He's a beauty!

HE’S an oddball alright, the sort of chap infected with child-like enthusiasm and spread the contagion any which way he could. Ain’t he a beauty, that crikey character Steve Irwin?

He couldn’t skeedaddle off into the Great Beyond just like that, we’d cry buckets.

We didn’t mind the thick curious accent as he spouted tidbits of facts. We hardly noticed his khaki outfit that spoke of a fashion sense much close to a carabao’s than to a gadabout mall rat. Irwin didn’t make any fashion statements. He made sense.

Neither did he gab about lazing around in spas for body toning or consultations with a dermatologist to correct skin flaws—he wasn’t that self-absorbed or too indulged about the appearance he gave out to audiences.

He wasn’t cast in the mould of sought-after celebrities puttering about the vacuity and howling emptiness of their lives—we’ll be doubly glad if they just drop dead like flies, let their fans and followers follow suit.

Irwin wasn’t the type “cropped, hedged and distorted by outward, trivial forms, fads and fancies.”

He wasn’t at all squeamish toddling after those slithering critters, handling ‘em with as much care and wonder with a wee bit of whimsy. He was making a pitch for all of ‘em creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful.

Do we have anybody like him around?

Nah, they all want to be our next idols, plying out song-and-dance acts or going through the motions of acting— terrible phonies all.

Oozing with energy, Irwin gawked and squawked about Nature. He sang to it paeans and praises. Adults these days, especially those soaked through in glamor and marinated in the mediocre don’t come any close to that.

And he could do mud-wrestling with crocodiles, fill in notebooks with sketches of reptiles, plop himself down on mud pies, celebrate life of the wild kind with nary a care.

That must have been a wonderful life!