David Blaine's stunt

[Trauma-san]

Yeah, David Blaine, Michael Jackson, and fucking Uri Gellar are all a little circle of friends.  Somebody needs to make up a name like 'the rat pack' for those 3, LOL.  Maybe Uri Gellar is the one who was interested in Exeter?  He talked them all into donating.

[Trauma-san]

The Independent did a study of his water, and Urine... check this out...

Faking it? How we (literally) took the p*** out of a master illusionist
Blaine watch: Days 17-23 Nutritionists make an impromptu visit to the glass box
By Andrew Johnson
28 September 2003


For three weeks the illusionist David Blaine has had eggs, golf balls, burgers, bananas and chips thrown at him. None has so far penetrated the plastic box suspended next to Tower Bridge in which he sits. But amid the flying junk, there has always been the threat of something far more damaging that could be hurled at him: the accusation that he is cheating.

He must have salt tablets hidden in his cage or glucose in his water supply, goes the speculation. His blanket has salt or sugar impregnated in it. Tablets or cubes of the stuff must be sown into his duvet. He is, after all, an illusionist.

So, in our role as professional dis-illusionists we felt duty bound to try to establish once and for all if Blaine, who intends to spend 44 days in his box without food, has a secret supply of sustenance.

We asked the country's leading nutritional experts to examine first his water supply and then his urine, and insisted to Blaine's camp that we would take the sample ourselves. "I think he has some salt in there," said Catherine Collins, the chief dietician at St George's Hospital in London. "Salt is the big issue. He is living in a greenhouse, and it has been very sunny.

"You cannot regulate your sweat, and through sweat you lose water and salt. Without salt the brain begins to swell. You get depressed and delusional. Round about now you would expect him to be going a little bit odd and talking to himself. I understand he has lip salve in there. I think it is a salt stick. He doesn't need much salt - just a lick every now and again would be enough. Also there are glucose polymers you can put in water that are colourless and tasteless."

Ms Collins accompanied The Independent on Sunday to the top of Blaine's water tower on Friday. We took two samples directly from the valves that feed water into the tubes leading to Blaine's box. They were analysed by Dr Paul Collinson, the head of chemical pathology at St George's hospital. The verdict:

"The water is completely pure," said Ms Collins. "There are no electrolytes or carbohydrates in there. It does what it says on the tin."

So far Blaine is in the clear. But the real giveaway will be his urine. That will tell whether he is taking salt, glucose or anything else. It is the job of Alex Angeloudes, the water monitor based at Sky Active's production camp set up in a car park behind the box, to take Blaine's urine sample twice a day. Blaine urinates into a funnel attached to a hose, which leads into a padlocked white box situated on a patch of scrubland beneath the cage. Twice a day she dons her rubber gloves, straightens the tube and decants all the urine into its plastic bottle.

Monitored by the IoS, on Friday afternoon Alex took a spot sample of urine. The first thing she must do is weigh the bottle on a small electronic scale in a caravan belonging to the production team which is filming Blaine. This is to check that Blaine is drinking enough water - a feature of starvation is a lack of thirst - and it is litmus tested to check for the presence of blood. He has produced about two litres.

These tests have been dictated by Professor Marinos Elia of the Institute of Human Nutrition at Southampton General Hospital. He is an expert in the physiology of starvation and is recognised as the country's leading nutritionist. Professor Elia has agreed to monitor Blaine's urine independently. He is unconnected to the Blaine camp but has been given the power to carry out unannounced spot-checks. He is not Blaine's doctor, nor is he responsible for his health.

The urine is sealed and driven to Southampton under the watchful eye of the IoS. There it is taken to the pathology department and the sample given a bar-coded number, which corresponds with its docket, so the samples cannot be mixed up.

The sample is placed in Bayer Advia 1650, a machine that looks like a cross between a washing machine and a photocopier. The machine is programmed by a lab official, hums and spins, and 20 minutes later produced the following results:

Sodium: 5 millimoles per litre (mmol). A millimole is an atomic weight measurement used by nutritionists.
Potassium: 12.6 mmol
Chloride: 4 mmol
Ketones: 16 mmol
Glucose: negative.

These results are first checked by a biomedical scientist to ensure they are within their correct parameters and accurate. They are then handed to Professor Elia. "They are consistent with starvation," he says. "The salt level, sodium chloride, is very low - 10 times lower than you would expect it to be. When the body starves it tries to retain as much salt as possible. The kidneys reabsorb it after filtering the body's liquids. You would expect the salt to be low."

The other interesting point is the ketone level, which is high. Ketones are molecules of fat harvested by the body from muscle and organ tissue to be turned into energy.

"The ketones are high," he says. "In a man who was not starving there would be no ketones, unless he was a diabetic. But there is no sugar in this blood, which would indicate he is not a diabetic.

"This is one sample, a snapshot in time. In the end one has to put all the pieces together. But in my view this sample is entirely consistent with someone who is starving. I cannot preclude that he is not taking a tiny lick of sugar or salt, because that would not show up."

"The salt level is very low," Ms Collins concurred yesterday. "In fact it's as low as you can go. If he was really clever he could take just enough salt to keep a low readout in his urine sample. But I don't think so. I no longer think he is taking salt."

[ITW [the irish boy]]

I reckon he's for real. Lets hope he just comes out alive.
They said on the radio he was starting to go insane, folding and refolding his duvet all the time.
I'd hate to be the person who decides when enough is enough...if it was a friend of mine up there i dont think i could wait two days of him lying still before calling it off.

[Trauma-san]

^ Yeah, I think he's gonna hurt himself... after a while, your organs start disolving, he could have brain damage & everything else.  

Apparently, when he did his 'frozen in ice' trick, he was asking to be cut out, and screaming and shit, but they wouldn't cut him out because he had told them before hand not to let him out until a certain time, no matter what he said.  This guy is intense.  I guess it could have been a show, though, but apparently he wanted out early on that one but they wouldn't let him.  

[··: O.G Kody™ :··]

He probably could have done something a bit more tasteful to make money.