Bear on a hog
Reddit’s a gold mine and while there’s stuff to make you mad, sick or sad as well there’s tons of stuff that makes you smile. Thegrinninglemur’s story in the “most fucked up things you’ve witnessed” thread is hilarious:
In Prague, periodically the ‘Baroque’ Circus sets up it’s big-top and caravans on the Letna plains. It’s a meager arrangement of tents surrounded by trucks at one end and another big tent on the other. Apparently one of the attractions is a motorcycle-riding black bear which they’ve trained to drive a bike around the inside of the main ring in front of grinning adults and cheering children. No telling how many times a day, and how many days a year, this beleaguered animal is forced to perform the trick –riding around, and around, and around, and, well…you get the picture.
One day, recently, there was a fairly well known journalist in the audience who the ringmaster tried to convince to ride shotgun with the bear. Naturally the journalist was apprehensive about this. The bear probably was too, at least more than usual. However, after much pleading and cajoling from the circus-types and audience alike the journalist warily got on the back of the bike.
Maybe it was the ringmaster tweaking the moment for the benefit of the audience. Maybe it was the unfamiliar presence of the journalist; his smell or the sudden re-distribution of weight on the bike. Maybe it was the mood of the bear; underfed, overfed, or just fed up. Who can say what a bear is thinking at any given moment? Whatever it was, the bear revved the engine and made a bee-line out of the tent and roared across the Letna plain – the journalist clinging to the back of the bike experiencing various degrees of horror and shock.
I worked out what had happened after a few weeks. But what I saw, standing at a nearby tram stop, was a Black bear on a motorbike - with a howling passenger - in the middle-distance zipping across a field with a crowd of people screaming and in hot pursuit behind it.
