A View To A Thrill

By Jocelyn Geboy in News on Sep 29, 2006 10:08PM

Building, Antennae, Span, Earth -- and other crap like construction cranes. This is the sport of BASE jumping. Every time we hear about people getting all crazy Bond and jumping off of high stuff, parachuting down and then cruising away as fast as possible to avoid criminal charges, we are entirely nonplussed. Not only do we admit to having a little fear of heights, but we also get a little vertigo just by walking a little too close to the edge of the el platform.

But there are people who get their thrills from having sex while getting into car crashes, who want on in front of the neighbors, and others who skip the sex and just need to get high by throwing their junk off of other junk. An individual was being questioned today over parachuting off a construction crane in Streeterville, and last week, three people floated down into CityFront Plaza between the Tribune Tower and the NBC Tower around 4:30 a.m, and then jetted in a gray Porsche SUV. We know it's still dark at that time, so that's some wack maneuvering. (You can turn down the Duran Duran now.) However, one of our favorite lines from the article is this:

"Bolden, a military veteran, said he was making his rounds outside Tribune Tower when he recognized the sound of a parachute opening, and when he looked up he saw blue and red parachutes opening just north of CityFront Plaza." We're pretty sure that although we've never done any military time, if we heard a parachute opening just hundreds of feet above our heads, we'd have a good idea 1. of what it was, 2. that something was amiss, and 3. to look up!

In other shit falling from the sky news, a mylar balloon was said to have been the cause of a power outage in the Gold Coast today. The metallic coating on mylar balloons causes a short in the line due to a surge in electricity when the two come in contact.

The birthday or "other celebratory balloons" caused "55 outages last year affecting 19,000 customers." Most importantly, ComEd "urges people to keep metallic balloons inside or securely tethered if outside." People. If we've learned anything from shows like Queer Eye, hopefully it's this: Mylar is tacky.

Images via gd_landser and goldmember