This is another case of lazy journalism gone wrong. A Polish newspaper running a story about the 2010 Vancouver Olympics has innocently included a picture of the animal mascots, except it appears the Internet renowned Pedobear has mysteriously joined them.

Who is Pedobear? Anyone who frequents Digg or 4Chan will know, but for the benefit of everyone else Pedobear is an illustrated representation of a pedophile bear, commonly used to as a way of mocking pedophiles in public forums. The bear is essentialy the internet mascot for pedophilia. A beginners guide to Pedobear can be read here.

So how did the Polish newspaper end up printing the official mascot team with a Photoshopped Pedobear among them? Back last July blogger Michael R. Barrick thought it would be fun to Photoshop Pedobear into an image of the mascots.

Some genius at the newspaper has obviously performed a Google image search for 'Vancouver 2010 mascots' because when you do, Barricks' Photoshopped version of the mascots is . Somebody at the newspaper saw the image and noticed it had one more character than the other pictures, and probably thought it was the most recent incarnation of the official mascot line-up.

Wow. A sane person would think the opposite. When there are thousands of images shown that are the same, and only one is different, I'd be treating the different version with suspicion.

Anyhoo - this story is all over the Internet now, and somewhere in Poland a newspaper editor is probably getting his arse handed to him for publically associating pedophilia with the Vancouver Olympics.

Michael Barrick is rightfully amused over this whole incident.

Pedobear FTW!