Friday, February 14, 2014
Crazy Ivan
The highest five: At the end of this video, the dudes stand up atop the tip of the crane, waaaay out over 650 meters of nothing but polluted Shanghai air, for a quick "Look ma! Nyet hands!" shot and a high five.
(Not for acrophobes. Srsly. You have been warned. My palms are sweating typing this, just from remembering the video. If God meant for us to do things like this, he wouldn't have repo'ed our prehensile tails.)
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18 comments:
Just watched that this morning. My first thought was "They exceeded the render distance!"
The height was a little less nerve-wrecking than the "let's climb up this sloped walkway over the cross-bracing with no safety line."
Because I grew up in Big Stiff Wind Gust Country...
I could sorta understand if they were BASE jumpers, but it looks like down came the same way they went up.
I am not afraid of heights and used to rock climb and jump from helicopters.
But there have been a few times when I thought about what I was doing - and then looked down - and had a moment of WTF. It's easy to let panic in. I think divers have to be aware of the same issues. Part of the joy is beating it down. It wouldn't be a thrill if there was no occasional fear.
Watching this video I saw the dudes hands stop once, just like mine did once or twice. I wonder if he had the same momentary thought? I wonder if he considered whether a video posted for free on the internet was worth posting himself all over Terra Firma?
I stopped climbing when I moved away from the west coast and had kids. Still miss it, though.
And my God, somebody needs Al Gore over there to clean that shithole up. Those were not natural clouds.
I'm glad I stopped climbing.
While watching the video, the thought I couldn't get out of my head was: "I'm sure that the expanded metal grating they're scaling meets or exceeds all the safety requirements of whatever is the Chinese equivalent of OSHA..."
While watching I kept thinking cool. I used to do crazy stuff on sport bikes but by the end of the video I was saying "Oh fv©k, oh fv©k, oh fv©k".
Heh, Darwin missed 'this' time... I'd do that for work, but NOT for fun...
It's not the height that scares me, but the Chinese construction and engineering standards.
I remember when I used to live out in Colorado. I used to see rock climbers in the mountains all of the time. I used to shake my head and think about how insane that was. And then I would descend alone into one of the countless abandoned mine shafts that I used to seek out and plunder on behalf of a museum and antique dealer who used to send me out with shaft locations and buy my finds if I made it back. Watching that video reminds me of how dumb I used to be. And strangely enough, part of me still sort of misses those days. The dumb part.
Using a wide angle lens is a bit of a cheat, but still, my base-jumping older brother liked this video.
But doesn't "Crazy Ivan" mean "they do it because all hope is lost, and who knows, it might even work"?
Oh wait - That's Crazy Eddie.
Never mind.
BSR
Just watching that made me wish I was wearing one of my parachutes.
Alright, I'll admit it. My crotch quivered a couple of times while watching that video!
I've watched it twice, and it's impressive. But they're actually not completely crazy. While on the tower, they've got a safety line on. Still, hitting your buddy's hand hard enough to pop an audible high five whilst balancing handless up top was pretty un-calming.
As precarious as those crane arms looked, they're lifting some pretty serious weight atop that tower.
Tam,
I think the Chinese equivalents of OSHA and FDA are as active and involved as whomever in America is supposed to be ensuring Fedgov is not trampling all over our constitutional rights.
Actually, I'm quite impressed that the buildings pretty much held together while falling over. That's some strong construction. But pilings don't seem to have been the right foundation design. Or it just wasn't the right place for a multi-story building on _any_ kind of foundation.
Um, that was referring to Armed Texan's link to a new Chinese apartment block that just plain fell over.
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