Reports of the Australian wildlife television presenter Steve Irwin’s death have long been either exaggerated or expected. On previous occasions, Irwin, known worldwide for his Discovery Channel programmes, was allegedly killed by a black mamba and a komodo dragon.
The Crocodile Hunter in 1992 began a television career featuring oversize khaki shorts, ankle-length boots, an enthusiastically thick Australian accent and an ability to shout, “Crikey, he’s angry.”
It is most likely that Irwin would have preferred to have been killed by a saltwater crocodile, his favourite creature, but he would, nevertheless, have relished telling an audience about the creature which killed him, the stingray, “with a 10-inch long serrated spine which flexes if it is frightened”.
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— The Guardian
John Francis Miller
1912-2006, armaments expert
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Inventive by disposition from boyhood, J F Miller realised that the simple means he had devised to trim his lawn — without the bother of walking behind the motor mower — might have an application to bomb disposal. This perception was to save hundreds of lives in Northern Ireland.
Miller adapted a chassis of a battery-operated wheelbarrow to carry a spring-loaded hook on a boom to reach beneath a suspect car. By November 1973 his device had been deployed operationally more than 100 times.
— The Times