Team Joe's Basement

Sicko Circus (Day Three part 4) - Adam

After we got back into the convention center we split up again. I had no real direction and just began wandering. I ended up at the Last Gasp booth where a small crowd had started to gather because someone was putting on a performance, of sorts. I missed his first stunt, but as I got there he was claiming that he would eat a lightbulb. So he tries to pop this whole thing in his mouth, and of course the bulb is much to big to fit. So he puts it in a ziplock bag and smashes it on the ground, then takes the shattered glass and begins chewing it, as seen here :

Pretty crazy. I'd see this stuff in videos before and always figured there was some trick to it. But this guy was standing 10 feet in front of me and I couldn't see anything but some dude chewing on broken glass. He then said he wanted to swallow fire, but the convention center had rules about fire, so the next best thing : Dry Ice. He takes some out, wearing gloves and explaining how dangerous it can be to touch because of it's extremely low temperatures. He proves to us that it is actually dry ice by dropping it in some water.

After that he just tries to break of some more and seems frustrated trying to handle it with gloves and just takes them off and tosses them to the side. Grabs some in his bare hand and pops it into his mouth. Again, I couldn't see any tricks. This guy was just nuts.

His next trick was some sword swallowing. I'd seen this before at the renaissance festival so it wasn't quite as shocking as the other things. But still crazy.

(This next thing got pretty graphic, I still get a little shiver when I look at the pictures. So I'm not going to put them right in here, but you can click the links to see them.)
The last thing he did was something else I'd seen in videos. I didn't really think there was any trick to it, but it has a completely different impact when seen up close and in person. He took some kind of needles (the looked more like skewers) and put them through... things. First his forearm Then his bicep, this one was particularly nauseating, I thought. And finally one through the bottom of his mouth, and out the bottom of his chin.

A unique experience to say the least.

posted by Adam @ 1:05 PM