Extreme Survival - My Man-Crush on Bear Grylls

When I talk Extreme Survival, I'm not talking about being in Southeast DC! (That was funny because SE DC, as a very unfunny fact, has a fairly high crime rate.)

I'm talking about Bear Grylls.  Yeah, the guy from that Discovery Channel series Man vs Wild - Bear F-ing Grylls.
He's a certifiable British Badass, emphasis on both British and Badass.  His show is like a cross between the Boy Scouts and the Army Rangers, on steroids...without the emasculating side effects (of taking steroids, not being British).  He's such a British Badass, he makes David Beckham look like Elton John.

This dude's been a badass from birth.  Really, his name is Bear.  Heck yeah!  A couple months ago, I saw him in an episode in Alaska (I think Alaska, I know there was alot of snow) and in the first half of it he had captured a deer, strung it around a tree, and tied its antlers to the trunk (Bear said that a deer with a free head could easily stab you with its antlers unless it is restrained.  "If you control the head, you control the beast.").  Then he leaned over, pulled his knife out, and drove it into the base of the deer's head, where its skull joins its spine, and killed the thing.  To start the butchering of his food, he cut the thing's throat and blood literally poured out.
Then he said how much nutrients fresh blood contains, and he stuck his face in there and literally drank the blood from the deer as it poured out!!

Now thats friggin' badass manly stuff!  Oh yeah!!

And as an example of his British-ness, read this excerpt from the Discovery Channel's bio on him:

  "In June 2005, Bear broke a world record by hosting a dinner party at a table suspended below a hot air balloon at 24,500 feet. He rappelled from the balloon's basket to the table, where in full naval uniform he ate a three-course meal before saluting the queen and skydiving to earth."

Hosted a dinner party?  Three-course meal?  Saluted the Queen?  Yeah, I call British on that one  I hope he ate with a splayd.

He's so British and Badass.  I mean, c'mon!  He even delivered his own child!!  Though maybe that's just a British man thing (though I suspect he did this for all 3 of his children).  Or, it could have been a '08-'09 Holiday Season fad in England.  Following is a news clip** from England that could (sort-of) support either theory:

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But enough of singing the praises of Bear Grylls.  If you get Discovery Channel on your TV, watch it (check your local listings, broadcast times and dates may vary).  Or find episodes on the internet (preferably in a legal manner).  And if all this didn't convince you, does it help that in just about every episode, he gets naked (or at least shirtless),

eats some sort of grubby insect thingy (or snake, or a fish he just pulled out of a river or some sort of other raw flesh),

or he drinks his own pee - as evidenced in this quote from his blog:

  "It made fighting a big pit viper rattlesnake interesting! (Although I did eventually get it. I then could eat it, and then use its skin to store my urine in whilst in the burning hot salt pan desert. (The cocktail of snake innards and pee was truly terrible!)"

And if those things arent enough to convince you, check out this quote from the same post from his blog:

  "I was then in the swamps - these are always the toughest shows to do- and I did end up having a pretty full-on encounter with a 6ft alligator. I came out on top, just, skinned it for cordage for my camp to sleep in, rubbed the alligator fat on me for mosquito repellant and then ate it."
 
The question is how could you NOT watch AND love that.


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**The Bugle: Audio Newspaper for a Visual World
Issue 57 - Hats off to Obama, Shoes off for Bush
By Andy Zaltzman, John Oliver, Tom Wright
From Times Online, December 21, 2008