World's Most Needless Repetition Of A Largely Pointless Act

World's Most Needless Repetition Of A Largely Pointless Act
Mark Morford

A 47-year-old man jumped out of a plane 534 times in 24 hours in hopes of landing a new world record, because this is the sort of thing people really really need to do to justify something important or to prove something to themselves or at least to finally, finally quell some nagging and panicky voice deep, deep in their psyches that says yes, yes Jay, you can do it, you can be *that guy*, the one who will be forever known as the guy who jumped out of an airplane 534 times in 24 hours one November in the year of 2003, one random measure of a random act in a random block of time.

Jay Stokes of Yuma, Ariz., used 22 parachutes and two planes in completing the stunt Wednesday morning. Stokes set the Guinness World Record in 1999 for parachute jumps in 24 hours, but Michael Zang took the title from him in 2001 with 500 jumps, thus apparently inducing a neverending rage and panick and determination in Jay to get the record back, not to mention proving to the world that there are, in fact, at least two guys who give a damn about this sort of thing.

No one anywhere else in the world has any idea why this matters to anyone in any known hemisphere, but at least it's not, you know, how many moldy Twinkies you can shove into the taxidermied carcass of a water buffalo in the space of an hour, so what the hell, right?

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2003/11/13/state0753EST0032.DTL&nl=fix