Entry 11 - Dan Saves His Nose

October 22, 2007

Entry 11 - Homestay, Salt Lake City, UT

Tonight was our last night here. We'll be shooting tomorrow until 2pm, but this was our last night. And to be honest, it was a little sad. : ( We've spent 16-18 hour days with these people for the past nine days, and many of them we might never see again. On top of that, while some of the groups had issues with either the event coordinators or other group members, we were able to play an impartial role and actually make friends with virtually everyone. And despite being asked out again by the Japanese team ... we're all beat, so we headed back here.

We're going to leave Travis behind with a camera to shoot the team(s) that compete tomorrow. It truly sucks that we can't all be here to tape it as a team ... not to mention that we simply can't *be* here when these people that we've gotten to know pretty well either win or lose (and there likely will be a winner of the half-million dollar prize, which is a big deal). It's just a bummer. But we figured it would be best to have at least one person here. So Dan and Nic are going back to manage the Bitter Jester office and catch up on work that they missed and Tarek is flying back to work in a few hours.

By far the highlight of today had to be when the Kansas City Space Pirates ran in their first competition run and came very close to winning. Unfortunately ... they didn't. Their time was 15 seconds too slow and they had an uncontrolled descent. The wind was so rough at the top of the tether (whipping around some 400 feet in the air) that the climber began to break apart - which was a sad moment for The Pirates, to say the least. But here is the funny part ... as pieces of solar arrays began twisting and eventually snapping off and fluttering to the ground, everyone looked up. Everyone, that is, except for Dan, who kept on shooting.

Now, if you know Dan, you likely know that he nearly lost his nose in a similar incident in 2001 when he and Nic were shooting a house being demolished. A huge piece of aluminum siding flew up in the air and came down on Dan's face, taking a chunk the size of a dime out of the bridge of his nose. As before, Dan's face was once again buried in his camera and he wasn't looking up. So Travis, being the steadfast and trusty boom operator, shouted out to Dan saying "Dan. Dan! DAN!!! DAN, LOOK UP!! YOUR NOSE, DAN! YOUR NOSE!!!!" Dan quickly locked his camera down and took off through the grass like a deer being hunted by lions, literally racing toward the audience who stood behind the perimeter fence. Ironically, all of the broken piece of the climber landed beyond the fence, but that's not what was amusing. The rest of the team member and crew under the 400-foot crane were all looking up. What the rest of us all saw was actually kind of peaceful-looking: several solar cell arrays gracefully floating down to the ground, almost like big feathers on the wind. They weigh almost nothing and in 18-mile-per-hour winds they simply wafted back and forth, gently settling to the ground some 1,000 feet from the crane itself.

Now cut back to the image of a frightened Dan Kullman (clad in his bright yellow construction worker's hard hat) running at top speed toward safety, only to eventually realize that ... as he looked around ... he saw that no-one else was running with him. So he slowly stopped, turned, and humbly trodded back to his camera and keept shooting. It's almost a certainty that on the tape - after you hear Travis' shouts for Dan to protect his chopping block of a nose from repeat injury - that you will likely hear Nic laughing hysterically at the lemon-coloured hard hat-clad Daniel bolting for safety from, well, pretty much nothing, surrounded by a hundred people who barely moved a muscle. ;-)

Sadly ... the visual is not on tape, so you'll just have to enjoy this entry!