Who Won The Internet This Weekend – Dave Grohl or The Alligator Surfing Raccoon

Tale of the tape

Dave Grohl

Widely considered to be a complete rock and roll icon, Foo Fighters frontman and and former Nirvana drum-thrasher Grohl is a rare breed of rock star that manages to be universally praised in musical arenas for simply being a great guy, as opposed to a lunatic.

Whether he’s breaking up fights mid-concert or breaking curfews so that he can play a few more tunes for the baying masses, generally speaking he's a pretty stand-up guy but even Dave Grohl managed to out-Dave Grohl himself this weekend.

The Incident

In a moment that will go down in rock history forever, Dave Grohl managed to break his leg after tumbling into the security pit during a gig in Gothenburg, Sweden. For most rockstars this would be a total gamechanger. The gig would end and the tour itself may even end up cancelled. But then Grohl isn’t a normal rockstar, he’s Dave Grohl, superhuman hero of rock.

Upon realising the damage, Grohl, grasped his microphone and said, “I think I just broke my leg… I think I really broke my leg”, before staring into the concerned crowd and adding: “You have my promise right now that the Foo Fighters, we’re gonna come back and finish this show… but right now, I’m gonna go to the hospital, and fix my leg!”

And that's what he did, he returned to the stage an hour later wearing a knee-high cast, sat in a chair and rocked the shit out of Sweden. At one point he even stood up on crutches to belt out some Foo Fighter hits.

What we did we do this weekend? We stubbed our toe on a door frame and cried about it for twelve hours.

Alligator Surfing Raccoon

Generally speaking raccoons are alright. On the Disney spectrum they’re furry beasts that deserve to be cuddled, with their swishy tails and ‘cry-me-a-river’ eyes. In reality they’re likely to be rabid face-scratchers that steal children from their cots.

Alligators on the other hand are all kinds of awesome. They’re essentially living tanks; all armour and sly sass, effectively making them the terminators of the wild.

Neither, however, really go hand-in-hand. Racoons: for their darty skittishness; alligators, for their cold-blooded bloodlust.

The Incident

We’ve all been there, strolling through alligator-infested wilderness with our loved ones on a fine Sunday morning. The ground glistening with dew and the sound of early morning crickets chirping in our ears like nature's alarm clock. When, suddenly, your excitable child startles a nearby raccoon, no doubt just casually perusing the morning papers. The raccoon panics and darts towards nearby water, taking flight towards the nearest floating object.

Which happens to be a god damn alligator. Eyes wide you stare in horror, shielding your son's eyes from the snappy gore that surely awaits, but then... the racoon lands like a ballerina and proceeds to alligator surf its way straight out of dodge. Two extremeties of nature joined together in unique harmony. The world stops, you wonder if you should hold your son aloft like Simba in The Lion King. You take a picture and become an internet sensation instead.

This happened to Florida’s Richard Jones, a man surely on his way to some kind of lucrative career in hilarious (but daring) wildlife documentaries.

“I snapped a lucky picture right when the gator slipped into the water and before the raccoon jumped off and scurried away. Without the context you’d think the raccoon was hitching a ride across the river. Pretty amazing,” Jones wrote in an email to news site WFTV. “Definitely the photo of a lifetime.”

Let it never be said that alligators and raccoons can’t live peacefully together.