Foiled Again

It came up in conversation during dinner last night that Key Tower, the largest skyscraper between New York and Chicago, is up for grabs to whomever has roughly $228 million burning a hole in their pockets.

So I did some fact checking. Multiple sources place the height of the tower between 289 and 290 meters, with 57 floors of high-rise office spacey goodness. Unfortunately, it's hard to get a sense of scale regarding the building from the sidewalk, so I ran across a neat site that has some nice pics of the building.

And that's when I realized that I could never succeed in fulfilling my fantasy to jump off of the base of the spire to my gory demise on the pavement below. Simply put, the big blue crown on the top of the building is so completely ziggurat-like in its construction that it makes a free fall impossible. Thus to actually throw one's self off of Key Tower would require a slickened sliding apparatus, and no one will agree that skidding down a skyscraper's exterior in your bathing suit is an acceptable method by which to shuffle off this mortal coil.

There goes one more thing I have to scratch off the "Things to Do Before I Die" list. Namely, the last one.