With a name like Bear, you've gotta be cool

Bear Grylls gets my annual award for being the coolest person in the world.
If you don’t know who he is, turn on the Discovery Channel and if he’s not on, wait for the next show because it’ll probably feature him. He’s the star of “Man vs. Wild,” a real-life survivor show, along with other survivor specials on the channel.
In “Man vs. Wild,” Bear is flown to some of the most desolate and dangerous areas in the world where he is left to find his way back to civilization. A camera crew is on hand to film his journey and a disclaimer at the beginning of the program lets us know regional experts are on hand to make sure nothing goes wrong, but you never see anybody else and you get a definite feel that Bear is doing everything on the show himself.
Some of the remote areas Bear tackles include the Sahara Desert, an Alaskan wilderness, Iceland, the Copper Canyon in Mexico, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the Everglades and Iceland.
I mention Iceland twice, and it deserves a third and fourth mention, because Iceland is the coolest country ever. Growing up, I read about the Vikings and Iceland, how the country is the land of fire and ice, but I had never really seen any pictures much less live footage from the country. Bear shows us how to survive there, although I doubt many of us could, because it’s one cold and hostile country. No wonder it served as home to many Vikings.
Bear is so cool that even his name is cool. If my wife would let me, I would name our next kid Bear. If she doesn’t like that one, maybe she would like another animal name – Shark, Lion, Tiger, Moose, Platypus – they’re all cool. I originally wanted to name our first child Thor for a boy or Raven for a girl, but my wife denied me. We settled on Braden, which is great and fits him perfectly, but it doesn’t have that cool edge a name like Thor or Bear has.
But a cool name doesn’t always make a person cool – Larry David has the most ordinary name ever but as the co-creator of Seinfeld and the star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” he is miles cooler than his name credits him for; and cool people can have lame names – Bono has a clown’s name but he still rocks.
Bear will do anything on his show to demonstrate survival techniques. This includes drinking his own urine, jumping in quicksand, scaling large cliffs without safety ropes, braving dangerous rapids, eating scorpions and sheep eyeballs, battling cobras and stealthily avoiding hippos, one of nature’s most dangerous animals – and one that has a very cool name. I could definitely see a Hippo Steuck in the future.
The best thing about “Man vs. Wild” is that Bear always has cool stories to tell about wherever he is at. And these stories are always about people that either were rescued or perished because of proper or failed survival tactics. As a kid I remember traveling out West and hearing stories from local people about people killed by bison and grizzly bears, and though I was afraid of staying in my tent, I really enjoyed those stories. Bear provides plenty of them to keep me entertained, and slightly frightened of someday being stuck in the same situation myself and not having the ability to survive.
I know I wouldn’t survive most of the situations Bear puts himself into for the show. I’m afraid of heights – actually I’m not afraid of heights, just falling from them – so the minute I come upon a high cliff that I either have to go down or up, I’m done for. I certainly wouldn’t eat the things he does, especially not raw fish and camel testicles. And I definitely wouldn’t jump into Arctic water. I have a hard enough time getting into not-super-warm lakes in the summertime.
But all of these things are what makes Bear the recipient of my annual coolest person in the world award. He doesn’t get anything for this award, except the possibility a child in central Wisconsin may some day be named after him.