Flutterby™! : Pedobear makes the Olympics

I'm sure some of you with a little more background on this can correct me, but if I have my history right, once upon a time, on a site called 4chan, there was a channel called /b/ in which people posted pictures. I've never delved there, but I'm told that many of the pictures pushed... shall we say... the bounds of propriety.

In response to some of this, the denizens of said channel created a mascot, named "Pedobear", who put his seal of approval on those images which could be interpreted as exploiting children. (Some say that this occurred on a predecessor called "2chan", I'm having trouble finding a serious history that I feel comfortable linking to).

I've only seen the later secondary effects of Pedobear, who is occasionally tossed into a thread to gently tell people that they're being tasteless or creepy or something else with regards to the sexualization of children.

Pedobear has come a long way. In fact, a Polish newspaper has just printed a picture of Pedobear as one of the Vancouver Olympic mascots. Apparently last July, Michael R. Barrick was mucking around with images and thought he spied a similarity in artistic styles, that image made it to the first page of Google Image search, and the rest is history.

Hat tip to MeFi.

It's frankly kind of surprising that he(?) showed up in the winter Olympics first, I'd expect womens' gymnastics would be the first event covered, but there's probably a Pedobear friendly contingent at ladies' figure skating.