Monday, September 04, 2006

there's a lesson here somewhere ...

Steve Irwin - the world's favorite mullet-headed nature poker - has died. Super sad for his wife and child, super sad for Australia, super sad for the ratings of the Discovery channel.

But unexpected?

Not really. I have a hard time feeling like this is some kind of tragedy. Yes, he seemed like an incredibly nice guy. But he made his living poking Nature with a stick. Eventually Nature is going to poke back. And it apparently did so with deadly accuracy.

Yes, it's sad and I feel for the guy's family most of all. But maybe this will serve as a lesson to people that exploiting nature by taunting it for TV isn't the best career choice to make. If anything, hopefully it serves as the means to stop Jeff Corwin from his ridiculous uber-Nature-poking that he does. Steve Irwin's nature taunting always seemed somewhat compassionate. Jeff Corwin just seems like a tool. I think the stingray stung the wrong guy.

1 comment:

EmoRiot said...

The thing with Steve Irwin was that he was trying to make us understand, respect, and conserve nature. He was, at his heart, an environmentalist. Of course, he was also - at his heart - a little boy who liked to pick up animals and turn them over or drag them around by the tail. Fitting, then, that he was stung in his heart I guess.

It's not unexpected that he died from the defensive strike of an animal. But it's somewhat unexpected that it was from a sting ray. I mean, this is the guy who climbed into a crocadile trap with a crocadile in it and got bit. He's the guy who chased a Black Mamba snake up a tree in Africa and only realized that the top of the tree that the Black Mamba, the deadliest snake in the world, was now coming back at him while he balanced on the thin top-branches of tree. This is the guy who dives without thinking into the Nile River precisely BECAUSE it's infested with crocs... and he died swiming over a stingray that was under the sand and hit him in a one-in-a-million fatality.

That's unexpected.

Oh well... poor Teri, Bindi Sue, and Robert. Teri especially. She was always so unsure of his craziness. And now she's got a zoo to run which is so completely based around tourists coming to see Steve and the crocs.