Look! Up in the Air! It's . . .

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I've got mixed feelings about this one.  On the one hand, it's completely mad, and I'm definitely in favor of that.  On the other hand, it strongly suggests that all the real adventures have already been done and so we're reduced to what is, after all, a stunt -- and a rather artificial one at that.

The folks at National Geographic have replicated the house in the Pixar film Up! 

It took three hundred weather balloons, a batch of engineers, and a 16 by 16 foot shell of a house to accomplish the feat, which was filmed for a show called How Hard Can It Be?  The house rose to 10,000 feet and flew for over an hour. 

Me, I'm going to spend the rest of the day contemplating Baudrillard's concept of the simulacrum.  Which is what you get when you blend "reality" and representation and come up with something where there's no clear indication of where the one stops and the other begins.  Hyperreality really seems to have the Twenty-First Century by the short hairs.

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