E. Reid Ross
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Everyone should have a hobby. Unfortunately, hobbies are like sexual preferences -- you don't get to pick what you're into, you're just born that way. If you were unlucky enough to be born with a passion for something lame, follow the lead of these people and turn your ridiculous pastime into an audacious display of badassery. Kind of like ...
Radio-controlled aircraft are interesting for about 35 seconds; after that, you're just watching a plane fly. Richard Hamel, a plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractor by trade, found a way to extend that by hundreds of seconds with one simple hack:
Popsci
Radio-controlled aircraft? BAM! Now it's a fire-breathing radio-controlled aircraft!
Fine, maybe it's not that simple. But it uses a 50,000-volt stun gun circuit wired to a canister of liquid propane to make a flying dragon that you control shoot flames from its mouth, so no amount of work is too much.
Build one today, start dominating your Game of Thrones LARP league tomorrow.
Bryan Berg graduated from Harvard with a degree in architecture and quickly put his prestigious educational background to questionable use by becoming the world's only "professional card stacker." In 2010, he constructed a replica of China's Venetian Macao Resort Hotel, nabbing himself a Guinness World Record and (we're assuming) little to no female companionship.
The project took 44 days and 218,792 cards to complete.
His creations are all self-supporting, freestanding structures that use "no tape, no glue, no folding and no tricks," which is pretty damn impressive when you consider that some of his stuff looks like this:
It can't all be amazing, though. Here's some pretty fantastic video of Berg trying to break a card-stacking world record on Live! With Regis and Kelly and failing miserably. That should make you feel a little bit better about all of the amazing things you're completely incapable of doing, right?
We know what you're thinking. "What could ever be extreme about knitting? That thing up there might be extreme in that it looks like a rabbit with Down syndrome, but what's so extreme about that?"
Well, first of all, that was an awful comparison to make, and you should be ashamed. But to answer your question, check out this picture of that same knitted monstrosity next to a house:
Right, it's the size of at least two of them. The 200-foot bunny, the brainchild of Italian art collective Gelitin, took five years and a team of "dozens of grannies" to knit. Visitors are encouraged to scale the 20-foot sides and frolic on its belly, and the plan is to leave it up there until 2025.
This seems wildly optimistic, considering its potential to become toxically disgusting well before then, but after seeing what Gelitin had to say about it (quite creepily) on their website, we don't doubt that they're willing to give it a shot.
E. Reid Ross embarrasses his family at RealToyGun
