French Spider-Man Climbs World’s Tallest Building

Alain “Spider-man” Robert, the French guy who is famous for, uh, climbing up tall buildings, scaled his own version of Everest: The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building.

The climb took him about six hours, much of it in darkness lit only by a spotlight (it gets pretty hot in the desert); he wore a safety harness and was attached to a rope (“to comply with safety regulations”) but scaled the building without relying on either. I am not really sure I “get” the “point” of all this building-scaling M. Robert undertakes, but that just makes me like him more. Sometimes it’s nice to think that if you look up in a city, there’s a chance you’ll see a shrimpy long-haired French guy “waving triumphantly” from the side of a glass-walled monolith, just because he can. [BBC; image via AP]