Mentioned Le Parkour as evidence of superhumanity before, and now Mr. Ellis has woven it into the awesome Global Frequency. Dan Hill and Chris Heathcote discuss it here.

In Dan’s post he goes on to mention “The Green Wave”, an almost mythic urban phenomenon, where one catches a wave of green (go) lights at traffic signals driving through central london.

I remember once in the middle of the night in San Francisco, being taken up to the top of a three-stepped hill (near the Mint?) by my friend Nicole, then a designer for WiReD. She waited at the lights, engine revving until the it hit green.

She hit the gas, and we barrelled down the hill… reaching the next set of lights just as it hit green – they were on one of the steps and we got a little air under us… Faster, and down the next set of lights, still on red…

Still on red…

Still on red…

They turned green the instant we passed them, almost as if in doing so we had activated them – and flew…

There I was, fingernails dug into the dashboard, grinning with fear and realization that I was in a thousand films at once. Films that had been born out of a location scout or director knowing that San Francisco allowed you to do this there, if you just let the city play with you hard enough.

Off to SF/Santa Clara tomorrow for O’Reilly EtCon, to meet up with the British Geek Expeditionary Force.

Hopefully see you there.