The Felix Baumgartner thing was really compelling.
I mean, in many ways it was another pseudo-event. It was created by the marketing people at Red Bull to... alright, I confess I'm at a loss as to why they would spend all this money.
But I think it was compelling because we have so sanitized our lives that we are devoid of real adventure anymore.
I've been rewatching some episodes of HBO's Rome and it's striking how casual they are about dead bodies. Not surprising because things die all the time and someone has to get rid of them. But we hide death away in special, sanitized places. We don't embrace pain, we run from it. We anesthetize ourselves in any way possible.
So when some crazy dude steps on to the edge of a great blue nothingness and hurls himself off, with the possibility that any of a million things could do wrong and kill him in a hundred different agonizing ways... that's damn fine TeeVee right there.
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