Okay, this is just insane but Bango, the Milwaukee Bucks' mascot, pulled off this ridiculous feat Monday night at the Bradley Center, climbing to the top of a 16-foot ladder and then doing a backflip(!) slam dunk of a basketball.

I refuse to even climb anywhere near the top of a 16 foot ladder and, to me, the 6 feet down to the basket might as well be distance to the Grand Canyon.  But he was undaunted as you shall see:



It's not all balloons and ponies for flying reindeer though.  A year ago he tore his ACL (do morphologically suspect reindeer have those?) doing a stunt at the All-Star Game.:



Scientifically, a backflip is easy:  

d= 1/2*a*t^2

where d is the distance, a is the acceleration of gravity and t is time, though in reality it is not so simple because we worry about breaking our necks doing things we were not genetically engineered to do.  Obviously you are less likely to die the higher you go, giving you more time to do the flip, and that means a lot more practice.   I don't know how much time Bango spent but I think it would be easier to turn yourself into a little Eastern European gymnast girl than do what he just did.

Antler tip: Don Walker of the Journal Sentinel sports blog