The premise is similar. The crews of submarines returning from successful patrols in WWII would lash a broom to the periscope shears when returning to base so everybody would know they'd "swept the seas".

>I was
>half-expecting Emily to show up at the celebration, but we got a new
>cub-photographer instead.

Emily's expense account does not extend to airfare to Nanisivik, etc. Particularly not now that she's not really working the society page any longer. More on this upcoming.

>What are the implications when a straight-on bear shows up?

The going theory at the moment is that the spirits, which tend to be just one kind of animal or another (by Dìqiú standards this makes them weird and exotic, but it also explains how people there know that a buzzard wasp is part buzzard and part wasp), are in some way the progenitors of the various "mundane" animals, which presumably represent some sort of collaborative effort. Under this hypothesis, boarcupines are the result of... some kind of encounter... between the boar spirit and the porcupine spirit. (Remember the thing that came up on another board a bit ago about why the ancient Romans called giraffes "camelopardalis"? :)

Nobody really wants to ask the spirits in question, as that would lead to the awkward question of exactly how that works, but that's the idea, anyway.

(As an aside, this is why the 52nd Earth King's pet bear, Bosco, was such a sensation. Apart from a few people in the South Pole who had caught a glimpse of Nanuq, and there weren't many of those hanging around the Earth King's court in the waning days of the Hundred-Year War, nobody had ever seen a bear before, and when they discovered that he wasn't even some kind of vanishingly rare spirit phenomenon - in those days spirits were very rarely seen in the physical world - he became an even greater enigma. Of course, in UF he was... just a bear, who happened to wander through one of the natural gaps in the Veil from Zipang. But nobody knew that at the time either. :)

>And finally, that was probably the wildest rose duel seen yet.

Well, that's what happens when you have a celestial incarnation and... well, a celestial incarnation... who have very selective notions of restraint. :)

>Oh, and who won the season opener?

The minor-league "supporting bands" were all over the map, as usual, and the Fire Ferrets - despite what Korra and Utena considered some pretty dubious refereeing - defeated the Caldera City Catamanders two rounds to one.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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