Category: survivorman

Survivor Queen?!? HUH?

I had to revert back to looking through my moleskine to get some writing mojo. I just came across a little entry I wrote while I was up in Schaumburg, IL for some sales training.

It must have been my second night in my hotel room because I got to the hotel way too late on the first night and I just passed out. But, it was 11:00PM and I was channel surfing through the small amount of channels this hotel had and came across Oprah. I have no idea why Oprah was on at 11 o’clock at night. Maybe they have a 24-hour Oprah channel in the Chicago-land area? I really don’t remember why I stopped on this channel but Oprah gave a little tease of what was up next after the commercials.

She was talking about survival and what you would do in certain situations to survive. I thought to myself, “Self? This should be pretty cool.” Considering I like surviving in all situations and the guest is probably someone cool like Les Stroud. Do you know who it was? LEEZA GIBBONS?!?!? WTF? Did she recently become the ‘survival queen’ and I didn’t get the memo? Needless to say, I was too aghast to continue watching. So, I ended up watching something else as I fell asleep dreaming of being stuck on the roof of a high rise inferno as Leeza swooped down to save me. Good times. . .

“Aaaaah, if anything will get you up in the morning it’s chewing on some cold squirrel bones.”

My latest man crush (besides Alton Brown) is Les Stroud of ‘Surivorman’.  The premise of the show basically is that he goes out into the wilderness for 7 days and tries to survive off of the land.  With his history of film-making and survivor-ing his show is a great marriage between them both.  Sometimes he has these scenarios where all he has with him are his multi-tool and whatever else he came with. 

Les Stroud is the man.  He carries all his camera gear himself.  He sets up intricate shots where he’ll walk ahead set the camera and hit record, walk back to pick up the rest of his gear and then walk through the shot and then have to walk back to pick up the camera. Whew, that’s a lot of work considering he hardly eats anything.

I read “Into the Wild” again recently in preparation for seeing Sean Penn‘s film based on the book.  I would love to get in touch with Les to get his thoughts on Chris McCandless and his lack of surviving in the Alaskan wild.  Maybe I would even suggest an episode of ‘Survivorman’ where Les hangs out where McCandless did.  If there was a way to do it respectfully that would be a cool show.  I just think it would end up showing us that McCandless wasn’t too smart in the ways of surviving.  He was more into the romance of it.  You gotta use your brain out there, too.