David Blaine's Massive Enchanted Snow Globe of Understanding

You guys made David Blaine cry. Seriously. Not cool.

A day after the televised stunt, Blaine, defying doctors' recommendations, checked himself out of Roosevelt Hospital. Friends took him out in a wheelchair then helped him walk to a waiting car.
At home, he took a hot shower, played cards and was able to eat.

But "he was crying," last night said Dr. Murat Gunel, the head of Blaine's medical team. "He still feels today that he let people down."

For those of you who ignore news about attention-starved idiots submerging themselves in oversized souveniers on the streets of New York for kicks, let me fill you in. David Blaine used to be a magician. Then he decided he wanted to date hip New York waifs-in-training, the kind of attractive yet skeletal wannabe models who don't exactly light up like a pinball machine when you drop the "I do card tricks for a living" bombshell.

For some reason I can't imagine, even though most people don't seem to mind actual magic, it turns out nobody really respects magicians. David Copperfield can't even return to his luxury home for a threesome without being mugged!

So Blaine, sensing a change was needed, started doing public endurance-themed stunts. He was buried alive in a glass coffin, stood on a very high pole in a New York park, and hovered above the Thames in a box. Some of you may recall that one because, unlike receptive American crowds, Brits tended to respond to an American dangling above a river for no good reason by yelling threats and chucking stuff at him.

For his latest trick, Blaine submerged himself in a sphere filled with water for a week. At the end of the week, he was going to hold his breath for a record-breaking 8 minutes. But he failed, going unconscious and requiring rescue with 58 seconds to go.



What a loser.

No, seriously, I'm kidding. I don't really understand the hatred the British seem to have for random, silly little stunts like this. There's just something in Americans that enjoys stories about dumbasses doing crazy crap just for the hell of it. You know about those kids who spent seven years making an exact shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark?

The lesson here is that you really shouldn't announce you're going to do something you probably can't do for no good reason. It just opens you up for ridicule. Blaine could have announced he was going to hold his breath for five minutes at the end, and I'd have been exactly as impressed as I was with eight minutes. I didn't know that was the record...because I didn't care enough to find out in the first place.

Also, it's clear David Blaine has kind of a Harry Houdini complex. He's even been called "Baby Houdini" in the press before. I'd remind Mr. Blaine that Houdini did a lot of crazy, impressive escapes in his day and became very famous without hanging out for eight days in a goldfish bowl. He would just show up somewhere and escape from some shit and people would clap. Maybe DB's just trying too hard.



He was rescued as he struggled to break a breath-holding record of 8 minutes, 58 seconds. Blaine, who had spent some 177 hours under water, went without air for 7:08 as a finale to his endurance stunt.

Blaine's liver and kidney functions had suffered while he was submerged, but now they are improving. His skin, which was peeling on Monday night, "looks much better today," said Gunel.

His team concluded that strenuous training and losing 50 pounds so his body would require less oxygen left Blaine too tired before he entered the tank. They said Blaine wants to try the breath-holding stunt again. Next time, he plans to be in better shape first, and do the stunt without being in a tank for a week beforehand.

Yeah, man....Skip the part where you hang out in a tank for a week. Geez.

Blaine always gives BS answers when asked the obvious: why he'd possibly want to do something so bizarre and possibly life-threatening. I mean, dropping 50 pounds? He was being observed by a neurosurgeon. His answers are always of the "because it was there" variety because he wants to be seen as an enigmatic explorer, a spiritual figure willing to endure physical pain in order to achieve ascetic purity or some such horseshit. He's not just hanging out in a goldfish boal as part of a TV special...He's inhabiting a massive enchanted snow globe of understanding.

I know the real reason. Because, as unpleasant as it would be to hang out in a snow globe for a week, subjected to the endless close-up scrutiny of slack-jawed gawkers, it beats a regular day job. This guy won't work again for months, and when he does it will be another wacky yet oddly profitable stunt. And in between, it's nothing but trendy, waify New York socialites. Beat that, The Amazing Randy! You know you can't!