I was dating a woman who was a lawyer, and I attended some lawyer event where their group sat in the corner of a downtown bar with lots of mirrors, chandeliers, and grossly overpriced drinks. A woman was walking down an open staircase that led to where our group was standing, and she lost her footing and tumbled all the way down the stairs landing splayed out at our feet. I thought, “Man, you could not have picked a better place to fall down the stairs.” It surprised me that people didn’t start throwing business cards at her, but it was this experience that leads me to believe that a woman in New York who was clobbered by a falling moose head has little chance of winning much money. Hell, if the lawyers at the bar I was at weren’t willing to pick that money up off the floor, then there must not be much cash in bar injuries.

Happy New Year. Do your best to avoid falling moose heads.

Remember that Best Job in the World Contest? The winner would become caretaker of a private island in Australia for six months and collect a salary of $103,000 (AUS). The whole thing was perpetrated by the Australian Tourism Board, who hadn’t hit a publicity homerun like this contest since Crocodile Dundee. Well that great publicity was nearly turned on its head when the lucky winner of the contest suffered a nearly fatal jellyfish sting. He survived, though the tourism board might prefer that he hadn’t considering his blogging about encounters with Australia’s deadly animal population.

via Wend

In the last two weeks a personal locator beacon has sent Colorado’s Alpine Rescue Team into a frenzy only to be deactivated once they commence their search. The ACR PLB-300 MicrOFix is an older model that doesn’t include a GPS locator, so the searchers only know that someone’s has set one off within a 12-mile radius. Since the person keeps turning the beacon on-and-off, they speculate that the user might think the PLB is an avalanche beacon or they simply don’t understand that it’s calling the Air Force every time they flip it on. There’s also the possibility that it’s malfunctioning, which is why the Alpine Rescue Team wants to talk to the guy who keeps turning it on. They say he’s not in trouble; they just don’t want to keep scrambling up the mountain every time it goes off.

Thanks Jerrod

A church in Canada is being turned into a rock climbing gym. This is the second church I’ve seen converted into a rock gym; I guess the high ceilings and low sales prices make them attractive. I’m not sure how future civilizations will judge us when their archeologists discover we converted churches to synthetic rock made for climbing.

The winning shot.

Critics are insisting that the Storybook Wolf photo by Jose Luis Rodriguez is a shot of tame wolf, making it ineligible to win the world’s largest nature photo competition. Judges give preference to wild animals, so if a tame animal is used in a staged photo, the photographer must declare it prior judging. Rodriguez is a Spanish photographer, and a group of his countrymen colleagues have taken up the investigation as they’re concerned about their own reputations.

Rodriguez is claiming innocence. This is the explanation of the shot from the Natural History Museum’s website:

José Luis visualized this image many years ago, when Iberian wolves first returned to Ávila in the Castilla y León region of northern Spain, and cattle ranchers declared war on them. His idea was a picture that would symbolize the ancient conflict between humans and wolves, while showing the beauty and strength of this fabled animal. But it took a long time to find the ideal location, let alone a wolf that would jump a gate. His chance came when he found a landowner who was happy to have both the wolves and José Luis on his property, and also had the ideal setting: a copse and an ancient, disused cattle corral.

This shot compares the background from Rodriguez’s shot to a Spanish private natural reserve.

via The Adventure Life