So, the notion of doing parkour on a bicycle is entirely laughable and warrants more Mountain Dew jokes than I can possibly conjure. But in all honesty, there’s no getting around the fact that this video of street rider Danny MacAskill [Ed. Note: hee hee! "mick ass kill"] is undeniably incredible. Like, I’m actually disappointed that I don’t have anything negative to say about this. It’s just a whole bunch of eye-popping tricks that you’d never think would be possible on a bicycle. And it’s not even set to rap metal. You win this round, MacAskill!
Kayaker Pedro Olivia set a new world record for the highest waterfall descent by paddling over the edge of the 127-foot Salto Belo falls in his native Brazil. The 26-year-old’s plunge lasted almost three seconds before he hit the water headfirst at 70 miles per hour. From the Daily Mail:
‘With the massive amount of water mixing with 127 feet of air, the landing was much more like 15 feet of churning dry powder snow than the hard surface of a lake.
‘This took Pedro and his boat deep into soft but violent water. His paddle snapped and flushed away as he was churned in the base of the falls. As he felt the violent churn of the falls ebb, he brushed against some rocks that he grabbed to right his kayak.
‘Pedro caught his bearings and realised he had entered a scenario that could have been a kayaker’s nightmare: resurfacing behind the falls. Rolling up in these extremely inhospitable surroundings behind the falls, Pedro emerged from the cavern behind the falls like a man returning from another world, and without a single scratch to show for his record breaking descent.’
In a related story, I totally jumped off the high dive all by myself. The gathered crowd cheered when I finally emerged from the water several minutes later. In the lifeguard’s arms.
|TPS|
Ugh, that sound… that’s not a good sound. It’s like a cantaloupe dropped off a roof. Makes me wanna wrap my head in cotton and styrofoam and duct tape before going anywhere near concrete. I’d leave some air holes, of course. Don’t wanna get too turned on, you know.
Listen, I love celebrating other people’s pain way more than the next guy, but even this face plant makes me cringe. And keep in mind this is coming from a blogging team that posted video of someone dying yesterday.
There’s good news and bad news. Bad news is that there’s nothing going today. But the good news is that if we had a bunch of interesting stories to talk about, you wouldn’t get to see this bicyclist/would-be stuntman slam his face into a picnic table. So I’d say we just about break even in the end. Oh who am I kidding. When someone’s face gets destroyed, everyone finishes ahead.
What’s amazing about this video, to me, isn’t that some guy is riding his bike off a roof. That I’m used to. It’s that he very obviously pushes his handlebars down to attempt a front flip, and it’s immediately obvious he has never attempted a front flip on a bicycle before.
“Hey, wanna ride your bike off a roof and try to land on this downward slope?”
“No way, man. Too easy. I gotta put my spinal cord at risk if I wanna feel alive.”
