Too soon?

Predictably, the best write-up on the death of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin comes via Bronwyn on the WFMU blog:

... [Irwin] died doing what he loved best—pestering animals who weren’t bothering anyone until he came along.

Apparently Irwin was working on a TV show with Jacques Cousteau’s son, and bad weather was keeping them from shooting whatever it was they wanted to film, so the Crocodile Hunter decided to go bother some stingrays and film that to use later on in a show of his own. And the stingray didn’t like it, and it stuck him in the heart, and he died. All the news reports stressed that it is incredibly rare for a stingray to kill anybody, but the statistics are based on people who encounter stingrays accidentally. In cases where someone goes looking for a giant stingray to intentionally rile it up, the stingrays are one for one.