Word: irwin
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Australian naturalist Steve Irwin was famous for getting up close and personal with his deadly subjects. He leapt fearlessly on to the backs of man-eating crocodiles, wrestled Komodo Dragons and deftly juggled snakes as they sought to plunge their venomous fangs into his arm or face, all the while keeping up a lively commentary for the cameras of his multimillion-dollar documentary operation. Scratched, bitten and bruised, he would display his wounds like trophies, casually using gaffer tape to bind up a severe bite from a large saltwater crocodile that he had been wrestling in a mangrove swamp...
...Steve Irwin's all pretty interesting on the telly or in the movie and that, but by crikey, it's great when he gets bitten," he once told Australia's ABC television. "Now and again I do get bitten. But I haven't been killed. And it's that, you know, that sense of morbidity that people do have. There's no use sticking your head in the sand and going, 'Oh, no, they're only here because, you know, I talk well.' Nah, man, they wanna see me come unglued...
...This morning, at 11am Australian time, things finally came unglued for the 44-year-old as he was shooting a documentary segment on stingrays. Snorkeling on Batt Reef , a stretch of the Great Barrier Reef about 15km from Port Douglas in North Queensland, Irwin happened to swim over a large ray which, startled, whipped its barbed tail upwards into his chest. He died instantly. Veteran marine wildlife documentary maker Ben Cropp, who has spent hundreds of hours filming on Batt Reef, says Irwin had come too close to a bull ray. Citing a colleague who saw footage of the attack...
...Fellow crew members dragged Irwin from the water and began cardio-pulmonary resuscitation while racing their boat Croc One to meet a rescue helicopter. Despite their efforts, he was pronounced dead at Cairns Base Hospital at noon. Outside the hospital his longtime friend and producer John Stainton said, "He died doing what he loves best, and left this world in a happy and peaceful state of mind. He would have said, Crocs rule...
...like to see movies about what came after: the Administration's canny mobilizing of American sentiment in favor of an attack on a nation whose involvement in 9/11 was never proved and now thoroughly debunked. Irwin Winkler's Home of the Brave, starring Samuel L. Jackson as one of three veterans returning home from a harrowing tour of Iraq, looks as if it could be a darker update of The Best Years of Our Lives. And perhaps, if the planned adaptation of Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies is actually made (Crash director Paul Haggis has expressed an interest...