A new death-defying trend has emerged across the globe where daredevils have decided selfies at brunch and at girls' night are no longer cool enough: skyscrapers and monuments are the real deal. Three people (reportedly teens) climbed up a 1,135-foot skyscraper in Hong Kong and just hung out, eating bananas.
While some of us spent the weekend tossing urine and testing familial bonds, death-defying stuntman Jeb Corliss was busy sailing through the narrow opening in the side of China's Tianmen Mountain at a rate of 75 miles per hour. In a wingsuit! After jumping out of a helicopter and falling several thousand feet toward Planet Earth. Besides a potentially fatal plummet, Corliss also risked smacking into the mountainside and turning into a liquid substance. Those awful things didn't happen, and when Corliss was done flying he thanked China for the "amazing" time.
A 23-year-old "human cannonball" was killed on Monday, apparently because "a safety net failed to engage." The daredevil has not been formally identified, but he was working for Scott May's Daredevil Stunt Show, a UK-based touring show that features, alongside the human cannonball, "pyrotechnics, motorbike and monster truck stunts." Given that it advertises itself as having a "100% safety record," one imagines that today's death is the show's first; it's unclear exactly what happened but the complicated stunt apparently requires the cannonball to extract himself from the safety net within seconds of landing. [The Guardian; image of Scott May's Daredevil Show via Stef Robb]
Take a picturesque location—Boulders Beach in South Africa, in this case—a brave little penguin, and a dash of suspenseful buildup, all set to Vangelis' "Chariots of Fire," and what do you get? You get one awesome animal video!
Don't try this at home! Actually, don't try it anywhere—ever. Anyway, here's a four-minute video of a Nicaraguan school bus driver literally fording a raging river. Twice! (The bus is full, by the way.) Brave? Idiot? Brave idiot?
In Soviet Russia, bungee cord jumps you! Or something. Anyway, here's another video of crazy Russian kids doing crazy Russian things, like—in this case—sliding off the roof of an abandoned building with only a waist-attached makeshift bungee cord.
In Soviet Russia... you film your friends scaling narrow steel beams—which are conveniently located 900 feet in the air—without any safety equipment. And then, if you don't die while doing so, you upload it to YouTube. Watch inside.
These guys decided to build an enormous slide, and this is evidence of their ultimate success. Given the guy shown in an arm sling, though, we wonder how many failed attempts there were, and where's the video documentation of it?
Board-track racing was a popular event in the early days of automobiles, but once the cars got too fast and the centrifugal forces too strong, it became an attraction for only the craziest motorcycle daredevils... at least in the US.
