23rd November:

David Blaine is currently dangling 50 feet in the air above Times Square, shackled and attached to a spinning gyroscope. Many of you may be asking why. Is this magic? Entertainment? A feat of endurance? Once he frees himself, Blaine will then lead a group of 100 underprivileged children (hand-picked by the Salvation Army) on a shopping spree through the city. Confused?

Blaine is a strange character. This will more than likely not have escaped your notice. The British public seem to have an especially low tolerance for self-publicists and his last attempt to engage the common man on these shores saw him pelted with cheeseburgers. We collectively declared it ‘pointless fannying around’ and let him know in no small measure. However, even our colonial cousins in the land of the weird do seem somewhat perplexed by Blaine’s exploits and don’t quite know what to make of him. Blaine’s previous forte was street magic – running around the major avenues of America’s notable conurbations with a camera crew hanging off his shoulder, making people’s shoes disappear and then vanishing himself, leaving bemusement and gasps in his edgy wake. Who was that masked man?

Now, however, Blaine seems to specialise in grand (grandiose?) headline-grabbing exercises that serve no point other than demonstrating to the world how mercurial and anomalous a character he is. It’s like an advert for a brand that is selling no product nor offering any service – ultimately rather pointless. Of course, maybe there is no point. Maybe Blaine is very rich and secretly having a very large old laugh indeed. Even if we are all looking for a message that simply isn’t there, though, surely there can only be a very finite public appetite for this kind of guff?

Without wishing anything untoward to befall the good Mr. Blaine in his latest endeavour, I’d like to suggest a fitting epitaph:

Here lies David Blaine
Eh?
Meh.