What do Japanese world hot dog-eating champion Takeru Kobayashi, seminal British depresso-pop icons The Smiths, and a four hundred and seventy-five pound Canadian black grizzly bear have to do with one another, you might well ask. Well, for the purposes of this article, plenty.

Mr. Kobayshi is one of the greatest all-time eating machines that the people of this planet have ever seen. He has globe-trotted himself to a place at tables shared with such heavy-hitters as ex-UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, popular American horror novelist Stephen King, and former Van Halen frontman Sammy Lee Hagar. People love to see him chow down dogs; they just can’t get enough of his wonderful stuff.

Mr. Kobayashi’s favorite band is The Smiths. He says he spent “endless unproductive hours” lying on his bunk bed during university, trying to unpuzzle Smiths lead singer Morrrissey’s lyrics. “I listened to their hit song ‘How Soon Is Now’ maybe a million times,” Kobayashi says. “I kept thinking – ‘I don’t know when now is.’ It made me crazy.”

The Canadian grizzly was hired by media guru Jackson Mular to act as a draw to his new Tar Sands Hotel. The enormous grizzling, known as “Shanks” was Mr. Mular’s surrogate mother after he was abandoned by his human family during a punishing journey across the frozen Midwestern Canadian tundra. After Mular made a success of himself he put Shanks on display, often challenging people to go one on one with the bear in various death-defying activities.

On Friday, after Mular became aware that Mr. Kobayashi and his petit wife Jaline Dack, the ice skater, were staying at the Tar Sands, he issued a challenge to the young Japanese eating sensation. It read: “I’m well aware of your Smiths’ conundrum. You’ve often posed the question, ‘How soon is now?’ I suggest that now is now, and that since this is so, you go head to head with Shanks in the Tar Sands first ever hot dog eat-off.”

Mr. Kobayashi consumed 1198 dogs. Shanks ate 786. Many cheers went up from hotel guests attending the event when the bear shook Mr. Kobayshi’s ketchup-covered hand.