I’m his next guest.
I’m on next weak! 
If semi-suicidal pursuits are viable candidates for this thread, then I’ll nominate the Manx TT. This is a motorcycle race on the Isle of Man that has been held almost annually for over 100 years. In contrast to a typical race track with maybe a dozen turns and lots of safety features, this race is six laps of a 37-mile circuit featuring hundreds of turns on public roads. The circuit is closed to traffic during the event, but all of the other attendant hazards remain, like rock walls, curbs, trees, cliffs, painted lines, lampposts, hedgerows, uneven pavement, and so on. Bumps and rises that wouldn’t bother your grandma at normal speeds have these bikes catching serious air at 160 MPH in the middle of quaint English villages. To have even a chance of winning, riders have to memorize every one of the turns on the course; there’s not enough time to react to a turn after you see it coming.
Here’s a lovely montage to give you a taste of the insanity:
The current lap record in the fastest category is 135 MPH. Turn your volume down and take in this rider’s perspective for a bit:
Now imagine keeping up that intensity for a full hour and forty minutes. If you screw up, you’re probably going to die.
As you might expect, this race is extremely dangerous. Not dangerous as in “…and so we take lots of safety precautions,” but dangerous as in “in spite of the safety precautions we take, riders keep dying.” The early years weren’t quite so bad, but as the bikes got faster, fatalities became more frequent. Over the past few decades, they’ve averaged about three deaths per year.
Women do compete, but they’re few and far between, making this an almost exclusively male event. Which kind of makes sense: it takes a stereotypically masculine level of competitiveness to participate in something like this.
Yes indeed. And I remember reading in one of the motorcycling publications that the factory team riders in MotoGP have it in their contracts that they are not permitted to ride in the TT races because it’s too dangerous, and Ducati, for example, doesn’t want their riders getting killed in a race that isn’t even part of the MotoGP series.
So the names of TT greats are different than the names of MotoGP riders. Valentino Rossi never rode the TT, but Joey Dunlop never competed in GP racing. As far as I know, anyway. If he did, he didn’t make it into the top ranks.
I have no idea how he did it, but my father was a Marshall at the TT races many years ago.
You’re right about the Isle of Man TT. I’ve seen it on TV several times. Now that you’ve seen the 2-wheelers, imagine doing that on sidecars. Scrub your mental image of a Harley with a sidecar that looks like a Dutch wooden shoe. Today’s racing side-hack is a low-to-the-ground 3-wheeled race car with low, wide tires. On one side, the driver is folded up behind his little fairing, and the passenger is scrambling from side to side to shift his weight while staying as low as possible to reduce drag.
Wow. There ought to be a rule that the drivers have to keep at least one wheel on the ground at all times. Seems like a reasonable requirement for a race… 
And even more so, the speed with which it was approved for sale.
I wondering what the front wheel was for. They don’t seem to use it very much.
At one point the Forest Service thought it would be a good idea to weld 4 Sikorsky helicopters to a blimp. The idea was that the were going to use it to log big ass trees out of the mountains. They actually got 4 helicopter pilots to try and fly the thing.
It combines; logging, helicopters, test pilots, a crash and a blimp.
Might have a winner there.
One day, Man will climb to the moon. Unaided by containers, canisters and capsules…
Like this only in reverse: [u]**https://what-if.xkcd.com/157/**[/u]. 
Back in the USAF days I dated a woman officer who was real fierce. At the time we were stationed in Latin America, home of machismo. or more like Machismo, especially among the officers of the various Latin American air forces we both interfaced with. Those guys were hot shit and knew it to their very bones.
When one of them got dismissive towards her, her answer, delivered in good quality Spanish went about like this:
Listen here macho boys, I’m way more macha than you can ever be. Try to keep up.
The fact she was a head taller than most Latin men helped.
Every now and then it’s a darn shame English doesn’t have full grammatical gender with matching endings and everything.
I think macha means different things in different dialects. It can be a derogatory lesbian slur or masculine/butch woman.
I’ve heard it used more generally like “be a macha, be tough.” Like be a badass. So in that context it’s roughly equivalent to macho.
I’m just interested in this word because one of my favorite feminist essays of all time uses it (The Collapsible Woman).
Neither she or I knew that then. :eek: Which may have explained a snicker or two in a couple countries. 
In addition to that, the word marimacho may mean tomboy.
Most of these seem to be free climbers rather than free solo climbers where you do not have any protective equipment.
While I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a few female free solo climbers, I am guessing the field is overwhelmingly male.