Sometimes YouTube can be a wonderful place, shimmering with visual gems like that video of a dad who accidentally pointed a GoPro the wrong way for a whole vacation, or whatever this is. But often it’s a hellscape—a place where PewDiePie makes millions playing video games, assholes play sadistic pranks on people, and child stars vlog themselves into ruin.
Jay Swingler is very good at navigating that hellscape, racking up more than 800,000 followers with videos of himself pulling bat-shit stupid stunts. This week, however, he made a jump to international headlines after deciding he’d try to cement his head inside a microwave—all for sweet, sweet YouTube glory.
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According to the Independent, Swingler and his buddies mixed seven bags of Polyfilla, a kind of quick-dry concrete, in a bucket, dumped it into a microwave, and stuck Swingler’s head inside. Luckily, he had the forethought to bring a breathing tube in there with him and wear a grocery bag as a mask, but—as anyone on Earth could’ve predicted—the stunt was a disaster.
Apparently he wanted to make a mold of his head, envisioning some kind of microwave hat he could take off and put back on at will. But given the fact that he literally shoved his head into a pool of quick-drying cement, the appliance wound up getting stuck, and his head was locked in so solidly his friends couldn’t begin to budge it. After laughing a bit, then screaming a bit, then finally freaking the fuck out because Swingler was teetering on the brink of death, his friends wound up calling the police. It took five firefighters in West Midlands, England, an hour and a half to finally free him.
The West Midlands Fire Service’s Shaun Dakin told the BBC Swingler “could quite easily have suffocated or have been seriously injured,” and the department is (understandably) pretty pissed at him for wasting their time.
But for Swingler, the whole thing eventually paid off. The video he and his friends ultimately made of the incident has been viewed more than a million times.
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