Yep, not only do polar bears shake like a dog, but they roll around and slide themselves on the snow to get dry. Penguins like Osborne start off with a shake and then some good old preening.

Snow!

Speaking of snow, we got more snow here yesterday than we have combined in the last two years, there was still snow falling this morning. I always figure if it’s going to be cold, there might as well be some snow. It’s really pretty, everything is just draped in white. Maybe I’ll go create a Pop Rocks and Soda snowman scene in the front yard.

Yup, polar bears have 10 teeth more than you if you are like me and have a big mouth that your wisdom teeth fit into, or they have 14 more teeth than you if you had them forceably yanked from your skull. Actually they could have up to 22 more teeth than you if you are just a young kid and haven’t gotten any of your molars yet. I guess they might even have 42 more teeth than you if you are old and they have all fallen out, or if you got into a lot of bar fights, or if you never brushed your teeth! Shame on you… for shame.

It’s actually not an incredibly large number, but it is the most that any bears have. It seems like a lot to Osbourne who has no teeth and eats everything whole or in thrown up fashion while he was a chick. If you have a dog, he or she should actually have 42 teeth too. Killer Whales have 56 teeth. Blue Whales have no teeth, but they have 300-400 baleen plates they use for filtering krill out of the water.

When I’m old and my teeth fall out I’m not going to get false teeth but rather false baleen plates. I will be so cool at the old folks’ home, sitting there at lunchtime filtering the chunks out of my soup, creamy broth running down my chin. It’s going to be awesome!

New Happy Feet Trailer

I forgot to mention that at the Ice Age opening I saw the new trailer for Happy Feet. It’s Robin Williams’ character singing and is pretty cute. He’s an adelie penguin, you’ll notice a gray tuft of fur on his head, that would be a sign that he is a chick that is just finishing his first molt from the baby “fur” to swimming feathers. That little tuft on the head is often the last thing to go, probably since the penguin cannot reach that spot to help it along. So the character is either young, or the character designers used reference photos of juvie penguins and just thought that was cute.

Anyway, the video:

[link]

New Wallpaper

Here’s some new wallpaper from the cowboy comics. I’ll probably be doing another one or two based on that storyline too.

After polar bears molt (they molt yearly like the penguin but it’s more like a dog shedding than the penguin’s ordeal) their coats appear bright white. By summer the sun can cause some oxidation and that’s why their coats will appear more yellowish.

Sometimes in zoos polar bears will even appear to be a bit green, this can be due to algae growing in their hollow hairs.

As far as things sounding cool, that’s like a major part of today’s society. We love stuff that sounds cool or that has a cool name or title. That’s why “On the Rocks” will now be known as “MAXIMUM Freeze!” with the intentional capitalization and exclamation point.

Friday Followup

I realized I never followed up on my news of getting a penguin on Friday. Yeah, as many knew, it was just a bad April Fools gag saying I was getting the penguin on Saturday. The Penguin Warehouse site is entertaining though, when I first found it I thought it would be fun for a gag. In most countries including the US, you cannot own a penguin as a pet. Penguins are protected and are not suppose to be removed from the wild, so the only ones in human circulation are those bred by zoos. They are basically a sea creature so it would seem kind of cruel to have one without having a large swimming facility for it. Also they are a social grouping creature so you would want to own several.

I did go see Ice Age though. It was great, the first one was one of my favorites of the 3D feature film explosion, and this one tops it. It was bigger, wackier and they added some more characters for additional comedy besides just Sid the sloth.

New Wallpaper

As promised, here is some new wallpaper. I added a bit to the scene where Wally wins the snowball fight with Osbourne. Here is a special 1600×1200 version of it for you resolution junkies. Still working on some old west wallpaper.

The polar bear’s primary source of food is seal, especially the ringed seal. Global warming threatens the polar bear because it threatens its hunting grounds, which is the ice around the arctic. The polar bear tracks the seals above the ice, while they travel from breathing hole to breathing hole under the ice. The polar bear also hunts for seal dens, holes dug up into the snow and ice from the water side where the cute baby seals live. Unfortunately the polar bear sees these as little snack pockets.

Penguins At the Oscars

The actual penguins weren’t there but some stuffed ones accompanied the directors of La Marche de l’empereur (March of the Penguins) as they received their Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

“[Whistles] It means, thank you in penguins. I’d like to dedicate this statuette to all the children in the world who saw that movie. In 2041, they will decide to ruin you or not, the treaty that protects Antarctica. I will, maybe, the “March of the Penguins” will inspire them. Sorry for my English.” — Luc Jacquet

“Looking out on these tuxedos tonight, it’s like seeing the movie again. Thank you for this homage. Thank you very much. Goodbye. Thank you. Thank you.” — Yves Darondeau

Apparently the original French version and other non-US versions of the film had a different soundtrack that they didn’t think would work in the US film. Also they had up to three narrators rather than just one. And finally the US version had three minutes cut out of it, it was of the bird (I believe it was of a petrel species) actually killing one of the chicks rather than leaving you wondering a bit. It would be interesting to watch the original French version with subtitles.

New Wallpaper

I almost forgot. I made up some new wallpaper from Wally’s dream in last Friday’s strip. Wally & the Magic Rainbow as an advertisement to an old video game.

We are on the brink of a storyline! Osbourne’s wheels are about to start turning… I can feel it.

I’ll actually be light on words the next couple days here as I’m trying to finish up a big project I’m working on that I need to get done by the weekend’s end. This is the part where I take off my sneakers and sweater and put on my work loafers and my sportsjacket. Thanks for being my neighbor.

LiveJournal Users

Just a reminder to new readers, there is a LiveJournal feed for On the Rocks. If you have LiveJournal, add Wally & Osbourne to your friends list, come on, don’t be embarrassed.

It’s been long argued whether the Kodiak bear or the polar bear are the largest. Depends how you look at it I guess. The Kodiak is a subspecies of the brown bear, and the polar bear is closely related to the brown bear. The largest Kodiak bear from the wild was 2,500 lbs and there are records of them reaching 13 feet tall (wellfed in a zoo a bear like that can reach over 3,000 lbs). The largest polar bear on record was 12 feet tall and weighed 2,200 lbs. On average though, male Kodiak bears stand taller whereas polar bears weigh quite a bit more.

LiveJournal Users

Just a reminder to new readers, there is a LiveJournal feed for On the Rocks. If you have LiveJournal, add Wally & Osbourne to your friends list, come on, don’t be embarrassed.

CorelDRAW X3

Well, I had been trying out the demo and I finally went and bought the upgrade so I now have the latest and greatest software that I use to do this comic. Nothing like a box of new software, the shiny CD’s and crisp books, that stinky smell of printer chemicals. I usually learn the basics to a software program, get the newer versions with new bells and whistles, but still just use the basic stuff I know. So basically new versions just make it more complicated for me, heh. I think I’ll learn some of the advanced features on this though, it’s even got some video tutorials and stuff. Maybe learn some tricks and shortcuts to make my work quicker and better.

I could do the comic in some other program, or my other styles, but I just like it the way it is. There’s just some magic in it you can’t understand. That I can’t understand. We paid some people to understand it but they were fired last week.

Corel was actually just in the news, could be a good move or exposure for them. They’ve been around a long time but have had some rough times. The article referred to Corel as “ever-scrappy”. Heheh, those little scrappers. I like supporting the underdog. They are usually cheaper and work harder to be more competitive.

Tags: Kodiak, Polar Bear, LiveJournal, Corel.

Well, Wally is always lugging around and reading from his “Antarctica’s Big Book of Facts” book, it was time for Osbourne to have one, and learn a bit more about Wally. Or at least how science thinks Wally should be.

In the archives you can sort by category and read all the Book of Facts strips as they will be listed under that category, I’ll list this new book with these strips as well.

Polar Bear Day feels like it was only yesterday… I guess that’s because it was, but what better way to commemorate it than with the requested wallpaper of the strip. I owe you guys a few new wallpapers, so I was thinking this one was a good start.

Penguin Cam Update

I had mentioned the penguin cam the other day for the final time in the season and that it looked like it was having some technical difficulties. Here’s word from Martin that’s been running the project:

“There were no technical difficulties, after the end of the brood activities the crew members decided to dismantle the cam over the winter. Me and the cam sponsors original plan was just to turn the cam towards the glaciers and leave it online nonstop (had been quite good scenery). Now it’s too late to change anything and penguin cam 2 has a set hibernating phase into the containers. The whole crew has gone and we are alone with the three cams… The plan is to have the second penguincam running again from October 2006.”

For those of us in the northern hemisphere we are just getting through winter, but down in Antarctica it is just coming. Most of the people working their in the research field leave during the winter, most of the penguins do too, to dissapear into the open sea, except the emperor penguins because they are insane.

I’ll be sure to update you in October when things get moving again for the Antarctic Summer. They zoom the camera in on a nest there at the gentoo penguin colony and you can follow the brooding process in real time. It looks like a german language only site but there are many active english speaking people on the shoutbox there. So until October you might want to check out the gallery and maybe peak in on occasion to see any of the changes that happen in winter.

As for On the Rocks, don’t worry, its always summer and Wally & Osbourne aren’t going anywhere. Although several months of black strips would be an easy vacation for me…

Some species of crabs can live in pretty cold waters, they live as far south as the sub-Antarctic islands but not actually in Antarctica’s surrounding waters. Scientists have found fossils of them though, showing that they lived there long ago in a time it was warmer there.

As Wally stated, those are crabeater seals. They are actually the most numerous of seals living in Antarctica. Their exact numbers are unknown, and actually little is know about them compared to other seals as they pretty much just live on the pack ice and ice floats around Antarctica making researching them more difficult. They are also a bit more aggressive when approached by humans, compared to the weddell that will roll over on its back. As Osbourne said they do not eat crab, they mainly eat krill along with some fish and squid. It was probably krill “crumbs” around the seals that made early explorers think they were eating crab (not knowing there were no crabs around). Krill are a major food in Antarctica’s waters, they are small and shrimp-like, crabeater seals have specially shaped teeth for filtering them out of the water. Helping to keep their large population in control are killer whales and even leopard seals that feed on the smaller, younger crabeater seals.

I don’t have too much too add here since the comic pretty much covers it. It’s true though, the Skua is a very aggressive bird and this is how far they will go to get food. Actually I remember a kid in school that practised kleptoparasitism. He would walk up to my lunch tray in the cafeteria, grab my cookie, crumble it in his hand and then ask me if I wanted it.

I’ve read reports of these birds being quite aggressive from the researchers there in Antarctica. Apparently they have no problem coming up and taking food from you.

Must be frustrating for the penguins, having this other bird around, that’s nearly as big as you, but it can fly, and it eats pretty much anything, including you if you’re sick or injured, or your kids. That sort of living environment would really stress me out. I guess penguins are adapted to a stressful life though. The penguins of Antarctica do have the advantage of no real land predators, there is that.