We can fly!

Sometimes, you have to follow along to notice the trends. One person shaving their head and then getting tattoos all over the melon is now fairly commonplace, but the first guy who did it (notice, it's always a guy!) stood out.

Imagine being the first guy to slurp, "Yes, I will eat a raw oyster! Let's see how this goes!"

So it was that on Wednesday, all the morning news shows were aghast (and no one does aghast like Hoba Kotb!) that a man in a jetpack was hovering over LAX airport in Los Angeles. Two different pilots radioed in from their planes in their Glenn Quagmire voices, "Uh, yeah, LAX, Adam Bravo Niner here, we uh have a guy at 3000 overhead...roger that...in a jetpack..."

Great story to tell your friends, if you live, but how dangerous can it be? He was up there at 3,000 feet with the big old jet airliners, running the risk of being sucked into an engine, killing not only himself but everyone aboard the plane. Capt Sullenberger is not flying anymore, and I don't think there's anything like the East River in Los Angeles, so it wasn't going to end well.

Then yesterday, everyone was burbling about how wonderful it was that this David Blaine, most notable in my mind for once having levitated to impress his erstwhile girlfriend Fiona Apple, still can't keep his feet on the ground. 

Blaine attached himself to a huge cluster of balloons (50 of them, filled with helium, at a time when Party City is running out of balloon juice) and went up, up and away over the Arizona desert in a stunt he called "Ascension."

"Every single stunt that I've ever done is about endurance and pushing past what I thought would be possible," Blaine said before the YouTube Live performance. "I can't imagine that many people would dream of doing it."

Blaine wound up floating 4.7 miles in the air, being careful to avoid the two great enemies of someone flying balloons over the desert: gravity and cacti.

And, as all great explorers will, he landed with great and sage words for mankind: "Wow! That was awesome!"

She's better off.

So if you're keeping track, jetpack over LA bad, balloons over AZ good. I'm just glad that Fiona survived going around with him.