Student’s photo of bear falling from tree goes viral

CU Independent | Westword
Andy Duann’s picture in the CU Independent of a tranquilized bear falling from a tree is the sort of thing that makes you feel bad for ever saying anything bad about the Internet. The bear hangs in midair above a mat in Duann’s shot, as if it had slightly miscalculated before popping into our dimension.

Update: Duann is considering legal action against the school for distributing the photo without compensating him

Mats for bear falling from Will Vill tree provided by CU Rec Center twitter.com/cuindependent/…

— CU Independent (@cuindependent) April 26, 2012

The picture was published Thursday in a report about how the bear wandered onto campus and was coaxed out of a tree by way of a tranquilizer. Gil Asakawa, who advises the Independent (the student publication of the University of Colorado Boulder), told Denver Westword the photo had received more than 10,000 page views by 5 p.m. Mountain Time Thursday and “eventually crashed the Independent’s site.” That’s more than twice the traffic generated by the paper’s 4/20 coverage, which has its own tab on the website’s top navigation bar.

And now it’s a meme! Allen Klosowski sends a couple groovy remixes: This animated one, and this one, which combines the bear with a previous CU meme, the “totally psyched dive bar girl.” There is also a pretty great video:

The bear is resting comfortably.