The best thing this year: a list
My friend Dan Shapiro stared a mailing list called TBTTY: The best thing this year. Anyone who joins the list can post just once a year. That’s the only rule.
There have only been a few posts so far, but this one by Ben Huh is likely to provoke many people to share some great stories. As documented in the videos below, Ben decided to be one of the first people to ever jump off one of the largest natural arches in the world, while wearing a FailBlog t-shirt (a blog his company runs).
Title: I jumped off a cliff
YOU ARE HERE
On Friday, May 18th, just after sunrise, I stood at the edge of a 150 foot tall natural rock arch in the Moab desert looking over the side, ready to jump. There were an infinite number of reasons why this was a bad idea.
Just how did I get here?
In February, a viral video of the insane jump off Corona Arch was making the rounds. It had accumulated more than 10 million views. So that same month, when Francisco Dao, organizer of the 50 Kings conference asked me if I would do the jump. I didn’t hesitate at all. It looked exciting and fun.
Fast forward to last Friday, I hesitated the morning of the jump trying to pick out what I would wear. I unknowingly brought a FAIL Blog t-shirt. If I wore it, would I be tempting fate? Would it be funny? Would it scare everyone else doing the jump? What if I really did die wearing our own branded shirt?
Friday morning at 5:45 am, the guide showed up to pick up 12 brave souls at our lodge in Moab, Utah. Out of 27 conference attendees, 12 signed up. But there were only 11 waiting in the dark before sunrise. Just one person, Paul Carr of PandoDaily, was missing. He had talked himself out of it after listening to the guide at the rappelling excursion the previous day with Sarah Lacy, his boss.
“Our guide said it was crazy,” Sarah told me, looking directly into my eyes like a negotiator trying to convince a jumper off the Golden Gate bridge. “You can’t use the rope more then four times because of the force. Do you know how few people have done this? You guys are nuts.
“He said people have died doing this.”
It turned out Sarah was correct. The person who invented the jump had died doing it – albeit at a different arch. Sure, but people also die from vending machines that fall on them.
“Sarah, it’ll be totally fine,” I said. “No one is going to die.”
Huh’s got some serious fucking balls to jump off that thing! I signed up for the e-mail list, and am looking forward to reading some more very stimulating writing.