Put a chain around my neck and lead me anywhere

I didn't realize the teddy bear had been immature all these years. But a promotion at Centrepoint mall is based on the notion ``The Teddy Bear Has Finally Come Of Age,'' a point it proves with a rather cute picture of a teddy bear, with glasses and bathrobe on, sitting in bed while a kid sleeps nearby, reading The Origin of Species. The book has the title imprinted in the back cover, in a fashion I haven't seen for books published this side of the Second World War.

I missed the ``Bear's Day Out,'' in which one could treat your bear to tea and biscuits at Marks and Spencer's Café Revive by being the first 200 to bring him and your receipt to the customer service counter. I also couldn't find the place to vote for your favourite amongst all the bears displayed in the shop windows for a chance to win a bear hamper worth $300. They can't mean hamper the way I know the word. I'm pretty sure they were in the mall somewhere, but I have a cognitive disorder that makes me unable to see the kinds of stores that have teddy bear displays or silk-based window displays, to the endless frustration of my mother when she sends me out to buy a new pair of gloves or something like that. I'm going to guess they were the sorts of teddy bears you look at from a distance while they're elaborately overdressed and posed in alarmingly ornate settings, not the sorts of teddy bears that you hit your little brother on the head with daily until you're seven, then your mom hides to put on her dresser after you leave for college.

They also offered a ``Bear With Me Writing Contest'': Write a story about your own teddy bear and you may win a Sasha's Bear worth $22.90. I hope the readers for the contest are getting danger pay. I have to imagine a collection of teddy bear stories would run very high levels of twee interrupted by the occasional piece of AAAAAAAUGH. Maybe there'll be a sequel to the Voyager fanfic classic ``I Am Chakotay's Bed Pillow'' in there. More, the posters said one could win a trip to England with every $50 spent, but what they meant was you had to do a specifically lucky fifty dollars of spending. Overall, it reminds us all that there are such things as teddy bears.

Trivia: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, co-inventor of calculus, urged his patron, the Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, to make a commemorative coin or medallion which showed the binary integers from zero through seventeen. Source: The Historical Roots of Elementary Mathematics, Lucas NH Bunt, Phillip S Jones, Jack D Bedient.

Currently Reading: The Evolution of Useful Things, Henry Petroski.