Good for a laugh???



>You'll recall a Darwin award from not too long ago where a guy decided to 
>strap a cargo plane rocket booster to his car to see how fast it would go, 
>and ended up hitting a cliff several hundred feet in the air.  Here's one 
>more.
>
>This story was clipped from the recent Darwin awards, which people get for 
>doing something incredibly stupid.  True stories.
>
>Here's the winner:  Larry Walters is among the relatively few who have 
>actually turned their dreams into reality.  His story is true, as hard as 
>you may find it to believe . . .
>
>Larry was a truck driver, but his lifelong dream was to fly.  When he 
>graduated from high school, he joined the Air Force in hopes of becoming a 
>pilot.  Unfortunately, poor eyesight disqualified him.  So when he finally 
>left the service, he had to satisfy himself with watching others fly the 
>fighter jets that crisscrossed the skies over his backyard.  As he sat there 
>in his lawn chair, he dreamed about the magic of flying.
>
>Then one day, Larry had an idea.  He went down to the local Army-Navy 
>surplus store and bought forty-five weather balloons, and several tanks of 
>helium. These were not your brightly colored party balloons, these were 
>heavy-duty spheres measuring more than four feet across when fully inflated. 
> Back in his yard, Larry used straps to attach the balloons to his lawn 
>chair, the kind you might have in your back yard.  He anchored the chair to 
>the bumper of his jeep, and inflated the balloons with helium.  Then he 
>packed a few sandwiches and drinks, and a loaded BB gun, figuring he could 
>pop a few balloons when it was time to return to earth.  His preparations 
>complete, Larry sat in his chair and cut the anchoring cord.  His plan was 
>to lazily float into the sky, and eventually back to terra firma.  But 
>things didn't quite work out that way.  When Larry cut the cord, he didn't 
>float lazily up; he shot up as if fired from a cannon!  Nor did he go up a 
>couple hundred feet.  He climbed and climbed until he finally leveled off at 
>eleven thousand feet!  At that height, he could hardly risk deflating any of 
>the balloons, lest he unbalance the load and really experience flying.  So 
>he stayed up there, sailing around for fourteen hours, totally at a loss 
>about how to get down.
>
>Eventually, Larry drifted into the approach corridor for Los Angeles 
>International Airport.  A Pan Am pilot radioed the tower about passing a guy 
>in a lawn chair at eleven thousand feet, with a gun in his lap . . . now 
>there's a conversation I would have given anything to have heard!  LAX is 
>right on the ocean, and you may know that at nightfall, the winds on the 
>coast begin to change.  So, as dusk fell, Larry began drifting out to sea. 
>At that point, the Navy dispatched a helicopter to rescue him, but the 
>rescue team had a hard time getting to him because the draft from their 
>propeller kept pushing his home-made contraption farther and farther away. 
>Eventually, they were able to hover above him and drop a rescue line, with 
>which they gradually hauled him back to safety.  As soon as Larry hit the 
>ground, he was arrested.  But as he was led away in handcuffs, a television 
>reporter called out, "Sir, why'd you do it?"  Larry stopped, eyed the man, 
>then replied nonchalantly, "A man can't just sit around!"