This guy, Alexander Roy, drove from New York to Los Angeles in 31 hours.
During the Oklahoma stretch of the run, Roy and his co-driver heard a cop reporting their crazy fast driving on their scanner.
"Roy said he heard it shortly after he and his co-driver, David Maher, had been exceeding 150 miles an hour. As Maher scanned the prairie through binoculars for a place to hide, the car’s radar detectors lighted up. They decided to exit the highway and feign a bathroom break while a support team in a Cessna overhead searched for the speed trap that would inevitably materialize.
Having temporarily escaped, Roy eased back onto the highway. As he approached two state police vehicles waiting on the median, he ducked to the right of a tractor-trailer in a move he called “the cross-country racer’s ideal police line-of-sight blocking position.”
The maneuver, he said, enabled him to break a 23-year-old illegal endurance-driving record by navigating from New York to Los Angeles in 31 hours 4 minutes. He said he recorded an average speed of 90.1 m.p.h. over a mapped route of 2,794 miles."
The very idea of doing this, leaving aside all questions about the out-and-out recklessness of the operation, and the putting of people's lives in danger, etc.,, is completely awesome. And, because I'm a dork, the top reason for doing something like this is just so that the following conversation would be possible:
Crazy Driver in NY: (casual) "I was thinking of coming out to Los Angeles. We could hang out."
Person in L.A. Completely Unaware They're About to Have Their Mind Blown: "Yeah, that'd be cool. You should do that."
CDinNY: (now deadly serious) "I'll be there tomorrow."
PinLACUTAHTMB: (sputtering) "Wh-what? Uh, ok. Do you need me to pick you up at LAX?"
CDinNY: "No. I'm driving."
PinLACUTAHTMB: (like Moe Szylak) "WHAAAAAAA?!!" (promptly has brain aneurysm)
Anyway, there's a lot of great details in the article about all the anti-speed-detection equipment these guys had on board, and all the prep-work the guy did to make the run in record time. It's worth a read.
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I know this is off topic, but check out this bombshell:
In front of a full house of hardcore Potter fans at Carnegie Hall in New York, Rowling, sitting on the stage on a red velvet and carved wood throne, read from her seventh and final book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," then took questions. One fan asked whether Albus Dumbledore, the head of the famed Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft, had ever loved anyone. Rowling smiled. "Dumbledore is gay, actually," replied Rowling as the audience errupted in surprise. She added that, in her mind, Dumbledore had an unrequited love affair with Gellert Grindelwald, Voldemort's predecessor who appears in the seventh book. After several minutes of prolonged shouting and clapping from astonshed fans, Rowling added. "I would have told you earlier if I knew it would make you so happy."
There's more:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/50787
Like her fans, I'm content to know that Dumbledore's gay, but why bring it up? If it wasn't relevant to include (or even to hint at) in the books themselves, does it really matter what she's been keeping to herself all these years? And that's to take the humorless bastard take on the whole thing.
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