Peeing Man Update
Legitimate news organizations in addition to this bastion of investigative journalism have apparently been fooled by the "man peeing way out of avalanche" story. Here's the scoop from Snopes.com (http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/avalanche.asp):Origins: The story about a Slovak man who was buried inside his car by an avalanche, and supposedly freed himself by drinking beer and urinating on the snow to melt it, was carried by a number of western news services in January 2005. The story has so far proved difficult to verify because its attributions have been vague (e.g., "correspondents in Bratislava"), and it evidently originated in a part of the world (the Slovak Republic) where information sources are more difficult to track down (particularly because the language is unfamiliar to most westerners).
However, a correspondent who works for a Slovak news agency informed us that not only has the avalanche story (or any news story about an avalanche) not appeared in the news media there, but the very same tale (of Czech origin, told about an unnamed man caught in the Austrian Alps) was circulating in that country as an e-mail joke even before the heavy snows described in the article occurred.
So, while it is undoubtedly true that a Slovak man has drunk sixty half-litre bottles of beer, and a Slovak man has been trapped in an avalanche, it appears to not be the same man. At this time.
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