CNN's Anderson Cooper On David Blaine's Latest Caper

CNN has this video about David Blaine's latest performance, the "hanging upside down for 60 hours thing," pointing out that Mr. Blaine will be resting periodically so that the blood doesn't rush to his head, and so that he minimizes that possibility of injury. Anderson Cooper seems to criticize him for it, by showing a photo of Doug Henning, and suggest that Mr. Blaine is being somehow less than honest by taking "breaks." I understand the point that originally the stunt seemed to be something that would go on for sixty hours, unbroken by any breaks. But of course any reasonable person would have had to have wondered about that. 

And I don't see the comparison with the late, great Doug Henning. When Mr. Blaine does these kinds of things--encasing himself in ice, or hanging from the rafters like a bat, well, these are stunts. If he has to escape from them, they are stunts that look like Houdini's escapes. They are not street magic (which Mr. Blaine also does). They are not the kind of magic that Mr. Henning did in the photo that Mr. Cooper shows in the clip. I'm not a great fan of the Blaine School of Magic, but he doesn't seem to be a Henningist to begin with. Let's not compare doves and bunny rabbits. They each have their modes of transportation.