Auditioning for the part of Ranger Jones, TJ Miller decided to use an audition tape that if it went right, he would get the role. If it went wrong, he would be hilariously tragically mauled by a bear.

[Panda sculptures at the Beijing zoo are covered in snow after Chinese scientists claimed to artificially induce the second snowstorm in the country's capital this year. Image via Getty]

Attention all parents: Do not take your children to this zoo in China. If the panda does to your kids what he does to these visitor's jackets, you might find yourself with some limb-less offspring.

The Way Live Now: Commemorating with hatred. One year ago on this day—or maybe over the weekend some time, or later this week...something—our economy collapsed, and recessionomics was born. Happy one year of suffering, for nothing!

America's infamous capricious sprite, Sarah Palin, is still out there "advancing in another direction." Today she saw a bear, a transformative experience which inspired her leviathan intellect to ponder the lessons she learned from it, lessons she shared on Twitter.

So it's been a weird day. Things changing everywhere! But at least some things are constant: the gurgling sea cucumbers at Fox & Friends will never get it. Today's confusion? The case of the cardboard bear. Everyone was perplexed.

Ryan Seacrest's wordsmith can't stand the sight of body hair! Wired's Jason Tanz went to the dentist! And a journalism instructor saw a mouse! It's scary out there in Twitterland:

Holy shit. "Man-Eating Bears Kill Two Scientists And Lay Siege To Survivors Trapped In Remote Forest Base." When asked why this is happening, a government official said: "the bears are hungry." Right.

"I thought you'd like to know that it is Bear Week in [gay Cape Cod resort town] Provincetown. I saw one sporting a Provincetown Bears t-shirt today."

When dreamboat CNN anchor Anderson Cooper found footage of an adorable younger bear for his show in April, he couldn't get enough of the "cute" and "cuddly" creature. But tonight, after AC360 co-host Erica Hill narrated footage of an older, larger bear, Cooper seemed to get a little grizzly, asking "What is with this program and bears?" Why, only your bread and butter and honey, Anderson! The bedrock of your credibility! What happened to being the "most trusted name in bears?" It's summertime, these guys will be out in force, and there's no going back now. Besides, Hill has a killer merchandising idea, click the thumbnail at left for details. It's only a few more months, that shouldn't be too much to b... well, ya, you get the idea.

In one of the crasser—and we mean that in the most splendid sense of the word—attempts at pandering to one's target audience we've seen, Kathy Griffin posed with a sloth of bear supermodels (just trust us, these three are the Cindy, Linda, and Naomi of their respective niche) for the cover of A Bear's Life magazine, a photoshoot captured for her reality show cameras. "Fine," you're thinking. "Kathy Griffin, a room full of mostly naked, middle-aged gay men draped on and around her. What's the big whoop?" Well, the big deal is that Steve "The Woz" Wozniak, the most bearish of all billionaire PC revolutionaries and Griffin's former boyfriend (who apparently never made it made to first base, even with the help of a speedcap-hacked Segway), was on hand to take in the proceedings. Not surprisingly, he was cajoled by the comedian into posing with his body-type teammates, who pestered him with questions about whether or not the iPhone 3G would be better equipped to handle the thousands of high-bandwidth images being traded daily on ChubbyFeeders.com.

This just in—an official statement from Rob Reiner on today's history-making California Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage:

CNN heartthrob Anderson Cooper devoted a couple minutes of his program to AN ADORABLE BEAR last night! Seriously. "Frankly I can watch this bear for hours," said Cooper. How does Anderson know so much about bears? His exciting answer to that question may be found in the attached clip! (We suspect he may be exaggerating the breadth of his knowledge.)

Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest, a chimp-rights group, is assailing Sports Illustrated with a vicious letter-writing campaign! The group is upset that the magazine used a macaque (FANCY WORD FOR "MONKEY") and a bear in its photo shoot for this year's Swimsuit Issue [Folio]. S.I. is like, whoa! We take care of the animals, and besides, what mammal wouldn't be happy nestled up against the thighs of a swimsuit model? The two bear/ model-relations pictures, which have caused all the human outrage, after the jump. The bear does look kind of annoyed by that muzzle.

Joshua David Stein is back briefly to talk about Bravo's Top Chef whose fourth episode aired last night. In one of the first shots of last night's Quick Fire challenge, presided over by special guest and legitimate superstar Daniel Boulud standing next to a Padma Lakshmi whose dress fell like a cataract of silk and sex over her rear end and opened up like a yawning chasm in the front to reveal two perfectly shaped bosom mounds, we see Andrew, the red-bearded manic chef from Ft. Lauderdale, currently working in New York as the sous chef at Le Cirque. While Boulud explains the challenge, remarkably sponsor-free, the chefs eye him respectively. Some nod. They are actively listening. And then there is Andrew who is rocking back and forth with a ferocious intensity written furrowing his brow. He looks like a schizophrenic Wallace from Wallace and Gromit but scary and at the same time sad. It wasn't ever like his weirdness was an act but previously his mania seemed controllable.

Joshua David Stein is back briefly to talk about Bravo's Top Chef whose second episode was last night. We're only on the second episode of Top Chef Chicago and Bravo's already calling in their chits from the gay community. Last night's challenge, in which chefs were asked to design a menu based on the diets of five animals, seemed an elaborate set up to make the joke, as mathnet did earlier, that yes, Tom Colicchio—the head judge—is a bear. Not in the sense of a meat-eating hibernating member of the family Ursinae but in the sense of "an affectionate gay slang term for those in the bear communities, a subculture in the gay community and an emerging subset of LGBT communities with events, codes and culture specific identity."

The internets are abuzz over Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling's revelation that Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore had a bad case of teh gays, and that his early love affair with golden boy turned dark wizard Grindelwald was his "great tragedy." "I don't disbelieve her—I just don't buy that Dumbledore, as written from Day One, was always conceived as a gay character," writes a nerd textualist. "Children who love the Harry Potter series character Dumbledore now may be less inclined to oppose homosexuality, or see it as an important moral issue," right wing loons fear. The sentiment around these parts is more along the lines of: "It's the time and the season for beardom."

The December Atlantic will have bear-blogger Andrew Sullivan on Barack Obama as its cover. Can you hold your breath until then? Let's hope Sully is as right on Obama as he's historically been on everything from "the end of AIDS" to publishing excerpts from The Bell Curve in The New Republic to his participation in a religion that hates him to his misreadings of Susan Sontag to supporting the war in Iraq to linking the 2001 anthrax mailings somehow to the war to endorsing Bush in 2000! [Folio]

Remember Bearforce1, the world's first all-bear Dutch synth-disco boi-band? Of course you do! Well, they're in New York for their big American appearances, and our Rod Townsend and Nick McGlynn sat down with the bears last night for an EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW (as they say in the tabloids) that includes a live a cappella performance from the band.