I thought the Charmin bears had gone by the wayside during my two-year stint without television, but apparently I thought wrong. And lo and behold, the baby bears have yet to have learned how to wipe without shredding the TP enough to leave little pieces on their behinds.

I don’t understand.

1. This has never happened to me in the whole history of wiping my own butt. Is my technique wrong or something? Is this really a common enough problem for the general population that Charmin would devote a decade-long ad campaign promoting their toilet paper as THE toilet paper with which people can wipe without fear of leaving their butt looking like a freshly crop-dusted field?*

2. Do these bears age? Are the baby bears the same baby bears that were starring in these commercials in like the Stone Age? Maybe learning to properly wipe is a skill learned with age for bears, like how to catch salmon and the ability to advocate the prevention of forest fires. Maybe the bears DO age, and the older bears in the commercials are just thrown into reminiscing about how difficult wiping was for them when they were cubs when they see their kids running around with a contrail of toilet paper residue behind them. That makes them run out and purchase some Charmin.

2 ½. You’d think by this point in the generational timeline, however, that they would’ve realized that starting the cubs out with paper that ISN’T Charmin is completely ineffective and would just stock the stuff in the bathrooms (woods?) automatically.

3. Unless you too are a naked anthropomorphic bear, I still don’t really see the issue with this. If you’ve got TP all up on your butt, it’s really your own issue, not the rest of the world’s. Odds are, your parents/significant other/random other people/ aren’t going to point out the debris on your bottom. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to be grounded from spaceflight due to having paper crumbs in your crack:

And hell, if you’ve gone through the rigorous training necessary for intergalactic space travel, if you’ve got pieces of TP on your butt before a mission, your alien coworkers better just let you have pieces of TP on your butt before a mission. The focus should be on the effects of time dilation on you and your fellow astronauts, not on whether or not your butt is pristine.

So there.

*I have no idea if anyone else knows of this technique, but around Moscow once a crop-duster has dusted a field they drop a string of TP on it to mark it as done.