre left the group to go solo. Free from the travel restrictions that Hank had insisted upon, Hungry Pierre moved to Los Angeles and made a number of guest appearances on “Solid Gold”. It looked as though Hungry Pierre might finally have his breakthrough moment until he gnawed the arm off of one of the Solid Gold Dancers and called host Denny Terrio a “little faggot”. Little was seen or heard from Hungry Pierre after that, but he apparently returned to Madawaska sometime in the mid-1980s and reconciled with his brothers.

During those lean years without Hungry Pierre, Jimmy and Hank endured another bitter split, this time with manager Roger Cornoyer. Cornyoer had tried to force the bears to appear with a teenager named Celine Dion, who was already a big name as a teenage singer in her native Canada. In reality, Cornoyer had hoped signing the bears with Dion would break the Svengali-like hold of her then-manager-now-husband Rene Angelil so that he could become the object of her affections. Celine Dion was terrified of bears, but, to be fair, the bears were terrified of her horse-like face and unmelodic screeching, and so nothing came of the plan. Cornoyer confessed all to Jimmy and Hank over drinks at a bar in Skowhegan and skulked away, never to be seen again.

Once reunited with Hungry Pierre, the trio began to pick up the pieces of their career, but musical tastes had changed since their heyday. Other than one performance at the Aroostook County State Fair in 1990, there would be no more limelight for the three bears who had brought such enjoyment with songs like “Madawaska Madam”, “I Like Your Blueberry Pie”, and “Disco Dumpster Diving”. However, about three years ago the bears came out of their retirement to begin singing for free in the town’s Bicentennial Park one night a week during the summer. At first, only a few diehard fans and assorted bear hunters came to the shows, but a minor mishap with a bear trap and a fellow from Fort Kent resulted in some media coverage, and once again there were dozens of people coming out to hear the bears sing.

Rumors persist that Jimmy, the quiet one, spent some time in rehab, but most people in Madawaska have one form of substance abuse problem or another anyway, so the rumors merely endear him that much more to the hometown crowd.

Links too good not to post, but which don’t have much in common:

• Not really all that thrilled about taking a “staycation”? (Oh, and if you EVER use that word in my presence, I WILL kick you in the gonads) Maybe you’d like to visit some of the most famous man-made ecological disasters in the U.S. GOOD Magazine lists a whole bunch of them just ripe for tourists. For example, the subterranean coal fire in Centralia, PA which has been burning since 1962, or what’s left of the Salton Sea. It’s got to be better than sitting on the front porch at night listening to Grandpa fart while you watch “I Survived A Japanese Game Show” on the old portable TV.



• Remember Max Headroom? Well, if you’re older than 30, you probably do. He was a big deal for a while back in the late 1980s. He had a TV show, did commercials for New Coke (which you also have to be older than 30 to remember), and was a genuine pop icon of that decade. Well, it’s been 20 years, but he’s back. Britain’s Channel Four has brought out some new channel promos featuring Max, looking a big older (like the rest of us). Even though today’s advanced CGI animation could probably whiz up a fully-animated version of Max, Channel 4 actually brought back Matt Frewer to play the talking head once again. Here’s Max today:




graph via Dave Sifry

• Nobody can say with 100% certainty, but the best estimate of the total number of blogs online today is in the range of 115-120 million based on an estimate of 175,000 new blogs launching every single day. Realistically, though, the vast majority of blogs go ghost after a pretty short period of time. It takes a lot of time, effort, and imagination to hang in there for the long haul. The eighth anniversary of this blog is only a few weeks away, and with the notable exception of the six-month hiatus I took in the second half of 2005, I have never taken more than a few days off here and there over the years. Some blogs, though, never get beyond Post #1. Maybe the author got writer’s block, maybe they realized they just didn’t have it in them, maybe they were abducted by Martians and were anally probed, who can say. This website “collects” blogs that never made it beyond the first post, calling them “one-post-wonders” (via). They all seem to be Blogspot.com blogs, but I’ll bet you could find just as many at any other hosted blog service.
• Blogging buddy John Tolva has been working on an interactive website of the Forbidden City in Beijing for a long while now. He’s one of them super-smart computer guys that do cool stuff at IBM, don’tcha know. Yesterday he had this interesting tidbit: he superimposed a map of the Forbidden City on a Google Map of Downtown Chicago (a.k.a. The Loop) to demonstrate that the Forbidden City is almost exactly the size of the traditional boundaries of the Loop. Frankly, I had absolutely no idea that the Forbidden City was so vast, and relating it to a place I could visualize was very effective. Looks like the site won’t be done until sometime in the fall — probably not in time for the Olympics, eh, John? I can hardly wait to see it.

Even though the EU has given the green light to in-flight cell phone service, and Air France has been testing text-messaging from cell phones since last December, plans for in-flight cell phone service in the U.S. haven’t gone very far due to regulatory opposition from both the FAA and the FCC. Meanwhile, though, this week American Airlines began testing in-flight WiFi service on some transcontinental flights. AA says they won’t filter content, but that they will prevent users from using PC-based VoIP services like Skype. I suspect that the “no filtering” bit will last only as long as it takes for the first passenger to complain about the person next to them watching porn, but we’ll see. I, for one, truly hope they never allow in-flight cell phone service; imagine the six-hour trip from Boston to California with the entire cabin full of business travelers yakking away on their cellphones while watching porn AT THE SAME TIME! The only way I’d get on a plane is if the airline gave free sedatives to everyone so I could at least be unconscious.

Amtrak has always been able to make the claim of having cell-phone service, since trains pass right through the terrestrial cell network like every other land vehicle, so no big whoop there, but Amtrak started offering WiFi on some trains all the way back in 2004. Here’s a fairly technical interview with Amtrak’s head Network Architect about the challenges they faced in pulling together all the pieces they needed to make for a seamless online experience for train riders. This discussion forum thread offers some first-hand accounts of using WiFi on other rail services in Canada and the UK for comparison. Here in Eastern Massachusetts, the MBTA offers WiFi on the Framingham-Worcester commuter rail line, though word is that the service can be spotty due to some dead zones.

Scariest of all, though, is this week’s announcement by Chrysler that ALL of their 2009 models (yes the ones that will be in the dealer showrooms come September) will offer WiFi as an add-on for $500. Vehicles will have built-in wireless routers that will make the entire interior of the car a hotspot with a throughput of 600-800 kbps down (that’s a good deal slower than today’s typical home broadband, but faster than dialup by a significant amount), and will extend up to 50 feet beyond the vehicle. The routers will connect to Chrysler’s UConnect service, which is a combination of WiFi to the end device and cell service to the ISP and will cost $29/month with a one-time $35 activation fee. If you thought drivers yakking on their cell phones while driving was bad, you just wait until people start checking their e-mail while driving. Time to make sure your car insurance is paid up, kids.

3QuarksDaily pointed me to this article from the May/June issue of Boston Review by historian William Hogeland, where he tries to re-contextualize two very different but inter-related icons of recent American political history: folk musician and left-wing activist Pete Seeger, and right-wing writer and commentator William F. Buckley, Jr.

Hogeland reminds us that neither man was quite as authentic as they both wanted us to believe: Seeger was the son of a pair of Harvard professors and grew up in upper-middle-class surroundings. Even though his parents were politically active in the leftist movements of their time, his early efforts to portray himself as a “common working man” were for show. Buckley came to prominence as a young man through his efforts against the Civil Rights movement, and then spent much of the rest of his career trying to avoid being tagged as a racist. The tie that binds them together is the McCarthy Era and the witch hunt for Communists that rendered Seeger an outcast for nearly 20 years; Buckley, like most Republicans of the time, lined up squarely behind McCarthy.

It’s a very interesting piece, clearly written with the intent of bringing down a notch or two the pedestals erected to each man by their respective camps in recent years. Hogeland is particularly critical of the recent PBS documentary about Seeger, which glides very lightly over Seeger’s role in the Communist Party during the years leading up to and through World War II. He’s less critical of the hagiographic treatment of Buckley following his death earlier this year, instead focusing on the harsh criticisms of left-wing bloggers, and overall the article is much kinder to Buckley than Seeger, but this next-to-last paragraph acknowledges the legacy-buffing of both sides:

Liberals may concur in calling Seeger’s Stalinism romantic, if unfortunate (although “American Masters” viewers are not supposed to; the Stalinism is not supposed to exist). But liberals may also feel that “romantic” softens the virulence of Buckley’s race ideas, letting him off too easily. Buckleyites, for their part, cannot call segregationism romantic, since they have left its central importance out of their story—and they are likely to feel that the adjective understates the evil done by Seeger’s Soviet loyalties. Each side in this story has become adept not only at falsifying its own narrative but also at picking apart the other’s fallacies to expose venal motives. It is unfortunate that each side, in accusing the other of bad faith, so often seems to be right.

For your added amusement, here are two YouTube clips, one is a montage of photos of labor protests with an audio clip of Pete Seeger singing a pro-union song, the other is part of the infamous debate between Buckley and Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett Show in 1968 where Vidal calls Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley threatens to punch Vidal in the mouth.