Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Last Friday, a bearded American stepped into a glass cage and was hoisted many feet up in the air. We do not know why, nor do we know why he chose a field directly opposite our offices in which to voluntarily suspend himself. But it's been great fun for us: you'll have to ask him when he gets down.
David Blaine -- or as we like to call him, the Yank in the Tank or the Arse in the Glass -- is proving an tempting target, and we often pop over there at lunchtime or on the way to the tube station after work to consider our options. We thought about laser pointers, but within hours someone had tried that and been roughly handled by the police. As a team, we are resolutely opposed to violence, especially against ourselves.
We wondered about assembling a lavish picnic, together with starched linen tablecloth, liveried butler and one of those big silver serving covers that always has a severed head underneath. But that would be cruel, and far too much work. Likewise setting up a video projector to beam the ZDNet home page onto the walls of his prison: it's bad enough for the man to have to watch the rich pageant of life pass by on the pavement and river outside without being reminded of the excitement he's missing in the world of information technology.
Instead, we're printing out a series of jokes on banners made from joined-up A3 paper, and we'll be out to try and cheer the chap up later. Finding jokes that are short enough to work is hard: we quite like "What's brown and sticky? A stick". We can reuse the word 'stick' and the subject matter may be close to the AitG's heart at the moment. While we prepare a compendium of light-hearted bons mots to delight and enthral him, we're pleased to relay a sneak peek at the journal he's scribbling down in his spare time (ie, all of it) this week. We hope that it shows that fears concerning the man's sanity are completely unfounded.
Blaine's Diary, Day 3
Looked out of windows. Drank water from tube A. Peed in tube B. Waved at crowd.