quote
…he will be suspended in a clear plexi-glass case by the River Thames for 44 days.
The 30-year-old New Yorker will be sealed in a space about seven feet (2.1 metres) high, seven feet long and three feet wide, hung from a crane near Tower Bridge.
Blaine will eat no food and will have one tube for water and another for urinating. unquote
My question is - Is it physically possible to go 44 days without eating? How would this affect your body?
quote
…he will be suspended in a clear plexi-glass case by the River Thames for 44 days.
The 30-year-old New Yorker will be sealed in a space about seven feet (2.1 metres) high, seven feet long and three feet wide, hung from a crane near Tower Bridge.
Blaine will eat no food and will have one tube for water and another for urinating. unquote
My question is - Is it physically possible to go 44 days without eating? How would this affect your body?
It’s pretty close to the maximum one can go without food, provided he has water and sleep. After using up all the food he’s got in his system, his body will begin to desolve fat and muscle tissue. If he goes through the experience and survives it, he’ll look pretty emaciated.
The human body can withstand that, but that’s about the limit. Right now I’m sure he’s fattening himself up for it. Water is more important than food for short periods. Besides, he’s not gonna be burning any calories if he’s locked in a box.
You hear stories about Tibetan monks and Indian Yogis who go for months on end without eating. One Yogi supposedly lives on <i>sunshine alone</i>, if you can swallow that.
It might be possible for some humans to do it, but I can assure you David Blaine will fake it like he did the other stunt inside the frozen igloo. The same methods he used to fake it inside the igloo will probably be used here as well. A TV show some months ago, showed how he did it.
That’s news to me. Could you elaborate on how he faked it? (I’m not doubting you, I’m just not really in the Stupid Human Tricks scene like I used to be.)
David Blaine is an illusionist. All his stunts are fake. I don’t know how he’ll do this but I guarantee he doesn’t go 44 days without food.
To answer the question, though, he could conceivably live that long if he was taking vitamin supplements. He would still suffer sever physical trauma but people have lived as long as 60 days without food before dying.
He basically used body doubles, and when the people would smoke up the ice supposedly to keep the ice from melting, that’s when the switch took place, and he went down the metal grating and up came his body double. They didn’t have to look like him much since the ice was somewhat opaque, and the camera that was also supposedly on him in the frozen igloo, was often taped. You probably can do a google on “Secrets of the Street Magicians”, and it will go into detail about it. It was on Fox, and it exposed every major trick he did, although they personally didn’t use his name, it’s obvious who they were exposing. The dead fly back to life was really cool too.
Firts of all, there was a pretty big hollow space within the ice. It wasn’t really that cold. Cool, maybe but not freezing.
More importantly, there was a trapdoor and a secret compartment under the ice. It was big enough to sleep in and maybe move around a little. at certain times, Blaine’s assistants would spray the ice block with something (freon?) under the pretense of keeping it frozen. They kind of stood around the block and it was really foggy when they sprayed so the view inside the block was pretty well obscured. At those times, Blaine would switch places with a body double who was waiting inside the hidden compartment. They would take turns standing up in the ice block in shifts and then getting some food and some shut-eye in the compartment. The shift changes were always obscured by the “freezing” spray and i guess the ice block was blurry enough that people didn’t hip to the body double (plus I think they only had him up there at night so it was even harder to see him).
No food for 44 days? Sounds like Blaine is trying to turn the big political protest of early 80s into entertainment. If he is so good I would think he would go for Bobby Sands’ record of 65 days, a mere 3 weeks more.
I seem to remember a number of Polish Labor Union members as well as jailed IRA gunmen (such as Sands) going the distance in 80-82. IIRC, a number of them made it 50+ days but tended to go down hill quick after doing so.
On a side note, as I was googling to refresh my memory, I found that a Polish labor union used a hunger strike to protest as late as 1996. The union representing nurses and other medical personnel went on a 33(!?) day hunger strike to protest their poor wages. I think they got a 6% increase–not what I would call a really a good return on their efforts.
Sorry about the double post at the top, there. I’m not quite sure how that happened.
When I read the article, I wasn’t familiar with his past stunts. I should have clued in when they said that he was an illusionist that it would be faked somehow. The part about no food for 44 days really caught my eye (apparently to the exclusion of the rest of the article!)
(double posts happen, just don’t click twice, =sever slow as f*ck here.)
Christ went 44 days with out eating, (at least 40 was it?)
Only he didn’t do it in a glass box, stinking to uhhh, *high heaven…[/i}
I personally think that David Blane is…
A) The Anti-Christ
B) A demon
C) A sicko, who know how to fake his way to a couple mil a year.
The “water” tube could actually be feeding him a vitamin and mineral enriched sucrose solution. I remember reading about at least one political protester on a hunger strike who was caught cheating that way.
Just because I hadn’t heard about it either, is there reason to believe that Blaine faked the ice stunt like that, or is that a proposed mechanism for how he could have faked it?
I don’t doubt that he did fake it that way, but the distinction is pretty important to me, as a magician. (There is a huge difference between letting people figure out how you could have done a trick and letting them figure out how you did it.) I’m also biased against believing what those “Secrets of Magicians Revealed!” shows have to say.
As a fan of magic (u can guess by my name) i like those magic revealed programmes, but i must say that the tricks they reveal are only how they think they were done, like the ice one, they just look at a trick and try and see a way it could be done, there is more than one way to do that trick so the way the programme showed it may not be how it actually happened.
As for his latest stunt he has been putting on weight so his body has fat to use, i don’t think that he would use vitamins in the water becuase if he was rumbled he would loose his repuation and probably make a lot less money. It more of an endurance test, like the ice (frozen in time) and standing on a pole (vertigo) rather than an illusion.
They mentioned on TV this morning that he has a 10% chance of brain damage. I maintain this has already occurred.
I also think his “water” will probably contain some kind of nutrients. He’s a showman, after all. He’ll also have some diapers (eeeugh), pencil and paper.
Geez, I’d be more worried about my mental health, being in one place for so long, no matter how exotic. Are there actually any real psychological concerns, or am I just clithrophobic?
