--Chad Love

It's one of the eternal coffeehouse debates of earnest naval-gazers everywhere: Does life imitate art, or does art merely imitate life? Who knows, but when it comes to dealing with m***********' snakes on m***********' planes, I think I'll go with the latter, because everybody knows that anything, anything that Samuel L. Jackson appears in is high art. However, I'm not sure the Australian pilot of this airplane would agree...
 
From this story on msnbc.com:  
 
A pilot made an emergency landing during a flight in Australia, reportedly telling air traffic controllers, "Look, you're not going to believe this. I've got snakes on a plane." Australia's ABC News reported that Braden Blennerhassett, 26, swiftly put the Air Frontier plane on the ground after making the unusual mayday call during a flight from Darwin to the remote town of Peppimenarti on Tuesday. Air Frontier offers charter and scenic flights throughout Australia’s northern territory.

--Chad Love

A Canadian moose hunter is out of the hospital after fending off (and ultimately killing) a charging black bear.

From this story on lotwenterprise.com:

A Kenora area hunter is lucky to be alive after fighting off a bear attack, Sept. 26. The 48-year-old man was treated for puncture wounds to his arm, shoulder and neck at Lake of the Woods district hospital and released later the same afternoon. The bear was mortally wounded during the encounter and did not survive. A Ministry of Natural Resources official credits the man for taking action to save his life.

"It was a dangerous situation," affirmed MNR Lake of the Woods supervisor Leo Heyens. "He did all the right things. If he hadn't fired an arrow or fought back, yelling and making himself look big, it could have been more serious."

--Dave Maccar

Two hunters going after black bears along the Idaho-Montana border mistakenly shot a grizzly and one of the men paid with his life. Steve Stevenson, 39, of Nevada yelled to draw the wounded, 400-pound grizzly away from his hunting partner when it charged them and was mauled to death.

From this story on Missoulan.com:
"They both shot it and it kept coming," Steve Stevenson's mom, Janet Price, said on Saturday. "Steve yelled at it to try and distract it, and it swung around and took him down. It's what my son would have done automatically, for anybody."

The Lincoln County Sheriff's Office in Montana said Stevenson, of Winnemucca, Nev., died Friday after 20-year-old Ty Bell wounded what he thought was a black bear and the two men tracked it into thick cover along the Idaho-Montana border where it attacked at about 10 a.m. Friday.

--Chad Love

Early one chilly fall morning some 16 years ago, on the scout day for a weekend bonus deer archery hunt I had been drawn out on, I was stumbling my way along a game trail in far eastern Oklahoma when I stepped over--literally stepped over, with my family jewels open to immediate and easily-accessible fanged attack--a cold, curled-up timber rattler trying to warm itself up right in the middle of the trail. This brings up an interesting twist on an age-old philosophical question: If a grown man screams like a wee girl in the middle of the forest, and there's no one around to hear him, does he make a sound?

I'll let you be the judge of that, but when I saw this cool video of a large timber rattler swimming across a Kentucky lake, those nightsweats I thought I'd finally gotten over suddenly started up again...