David Blaine's Bungee of Boredom
Apparently, we were supposed to be amazed at David Blaine's latest stunt, but everything that could go wrong seemed to. When Murphy's Law meets magic, boredom and disgust set in.
First of all, Blaine was supposed to hang upside down for 60 hours over Central Park drinking only through a straw and urinating through a catheter. But somewhere along the way, plans changed and instead he took a 15 minute break every hour to right himself, drink and urinate. But we weren't supposed to know that. And now we are told that the plan never involved being inverted for 60 continuous hours. As one blogger stated it best "I am going to eat 1,000 hard-boiled eggs - but I am going to do it one a day for a thousands days. I wouldn't want to make myself sick."
Setting aside the failed attempt to fool the public, let's take a look at what was intended to be a spectacular finale to this "death defying" publicity stunt. Of course, this is all conjecture. Even the television announcer stated "only David knows what he intends to surprise us with." We were only given the label "Dive of Death" which implied something more amazing than the bungee of boredom it turned out to be. From repeatedly watching the debacle time after agonizing time, I have come up with what I consider to be a pretty fair estimation of what the trick was to be.
Blaine was to jump from a 44-foot scaffolding and vanish just before impact only to re-appear elsewhere. To pull off the stunt, dozens of high powered strobe lights on the scaffolding were to go off simultaneously to obscure our view of what was really going on. The balloons (or whatever contraption connected to the other end of the bungee) was supposed to snap him back out of view of the public who would be looking for his crumpled mass on the concrete. Instead, we get to see the bungee cord attached to a harness under his jacket as he swung in mid air for several seconds realizing that the illusion had failed. The balloons did not rise as quickly as Blaine had intended. His downward momentum apparently negated their upward ascent and left him hanging like a limp penis. Newton's adherents are no doubt giddy at Blaine's inability to grasp simple laws of physics. Others are just pissed at the loss of two hours of their lives they will never get back.
To paraphrase T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men",
This is the way a career ends.
This is the way a career ends.
This is the way a career ends.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.