What’s that? You sat next to someone with really bad B.O. during a flight. Must have been a real nightmare. The passenger who sat next to this smuggler heading to Norway will be able to beat any awful-flight story. Norwegian customs officers arrested the man for smuggling rare animals into the country. He had 14 royal pythons and 10 albino leopard geckos hidden under his clothes. It must have looked like he was dancing in his seat. He was busted when customs found a live tarantula stashed in his checked luggage. Oh man, you have a rare animal addiction problem if it’s so bad you need to stuff them in your baggage, too. The Scotsman has plenty of pictures of the smuggler. I’d rather sit next to a sweaty, smelly, morbidly obese man who won’t stop talking about the pound of heroin packed in his armpits.

via Wend

Check out this hilarious Euro video for the AlpControl Black Powder ski. At first I thought it was an ad for a 70s-era Blaxploitation ski movie. You can tell the narrator records all the audio for the video onto his phone before he puts it online. Let’s see, we have the minivan test, the chair swing test, and the skinny Euro dude in a yellow jacket test. Should I just e-mail you my credit card info then?

The Federal Government allocated more than 200,000 square miles of Alaska and its coastal waters as habitat critical to polar bears. This blocks any activity in that region that could threaten the habitat of polar bears. Read “any activity” as “oil drilling.”

I like Alaska immensely. Huge tracts of unmarred land and loads of people dedicated to a balancing wildlife protection and development. They might not always agree on how to get the job done, but all of them receive a share of the money the government makes each year from oil production. It’s such an odd system-a right leaning state with this obvious drop of socialism where they divvy up the cash.

The World Wildlife Fund is stoked on the designation of polar bear habitat as are all people who love cuddly animals and old Coke commercials. Sarah Palin’s replacement is not quite so happy, and he vowed to stop the Obamanos Crew from shutting down ‘resource development.’

via Backpacker

The Olympic torch was lit in a folksy pagan ceremony last week, and now the ever-burning flame is being transported around the world in airplane overhead compartments on its way to Vancouver. I wonder what kind of mechanism they have for ensuring that the flame doesn’t go out on those long plane rides; or maybe they just put it out and everyone on the Olympic committee has a laugh at how gullible we are. The torch is a meant to be a symbol of peace among the continents, and it’s currently a highly protected trademark defended with vigorous litigation by the Olympic brand. Canada is running the torch all the way along our border just to taunt us. I’m betting an out of hand Fireman’s Fair in northern Minnesota ruins the whole thing for them.

Granite Peaks ski hill in Wisconsin has designated three runs as open only to skiers. The hill has three terrain parks, which makes sense because there’s not a lot to do on a hill with 600 vertical feet except take laps through the park. I hope snowboarders don’t get outraged. If they should be mad about anything, it should be going to Granite Peaks and paying $58 a day for a lift ticket in Wisconsin.

via Transworld Snowboarding

The three U.S. hikers who were arrested by Iranian authorities in July after straying over the border during their Iraq hike can be seen on a newly released vacation video. The video was shot by a fourth friend who didn’t go hiking that day because he wasn’t feeling well. Supporters of the detained hikers say that the videos clearly show the three U.S. citizens were there for a relaxing, innocent vacation. You can see the clips here. It’s kind of like watching old Saved by The Bell episodes; you’re embarrassed for the people in video. These skinny kids with Ray Bans are clearly not a danger to the Iranian government.

Why bother learning to read a map when you have GPS? No, really. My cartography skills have gone to hell. At least my vocabulary skills are tite. Cartography.

Cheap, transportable technology like GPS and Personal Locator Beacons is giving people the confidence to go places they probably shouldn’t.

“Now you can go into the back country and take a risk you might not normally have taken,” says Matt Scharper, who coordinates a rescue every day in a state with wilderness so rugged even crashed planes can take decades to find. “With the Yuppie 911, you send a message to a satellite and the government pulls your butt out of something you shouldn’t have been in in the first place.”

The bad news for people who resist calling 911 when all their ice melts is that abuse of the system might make it unavailable when it’s actually needed. If SPOT and all these PLBs continue to get cheaper and people keep setting them off when they think their water it too salty (true story), there will be an eventual adjustment to the appropriate response.

This sounds like a Lifetime movie. A woman drives her tractor off the farm with some vague idea of heading to the South Pole. The world rallies around TVs watching and sees the trip as representative of all our own lost goals. Then it ends when she drives into the Grand Canyon with her best friend.

In what could be the oddest current expedition, Dutch actress Manon Ossevoortis is riding a tractor from the Netherlands to South Africa, and then hopping a boat to Antarctica. I’m not sure how far it is, but she has to go past the pyramids on her way, so it’s not like she’s taking the interstate. The plan is to make the South Pole in 3.5 years. She also has a blog.

via Wend

Who in god’s name is commissioning these studies? A real group of scientists and analysts received actual money to examine data on bears breaking into vehicles in Yosemite parking lots. The study, which will be published in the Journal of Mammalogy, found that minivans were more likely to be broken into than any other vehicle. Actual scientist posit that this is because families with small children drive minivans, and those kids spill juice and drop food all over their car seats making the vehicles smell more like food. The study also found that bears are more likely to break into vehicles with food in them. While it didn’t explore the topic in depth, the study also found that bears were less likely to break into U.S. Army tanks.