Badass of the week.

Rhys Essien

I only heard this week about a fella called Lt Gen Adrian Carton de Wiert.He served in the Boer War,WW1,and WW2.He was known mainly for ‘suicidal bravery’.In total he was shot in the face,head,stomach,ankle,leg,hip and ear.He survived two plane crashes,tunelled out of a POW camp and bit off his own fingers because of the pain after a doctor refused to amputate.He was awarded every medal in the book.
He had an Irish mother and a Belgian father with his father strongly rumored to be none other than King Leopold II.He fought alongside Winston Churchill and later Churchill appointed him his representative to China where soon after he met Mao for dinner and during a propaganda speech by Mao he interrupted him to criticize him for holding back on fighting the Japanese.
In his retirement he moved to Cork and died aged 83.He is buried near Macroom.Hard to believe I went this long without hearing of him.He makes Chuck Norris look like a pussycat.

More here.
http://badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=30045813384

He Wikipedia page is insane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Carton_de_Wiart

Samuel T. Cogley

harry Bailey esq

The 13th Duke of Wyndbone.

For Forks Sake

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_Mayne

This lad from NI was quite some character: Irish and Lions rugby player, boxer, one of the SAS/British armys most decorated members during WWII

And madder than a box of frogs to go along with it.

The king of them all, though, was Blair "Paddy" Mayne, a man who has every claim to being the hardest-drinking, free-est-swinging firebrand in the long history of the Lions. Mayne was an Irish lock, and one-time university heavyweight boxing champion. He toured in 1938, when his great running gag, the centre Harry McKibbin said, was to burst into his team-mates' rooms in the middle of the night, knocking the doors off the hinges, and then systematically smash up all furniture, Keith Moon-style. "Until," McKibbin said, "all the chairs and tables and things were just so much bits of kindling around us in the room while we were still in bed."

The management despaired of Mayne, who used to run around with the Welsh hooker (what is it about Welsh hookers?) Bunner Travers. The two of them dressed up as sailors and snuck off to the Durban docks just so they could pick fights with the local longshoremen. When they got to Ellis Park, they found that the stands were being erected by a team of convicts from the local prison who were sleeping in a compound underneath the scaffolding.

Blair and Bunner befriended one of them, and asked him what he had done to merit a prison sentence. "Stealing chickens," he said. "And I've been given a seven-year stretch." Full of sympathy for their new companion, who they nicknamed "Rooster", Blair and Bunner returned that night with a pair of bolt cutters and some spare clothes. They sprung Rooster, and set him free. When he was caught the next day, it turned out the jacket he was wearing still had Mayne's name stitched inside the collar.

In desperation, the management decided to make Mayne share a room with the fly-half George Cromey, who also happened to be a Presbyterian minister. Even Cromey couldn't stop Mayne sneaking off from an official dinner to go on a late-night hunting trip with a group of men he'd met who were carrying rifles and lamplights. Cromey waited up for his room-mate till 3am, and then, just as he was nodding off, Mayne broke down the door and announced "I've just shot a springbok".

Cromey said his blood ran cold. And then he turned on the light, and saw Mayne, still wearing his cummerbund, with a dead antelope draped over his shoulders. "Jimmy Unwin has been complaining that the meat here isn't as fresh as it is back home," Mayne announced. So he took himself off to his team-mate Unwin's room, broke down that door too, and tossed the beast into his bed. The trouble was that, in all the confusion, Unwin cut his leg on the antelope's horn. That wouldn't do. So Mayne decided to deposit it outside the room of the South Africa manager, with a note saying: "A gift of fresh meat from the British Isles touring team."

Well, that did it. Even though the captain, Sammy Walker, was a great friend of his, Mayne knew that the management were going to tan his hide for that. So he scarpered. The team didn't see him for three days, till he turned up, still in his suit, to meet them on board the ship they were sailing home on.

And if those stories sound a little far-fetched, as though, like all the best tales, they have gained a little in the telling, well, they've nothing on what he did next. Mayne became one of the founding members of the SAS in the second world war. He was recruited out of a prison cell, where he had been sent after striking a senior officer "because he bored me". His bravery won him the Distinguished Service Order with three bars, the Légion d'honneur, and the Croix de Guerre.

Rugby has gained a lot from professionalism but it has a lost a little something

gctest50

Heather Penney - went off to ram plane into one of the 9/11 planes