Father Adelir Antonio de Carli

There’s no question Father Adelir Antonio de Carli was a good man. There’s no question Father De Carli was a nice man.

There’s no question that Father De Carli was a dumb man.

And now, there’s no question that Father De Carli, last seen in April headed out to sea carried by a bunch of helium-filled party balloons, is a dead man.

Father De Carli (name variously reported as De Capri as well), who was trying to beat the record for staying airborne via party balloons, has been found by the crew of a tugboat, hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic, which is, in a way, poetic: he’d been trying to raise money for a spiritual rest stop for those nomads of the landmass, truckers. Unfortunately, he’d been planning to travel inland, but Nature had other plans for him.

So, why am I being so mean about a nice fellow who took on grave personal risk and ridicule in the pursuit of the service of his god and his fellow man?

Because Father De Carli did not attempt learn to operate the GPS which was to relay his coordinates to trackers on the ground until after he was airborne.

From Gizmodo:

I need to contact someone who can teach me how to operate this GPS, so I can give the latitude and longitude coordinates, which is the only way that people on the ground can know where I am.

Now, as one who has always distrusted such devices on principal, and whose experiences with them have done nothing to dissuade me of my view of them as functionless Yuppie fear-sops and technofaith fetish amulets in the shape of bricks, I must say that even had the device functioned as such devices are known to do, it would have done nothing more useful than electrocute him when he hit the water, which would probably (in brutal retrospect) have been quicker than what ultimately happened.

May Father De Carli rest in peace, and may we all learn never to take off in a lawnchair pulled by a thousand helium balloons without proper preparation.

At least a windsock!

Father De Carli is airborne!