Sense makes sense. Nik Wallenda walks tightrope blindfolded between skyscrapers; 79-yo Icon Maggie Smith; Magic magician Randi

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"If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him." - Robert Louis Stevenson

Daredevil Nik Wallenda wowed the world on Sunday November 2 when he crossed between two Chicago skyscrapers blindfolded and without a harness.

Maggie Smith interview for My Old Lady: 'If you have been around long enough you are an icon' - More famous than ever thanks to Downton Abbey, the 79-year-old actress tells Elizabeth Grice why she keeps going
Smith has been famous for 60 years, but with nothing like the worldwide reach she has now in the autumn of her career. She made her debut with the Oxford University Drama Society in 1952. In 1963 she played Desdemona opposite Laurence Olivier but as a young actress she felt inadequate and visually wrong. “I think there is an accepted way that a face should be, and I’m not like that.” Not that the lack of conventional beauty held her back. She won her first Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969, the second for California Suite in 1978. Honours and awards (including five Baftas) have been flowing ever since.
She claims she has never had a career plan or an ambition to play a specific part in her life. “It’s what turns up, quite honestly. When I started out I didn’t have any of this [film and television roles] in mind. Not a scrap of it. I just thought it was going to be all theatre and wonderful.”

McCabe had spent the last three years of his life thinking about London’s roads and landmarks, and how to navigate between them
In the process, he had logged more than 50,000 miles on motorbike and on foot, the equivalent of two circumnavigations of the Earth, nearly all within inner London’s dozen boroughs and the City of London financial district. He was studying to be a London taxi driver, devoting himself full-time to the challenge that would earn him a cabbie’s “green badge” and put him behind the wheel of one of the city’s famous boxy black taxis.

The Unbelievable Skepticism of the Amazing Randi

Google senior executive breaks Felix Baumgartner's parachute record in secret 135,000 foot jump from the edge of space
Alan Eustace, 57, a senior vice president of Knowledge at Google, was lifted by a balloon filled with 35,000 cubic feet of helium, from an abandoned runway at an airport in New Mexico.
A well-known computer scientist, he fell faster than the speed of sound and broke Baumgartner's world altitude record set just two years ago by jumping from 135,000 feet.

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Photos courtesy of Charles Rex Arbogast / AP, Bettmann / CORBIS, PBS, Rory Van Millingen, E.F. Corcoran/Topical Press Agency, Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images, Jeff Minton / The New York Times, and Paragon Space Development Corporation