Space Commando: you faithfully read this blog and you regularly submit comments! With much gratitude (and excitement that someone may be reading this blog), this post is dedicated to you, my dear, cosmonautic friend.
We play the lottery to get the sensation of risk. We're wired to want this feeling. For early man, hunting was risky and so was moving to new lands to find food. Man has survived as long as he has because he has taken chances.
Today, life is incredibly safe. There's no great challenge to our daily survival. Food is always in the supermarket, water's always in the tap. We wear helmets and seatbelts and there's a pill for everything. But we need challenges, we need the sensation of risk.
Fishermen, loggers and pilots have the most dangerous professions. They do this work to survive but they also do it by choice - in part perhaps for the excitement. These are professional risk-takers. The rest of us lead more simple lives. We get vicarious thrills to get the feeling. We watch films & sports, ride rollercoasters, play video games, buy lottery tickets or frag one another with paintballs. There's a unique place where doers and spectators come together for high-risk thrills: the circus
The professional acrobat takes the risk to make money (to survive) and the spectator pays his money to get the sensation of risk without putting himself in harm's way. It all gets a bit bizarre, at the circus, when things go horribly wrong. The circus is different than any sporting venue. In sports if someone gets injured medics are there on the spot. There's no fooling around or "play" involved. At the circus it's quite the opposite. It's all play, especially when, woops, something goes horribly wrong. If there's anywhere you don't want to get injured it's at the circus. Under the big-top no one will help you - because it's all just "part of the act."
"In the first part of the performance," said fellow circus performer Nicole Antosu, "Vlad held a flammable cocktail in his mouth to spit fire at a burning torch. Somehow, he must have swallowed some of the liquid, because when he burped he triggered an explosion." The Parrot (Accra, Ghana) - 2-8 June 1998
Example 2:
The accident at the touring Royal Russian Circus happened last night in Scariff, Co Clare, a village in western Ireland, in front of about 100 people, most of them children. Police identified the dead performer as a 26-year-old man from Belarus but did not release his name.
Witnesses said the man, dressed in a clown outfit, was hanging from a cage that was being suspended from a hot-air balloon inside the canvas tent. When the balloon exploded in flames, the cage crashed to the ground on top of the man. They said circus workers struggled to lift the cage off the man, but he was pronounced dead at nearby Ennis General Hospital.
The man’s wife, who was also performing at the time, suffered a broken arm, police said."We were all sitting down and they were doing their act. They were up fairly high, but they were doing fine. Next thing, he was down on the ground," said one witness, Hazel Harrington. She said many people in the audience initially thought the falling cage was part of the act. (The Sun Online)
Labels: Circus, lottery, Risk, The Ticket
¶ 4:23 PM
I'm thinking, what good would it have been to come to the aid of a man who had been blown to bits anyway?
And people are conditioned to see worse and think nothing of it.
-T
: May 29, 2008 at 6:59 PMSubscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home
