I heart Bear Grylls *the baddest survivalist ever*
Bear Grylls
Bear Grylls is the host of TV’s Man Vs. Wild, a show almost completely centered around him parachuting into the harshest climates on the planet, chopping down trees with a butter knife, building homemade flotation devices out of bamboo shoots and shoelaces and then slaughtering two-thirds of the indigenous species of that particular region using only his bare hands and his teeth.
Bear got his start whomping balls in the British SAS, which is pretty much one of the most badass military units to ever strap on steel-tipped boots and kick terrorists square in the junksack. He was trained in survival, mountaineering, parachuting and hand-to-hand asskicking by the most hardcore drill sergeants this side of Full Metal Jacket and served actively in a bunch of crazy fucking black ops shit right out of a Chuck Norris movie, until all of a sudden one day his parachute ripped in half while he was plummeting to Earth and he ended up breaking his spine in fifteen places and having his legs eaten by rabid lions. Bear was so badass though, that he ended up knifing the lions to death with a rusty shiv and re-attaching his legs using only a pocketknife and a couple vines tied into perfect sqare knots. Since the SAS has this crazy policy where they don’t employ dudes with broken backs, they let Bear go off into the wild on his own. Within two years he had miraculously rehabilitated himself to the point where he became the youngest British dude to ever summit Mount Everest. After that he went off and put himself through three months of basic training in the middle of the Sahara Desert for the French Foreign Legion just for fun. Once he sufficiently proved the size of his enormous nuts to the French dudes, he decided it was time to start up Man Vs. Wild and prove to the rest of the world that he was the most hardcore motherfucker to ever punch a rattlesnake in the mouth.
Now Man Vs. Wild is ostensibly a program designed “to show you how to survive in the wild” by teaching you all sorts of insane fucking survival techniques. In actuality, the show is more or less “look at how fucking awesome I am”, because Bear Grylls does all sorts of superhuman insane shit that no other human being on the planet should ever be able to accomplish.
Two things strike me as being totally balls-out about Bear Grylls. First off, the man will eat fucking anything. He’ll bite the heads off of live rodents and insects, he’ll chow down on crazy shit like pirahnas, tarantualas and rusty thumbtacks… fuck, the dude once drank an entire water bottle filled with his own piss in an effort to stay hydrated in the middle of the goddamned Australian Outback. It doesn’t get more hardcore than shotgunning your own urine. It’s like the Holy Grail of Survivalism - you either have the nuts to do it or you die an excruciatingly painful death by dehydration. Secondly, the dude has a climbing ability the likes of which make The Amazing Spider-Man look like the fucking last kid up the rope in gym class. He’ll be standing there looking at a cliff face that better resembles a pane of sheet glass than it does a rock wall, and he’ll just be like, “no problem, I’ll just climb up this fucking wall and get out of the canyon”, and shimmy up the wall with about as much difficulty as it takes a regular person to tie their shoes. It’s so awesome that it borders on retarded.
Another sweet thing about Bear is that his answer to everything is to just suck it up and do some fucking pushups like a real man. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just fallen face-first into freezing cold water, jumped into a pool of molten magma or had your arm bitten off by a polar bear - as long as you do some goddamned pushups you’ll be fucking fine. Stop being a baby, walk it off, and get going. He also doesn’t give a shit about putting himself in life-threatening situations purely for the enjoyment of his viewers. At least once per episode he does some stupid-ass thing like purposefully jumping into a vat of quicksand, leaping off a thirty foot cliff into a pool of glacial water, getting himself trapped underneath some ice or showing you how to survive if an alligator tries to chomp down on your head or something.
Bear also proves something that a lot of people tend to forget - that humans are the most badass motherfucking animals on the planet. A lot of humans tend to “get soft” by living up the cushy city life, but it’s nice to see guys like Bear getting out there and showing the fucking animal kingdom that we’re still the toughest bastards around. He kills a rabbit by sharpening a stick into a point and chucking it with enough force to dent sheet metal, he builds a bow and arrow out of bamboo and skewers pirahnas with it, he beats trout to death with his bare hands, he can make fire just by rubbing his hands together really fast and yelling and he can build rafts and shit out of things that theoretically shouldn’t actually even be able to float. Darwin would be proud.
Basically, Bear Grylls is totally fucking sweet to the max and Man Vs. Wild is one of those shows that puts hair on your chest every time you watch it. He’s the ultimate survivalist, a tough-as-nails adventurer, and the sort of guy who can walk up to Mother Nature herself and give her a right proper bitch-slap across the face.
