10/22/2003: Niagara faller

[Undertoad]

Elspode picked up this one. This is now day-old news, but this is one Kirk Jones, who became the first person to go over Niagara Falls without anything but the shirt on his back, and survive.

Dude is incredibly lucky. How lucky? According to one interview I saw, there have been about 150 suicides by jumping Niagara over the years. Nobody ever lived. There have been at least 15 attempts that included barrels or some other sort of protection, and 10 of those resulted in death.

This begs the question: if you try to kill yourself this way and live, do you regard it as the ultimate failure or the ultimate success?

If failure, do you give up, figuring that you're so bad at it that you'll never succeed - or do you keep on trying, to show the world that even though you want to kill yourself, you really are competent at it?

In this case, Jones gets an arrest on the charge of "performing an unlawful stunt within a government-run park", a Canadian law without which one imagines thousands of Canucks hurling themselves over the Niagara ledges.

They don't want people doing this sort of thing because it puts rescue workers under undue stress, although it looks like Mr. Jones should be the only one not charged for that reason, because he is the only one ever to not really need rescuing. And if they want to cut costs, they can skip the free psych evaluation he will now be getting, because we all know the obvious: this guy is disturbed.