I have been waiting for somebody to try this. They always tell to you to "poke a shark in the eye" if you get attacked, but it always seemed unreal to actually do it when it happens. The eye of a shark is pretty damn small, not to mention creepy.

Nonetheless, an Australian swimmer says he survived a mauling by a 16-foot shark by wrestling with the beast, finally getting free by poking it in the eye. The shark, believed to be a great white, seized Jason Cull by the left leg as he was swimming at Middleton Beach in southwestern Australia on Saturday, AP reports.

The shark was one of three that swimmers reported seeing at the beach Saturday. Officials closed the beach after the attack. From his hospital bed where he was treated for deep lacerations, Cull, 37, told reporters Sunday he saw a shadow moving in the water just before the attack and mistook it for a dolphin.

"It was much bigger than a dolphin when it came up," Cull said. "It banged straight into me. I realized what it was, it was a shark....I sort of punched it, and it grabbed me by the leg and dragged me under the water," he said. "I just remember being dragged backwards underwater. I felt along it, I found its eye and I poked it in the eye, and that's when it let go."

There you go. The eye method is obviously not just an urban legend. Now it's just a matter of being able to locate the eye of a shark (while being half-submerged in its jaws) and poking it . Got it.

[via WTOPnews.com]

Oh, my beloved Australia scores again!

An Australian has been fined after buckling in a case of beer with a seat belt but leaving a 5-year-old child to sit on the car's floor, NY Times reports. Police said they were ''shocked and appalled'' when he pulled over the unregistered car Friday in the central Australian town of Alice Springs and saw a 30-can beer case was strapped in between two adults sitting in the back seat of the car. The child was also in back, but on the car's floor. The driver was fined 750 Australian dollars ($710).

''This is the first time that the beer has taken priority over a child,'' said the police officer in charge.

I hate to break it to them, but I am quite certain this is--sadly enough--not the first nor the last time beer has taken priority over a child.

Traveling with food allergies must be hard.

Even in many countries in Europe, menus simply don't list all the ingredients used in meals. My Canadian friend went into an allergic shock in Prague because of his nuts allergy. He figured eating a sandwich would be safe. Of course, they didn't mention the sandwich had pesto in it. And pesto contains pine nuts...

And that's Prague, which is now fairly Westernized. Imagine what it must be like to travel in Asia, where not only do they use peanuts a lot more but it is much harder to read the menus and find people who speak English well enough.

This ABC article talks about traveling with allergies. It is about the challenges of a traveler with serious food allergies, who presents a card to the waiter noting his allergies to peanuts and peas, written in the native tongue. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. Some waiters even say that they have "never heard of such allergies."

I found it really interesting to read, although I don't have any allergies. How do you deal with food allergies when traveling?

When writing my blog about the recent violence in Chicago last night, I stumbled upon the Forbes list of the world's most dangerous destinations for 2008.

Here they are:

• Somalia
• Iraq
• Afghanistan
• Haiti
• Pakistan
• Sudan
• Democratic Republic of Congo
• Lebanon
• Zimbabwe
• Palestine

Although some of these might not exactly be tourist destinations, it is interesting how that list has changed over the years.

Forbes writes that "in the 1970s, a traveler's worst nightmare might have been a hijacked plane or hostage crisis. Today, the threats are equally perilous but reflect the changing times. Now, a tourist or business traveler might worry more about terrorist attacks on mass transit, getting caught in a spontaneous uprising or a bombing of a nightclub or hotel."

The latest terrorist weapon in Australia isn't dirty bombs, oil attacks or hijackings. It's lasers. New high powered lasers that have recently become widely available on the market are turning out to be a formidable tool in harassing pilots while on sensitive landing patterns.

When shined into a cockpit, these high powered devices can refract around the cabin, temporarily blinding crew and potentially damaging their vision. Opposed to older lasers commonly used in classrooms and during presentations, strong lasers have the ability to reach long distances, allowing attackers to strike from relatively long (and well covered) distances.

Here in the United States we've seen sporadic instances and subsequent prosecutions of laser strikes, but in Sydney the problem is starting to get out of hand. So far this year there have been six sightings of lasers in cockpits and the government is getting ruffled. They're passing legislation to ban possession of high powered lasers without a reason, saying that they can now search and question perpetrators on why they own the devices.

Meanwhile, casual users from teachers to hobbyists are up in arms about the legislation, saying that not all lasers need to be banned from use. I suppose if more flights are safer and normal users can prove they're using the lasers for the right purposes it's not too big of a deal, is it?

I picked this photo by Kouiskas as the photo of the day because it looks almost too good be real, you know? Everything is perfect, from the colours of the earth to the fluffiness of the clouds. Postcard-perfect photos are usually fairly elusive, down to nothing more than the stroke of luck that you happened to visit a site on the ideal day. And it's why we bring our cameras everywhere -- we're afraid of missing that perfect photo opportunity.

Got any perfect photos to share? Share them with us -- join the Gadling Flickr Pool.

Let's set this straight. According to hard evidence I have gathered, Victor Flanagan, an Australian also known as "Naked Nomad," didn't walk around naked all the time. He wore a sarong when walking through towns and a pair of thongs for when there were too many prickles on the road. Sellout.

He spent at least the last decade living in Papua New Guinea, where he walked from Australia sometime in the 1990s. And, he was found dead lying in a canoe – without any clothing -- in a PNG jungle, news.com.au reports.

Last week, more than a decade after he last spoke to his sister, the Supreme Court in Perth declared Naked Nomad "presumed dead". This is a relevant piece of information because he left all his property--primarily the multi-million dollar beachfront property near Busselton--to his sister. Flanagan had inherited the property after their father's death but didn't have much use for it since he primarily just wanted to be in touch with nature and spend his life walking around naked.

Naked Nomad really isn't that different from multimillionaires, after all. Multi-million beach front property is only fun if you can do nothing all day, but walk around naked.

###

The 10 Richest Cities in America


Did yours make the list?

I never get tired of people's inventions when it comes to smuggling stuff across the border. Take Jereme James, a 34-year old Californian man, who tried to smuggle iguanas into the US inside his prosthetic leg.

James was caught and convicted on two counts of smuggling and possessing endangered animals. He allegedly stole three baby Fiji Island banded iguanas from an ecological preserve while on a trip to the South Pacific islands in 2002 and smuggled them by concealing them in the compartment of a prosthetic leg. The iguanas are threatened with extinction because of habitat loss and are considered an endangered species, AFP reports.

OK, so things didn't work out so well for the iguana smuggler who now faces jail. But, how many people actually get away with stuff like that all the time? How many have I been on a plane with?

I'm going to admit to a little ignorance about this strange story in the New Zealand Herald this morning, concerning an Air New Zealand flight yesterday that was fumigated with passengers still on board.

A man is complaining of a sore throat, and a baby caught in the noxious fog gagged and threw up.

Passengers were left with no official explanation for the spraying, but one traveler who spoke to the Herald said that one of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry officers who carried out the spraying explained that the airplane had its "bio-security certificate" expire and thus needed manual fumigation.

The plane had come from Fiji and was fumigated on the tarmac of Auckland International Airport.

I can sum up my ignorance thusly: Just what is a airplane bio-security certificate? It seems to me that this is something particular to New Zealand; there is, after all, an official agency called the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Bio-security New Zealand. But then again, maybe this is something so common as to usually be ignored.

What doesn't seem common is dousing a bunch of passengers with chemicals while they sit in their seats, covering their noses and trying not to breath too much. One man described the ordeal as like a sauna, only without the heat.

Next time your pissed sitting on the tarmac be at least thankful that the plane's doors do not fly open and man in gas masks come on board.

As I was searching for an internet cafe in London this week, I thought it would be really helpful to have a site that lists them all and allows you to search based on your location. And guess what. Of course, that exact site already exists.

Cybercafes.com contains a database of over 4000 internet cafes in 141 countries. So, if you, like me are staying in the Embankment area of London and are looking for a place to log in, you will find there is easyInternetcafe at Strand 54. Which is, incidentally, where I am right now.

I must say, though, at £2 ($4) an hour, it is a little overpriced. You can find places nearby that charge only £.5 per hour, although arguable not as easy to use and consistent as easyInternet.