At the 1994 annual awards dinner given for Forensic Science, AAFS, President Dr. Don Harper Mills astounded his audience with the legal complications of a bizarre death. Here is the story:
On March 23,1994 the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound to the head. Mr. Opus had jumped from the top of a ten story building intending to commit suicide. He left a note to that effect, indicating his despondency. As he fell past the ninth floor his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast passing through a window which killed him instantly.
Neither the shooter nor the descender was aware that a safety net had been installed just below at the eighth floor level to protect some building workers and that Ronald Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide the way he had planned.
"Ordinarily," Dr. Mills continued, "a person who sets out to commit suicide and ultimately succeeds, even though the mechanism might not be what he intended, is still defined as committing suicide."
That Mr. Opus was shot on the way to certain death, but probably would not have been successful because of the safety net, caused the medical examiner to feel that he had a homicide on his hands. The room on the ninth floor, whence the shotgun blast emanated, was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. They were arguing vigorously and he was threatening her with a shotgun. The man was so upset that when he pulled the trigger he completely missed his wife and the pellets went through the window, striking Mr. Opus.
When one intends to kill subject A but kills subject B in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject B. When confronted with the murder charge the old man and his wife were both adamant. They both said they thought the shotgun was unloaded. Thed old man said it was his long-standing habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder her. Therefore the killing of Mr. Opus appeared to be an accident; that is, the gun had been accidentally loaded.
The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple's son loading the shotgun about six weeks prior to the fatal accident. It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son's financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother. The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus.
Now comes the exquisite twist. Further investigation revealed that the son was, in fact, Ronald Opus. He had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother's murder. This led him to jump off the ten story building on March 23rd, only to be killed by a shotgun blast passing through the ninth story window. The son had actually murdered himself so the medical examiner closed the case as a suicide.
This one needs an introduction, so you won't be lost at the beginning. This man was in an accident at work, so he filled out an insurance claim. The insurance company contacted him and asked for more information. This was his response:
"I am writing in response to your request for additional information, for block number 3 of the accident reporting form. I put 'poor planning' as the cause of my accident. You said in your letter that I should explain more fully and I trust the following detail will be sufficient. I am an amateur radio operator and on the day of the accident, I was working alone on the top section of my new 80-foot tower. When I had completed my work, I discovered that I had, over the course of several trips up the tower, brought up about 300 pounds of tools and spare hardware. Rather than carry the now unneeded tools and material down by hand, I decided to lower the items down in a small barrel by using the pulley attached to the gin pole at the top of the tower. Securing the rope at ground level, I went to the top of the tower and loaded the tools and material into the barrel. Then I went back to the ground and untied the rope, holding it tightly to ensure a slow decent of the 300 pounds of tools."
"Devoid of the weight of the tools, the barrel now weighed approximately 20 pounds. I refer you again to my weight in block number 11. As you might imagine, I began a rapid descent down the side of the tower. In the vicinity of the 40-foot level, I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the two fractured ankles, and the lacerations of my legs and lower body. The encounter with the barrel slowed me enough to lessen my injuries when I fell onto the pile of tools and, fortunately, only three vertebrae were cracked. I am sorry to report, however, that as I lay there on the tools, in pain, unable to stand and watching the empty barrel 80 feet above me, I again lost my presence of mind. I let go of the rope..."
This guy pushed his motorcycle from the patio into his living room, where he began to clean the engine with some rags and a bowl of gasoline, all in the comfort of his own home. When he finished, he sat on the motorcycle and decided to give his bike a quick start and make sure everything was still OK. Unfortunately, the bike started in gear, and crashed through the glass patio door with him still clinging to the handlebars.
His wife had been working in the kitchen. She came running at the fearful sound, and found him crumpled on the patio, badly cut from the shards of broken glass. She called 911, and the paramedics carried the unfortunate man to the Emergency Room.
Later that afternoon, after many stitches had pulled her husband back together, the wife brought him home and put him to bed. She cleaned up the mess in the living room, and dumped the bowl of gasoline in the toilet.
Shortly thereafter, her husband woke up, lit a cigarette, and went into the bathroom for a much-needed relief break. He sat down and tossed the cigarette into the toilet, which promptly exploded because the wife had not flushed the gasoline away. The explosion blew the man through the bathroom door.
The wife heard a loud explosion and the terrible sound of her husband's screams. She ran into the hall and found her husband lying on the floor with his trousers blown away and burns on his buttocks. The wife again ran to the phone and called for an ambulance.
The same two paramedics were dispatched to the scene. They loaded the husband on the stretcher and began carrying him to the street. One of them asked the wife how the injury had occurred. When she told them, they began laughing so hard that they dropped the stretcher, and broke the guy's collarbone.
"I pushed a cardboard toilet paper tube up his rectum and slipped Ragout, our gerbil, in," he explained. "As usual, Kiki shouted out 'Armageddon,' my cue that he'd had reached nirvana, so to speak. I tried to retrieve Raggot but he simply would not come out, so I peered into the tube and struck a match, thinking the light might attract him."
At a hushed press conference, a hospital spokesman desribed what happened next.
"The match ignited a pocket of intestinal methane gas in Kiki's colon. Flames shot out the tube, ignited Mr. Tomaszewski's hair and severely burning his face. It also set fire to the gerbil's fur and whiskers, causing it to scurry further up Kiki's colon, which in turn ignited a larger pocket of gas further up the intestine, propelling the rodent out of the cardboard tube like a cannonball."
Tomaszewski suffered second degree burns and a broken nose from the impact of the gerbil, while Farnum suffered first and second degree burns to his anus and lower intestinal tract.
Sadly, Ragout the gerbil did not survive the incident.
Raccoon Rocket In rural Carbon County, Pennsylvania, a group of men were drinking beer and discharging firearms from the rear deck of a home owned by Irving Michaels, age 27. The men were firing at a raccoon that was wandering by, but the beer apparently impaired their aim. Despite an estimated 35 shots fired by the group, the animal escaped into a 3' diameter drainage pipe 100 feet away from Mr. Michaels' deck. Determined to terminate the animal, Mr. Michaels retrieved a can of gasoline and poured some down the pipe, intending to smoke the animal out. After several unsuccessful attempts to ignite the fuel, Michaels emptied the entire five-gallon fuel can down the pipe and tried to light it again, to no avail. Not one to admit defeat by wildlife, the determined Mr. Michaels proceeded to slide feet-first approximately 15 feet down the sloping pipe to toss the match. The subsequent rapidly-expanding fireball propelled Mr. Michaels back the way he had come, though at a much higher rate of speed. He exited the angled pipe "like a Polaris missile leaves a submarine," according to witness Joseph McFadden, 31. Mr. Michaels was launched directly over his own home, right over the heads of his astonished friends, onto his front lawn. In all, he traveled over 200 feet through the air. "There was a Doppler Effect to his scream as he flew over us," McFadden reported, "followed by a loud thud." Amazingly, he suffered only minor injuries. "It was actually pretty cool," Michaels said, "Like when they shoot someone out of a cannon at the circus. I'd do it again if I was sure I wouldn't get hurt."
In rural Carbon County, Pennsylvania, a group of men were drinking beer and discharging firearms from the rear deck of a home owned by Irving Michaels, age 27. The men were firing at a raccoon that was wandering by, but the beer apparently impaired their aim. Despite an estimated 35 shots fired by the group, the animal escaped into a 3' diameter drainage pipe 100 feet away from Mr. Michaels' deck.
Determined to terminate the animal, Mr. Michaels retrieved a can of gasoline and poured some down the pipe, intending to smoke the animal out. After several unsuccessful attempts to ignite the fuel, Michaels emptied the entire five-gallon fuel can down the pipe and tried to light it again, to no avail.
Not one to admit defeat by wildlife, the determined Mr. Michaels proceeded to slide feet-first approximately 15 feet down the sloping pipe to toss the match. The subsequent rapidly-expanding fireball propelled Mr. Michaels back the way he had come, though at a much higher rate of speed. He exited the angled pipe "like a Polaris missile leaves a submarine," according to witness Joseph McFadden, 31.
Mr. Michaels was launched directly over his own home, right over the heads of his astonished friends, onto his front lawn. In all, he traveled over 200 feet through the air. "There was a Doppler Effect to his scream as he flew over us," McFadden reported, "followed by a loud thud." Amazingly, he suffered only minor injuries.
"It was actually pretty cool," Michaels said, "Like when they shoot someone out of a cannon at the circus. I'd do it again if I was sure I wouldn't get hurt."
"The sheer force of the elephant's unexpected defecation knocked Mr. Riesfeldt to theground, where he struck his head on a rock and lay unconscious as the elephant continued to evacuate his bowels on top of him," said flabbergasted Paderborn police detective Erik Dern. "With no one there to help him, he lay under all that dung for at least an hour before a watchman came along, and during that time he suffocated. "It seems to be just one of those freak accidents that happen."
The bullet missed him completely and cut through the rope above him. Now freed from the threat of hanging, he plunged into the sea. The dunking extinguished the flames and made him vomit the poison. He was dragged out of the water by a kind fisherman and was taken to a hospital, where he died of hypothermia.
A fellow from Michigan buys himself a brand-new $30,000 Jeep Grand Cherokee for Christmas. He goes down to his favorite bar and celebrates by tossing down a few too many brews with his buddies. In one of those male-bonding rituals, five of them decide to take his new vehicle for a test drive on a duck hunting expedition. They load up the Jeep with the dog, the guns, the decoys, and the beer, and head out to a nearby lake.
Now, it's the dead of winter, and of course the lake is frozen, so they need to make a hole in the ice to create a natural landing area for the ducks and decoys. It is common practice in Michigan to drive your vehicle out onto the frozen lake, and it is also common (if slightly illegal) to make a hole in the ice using dynamite. Our fellows have nothing to worry about on that score, because one member of the party works for a construction team, and happens to have brought some dynamite along. The stick has a short 20-second fuse.
The group is ready for some action. They're all set up. Their shotguns are loaded with duck pellets, and they have beer, warm clothes and a hunting dog. Still chugging down a seemingly bottomless supply of six-packs, the group considers how to safely dynamite a hole through the ice. One of these rocket scientists points out that the dynamite should explode at a location far from where they are standing. Another notes the risk of slipping on the ice when running away from a burning fuse. So they eventually settle on a plan to light the fuse and throw the dynamite out onto the ice.
There is a bit of contention over who has the best throwing arm, and eventually the owner of the Jeep wins that honor. Once that question is settled, he walks about 20 feet further out onto the ice and holds the stick of dynamite at the ready while one of his companions lights the fuse with a Zippo. As soon as he hears the fuse sizzle, he hurls it across the ice at a great velocity and runs in the other direction.
Unfortunately, a member of another species spots his master's arm motions and comes to an instinctive decision. Remember a couple of paragraphs back when I mentioned the vehicle, the beer, the guns and the dog? Yes, the dog: a trained Black Labrador, born and bred for retrieving, especially things thrown by his owner. As soon as the stick leaves his hand, the dog sprints across the ice, hell-bent on wrapping his jaws around the enticing stick-shaped object.
Five frantic fellows immediately begin hollering at the dog, trying to get him to stop chasing the dynamite. Their cries fall on deaf ears. Before you know it, the retriever is headed back to his owner, proudly carrying the stick of dynamite with the burning 20-second fuse. The group continues to yell and wave their arms while the happy dog trots towards them. In a desperate act, its master grabs his shotgun and fires at his own dog.
The gun is loaded with duck shot, and confuses the dog more than it hurts him. Bewildered, he continues towards his master, who shoots at man's best friend again. Finally comprehending that his owner has become insane, the dog runs for cover with his tail between his legs. And the nearest cover is right under the brand-new Jeep Grand Cherokee.
Boom! The dog and the Jeep are blown to bits, and sink to the bottom of the lake, leaving a large ice hole in their wake. The stranded men stand staring at the water with stupid looks on their faces, and the owner of the Jeep is left to explain the misadventure to his insurance company. Needless to say, they determined that sinking a vehicle in a lake by illegal use of explosives is not covered under their policy, and the owner is still making $400 monthly payments on his brand-new Jeep at the bottom of the lake
A Vermont native found himself in a difficult position yesterday while touring the Eagle's Rock African Safari Zoo with a group of thespians from St. Petersburg, Russia. Ronald went to extremes to demonstrate the power of Crazy Glue, one of America's many marvels, to the Russians.
To prove the effectiveness of Crazy Glue, he rubbed several ounces of the adhesive onto the palms of his hands and jokingly placed them on the buttocks of a passing rhino.
The rhinoceros, a resident of the zoo for the thirteen years, was not initially startled, as it has been part of the petting exhibit since its arrival as a baby. However, once it became aware of being involuntarily stuck to Ronald, it began to panic and charge wildly about the petting area with Ronald as an unwitting passenger.
"Sally the Rhino hadn't been feeling well. She was constipated, and had just been given a laxative when the American played his juvenile prank, " said caretaker James Douglass.
During Sally's tirade, a shed wall was gored, two fences destroyed, and a number of small animals escaped. Three pygmy goats and one duck were stomped to death. During the stampede and subsequent capture, Sally began to feel the effects of the laxative, showering Ronald repeatedly with over 30 gallons of rhinoceros diarrhea.
A team of medics and zoo caretakers were needed to remove his hands from Sally's buttocks. "It was tricky. We had to calm her down while shielding our faces from the pelting rhino dung. I guess you could say that Ronald was in it up to his neck.
Once she was under control, three people with shovels were working to keep an air passage open for him. We were eventually able to tranquilize Sally and apply a solvent to remove his hands from her rear," said Douglass. "I don't think he'll be playing with Crazy Glue for awhile."
Meanwhile, the amused Russians were impressed with the power of the adhesive. "I'm going to buy some for my children, but of course they can't take it to the zoo," commented Vladimir Zolnikov, leader of the troupe.
Ronald did not die, nor was there any reproductive injury, so he can only qualify for a Darwin Award if you are persuaded by the fact that nobody would date a man who smelled of rhino dung.
Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It's a wetsuit.
This time of year the water is quite cool. So here's what we do to keep warm: We have a diesel-powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temp. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a damn good plan, doesn't it? I've used it several times with no complaints.
When I get to the bottom and start working, what I do is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my neck and flood my whole suit with warm water. It's like working in a Jacuzzi. Everything was going well until my ass started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my itchy ass started to burn. I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done.
In agony I realized what had happened. The hot-water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. This
When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into my ass. I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communications system. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he and 5 other divers were laughing hysterically.
Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make 3 hellish in-water decompression stops totaling 35 minutes before I could reach the surface for my chamber dry decompression. I got to the surface wearing nothing but my brass helmet. My suit and gear were tied to the bell. When I got on board, the medic, with tears of laughter streaming down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to coat my ass when I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn't *** for two days because my *** was swollen shut.
We've since modified the equipment to filter out most sea creatures.
Anyway, the next time you have a bad day at the office, think of me. Think about how much worse your day would be if you were to squash a jellyfish on your ass. I hope you have no bad days at the office. But if you do, I hope this will make it more tolerable.
Police in George, WA issued a report on the events leading up to the deaths of Robert Uhlenake, 24, and his friend, Ormond D. Young, 27, at a Friday night Metallica concert.
Uhlenake and Young were found dead at the Gorge Amphitheater after the show. Uhlenake was in pickup that was on top of Young at the bottom of a 20-ft drop. Young was found with severe lacerations, numerous fractures, contusions, and a branch in his anal cavity. He also had been stabbed and his pants were in a tree above him, some 15 ft off the ground, adding to the mystery of the heretofore unexplained scene.
According to Commissioner-In-Charge Inoye Appleton, Uhlenake and Young had tried to get tickets for the sold-out concert. When they were unable to get any tickets, the two decided to stay in the parking lot and drink. Once the show began, and after the two had consumed 18 beers between the them, they hit upon the idea of scaling the 7-foot wooden security fence around the perimeter of the site and sneak in.
They apparently moved the truck up to the edge of the fence and decided that Young would go over first and assist Uhlenake. They did not count on the fact that, while it was a 7-foot fence on the parking lot side, there was a 23-foot drop on the other side.
Young, who weighed 255 lbs. and was quite inebriated, jumped up and over the fence and promptly fell about half the distance before a large tree branch broke his fall and his left forearm. He also managed to get his shorts caught on the branch. Since he was now in great pain and had no way to extricate himself and his shorts from the tree, he decided to cut his shorts off and fall to the bushes below.
As soon as he cut the last bit of fabric holding him on the branch, he suddenly plummeted the rest of the way down, losing his grip on the knife. The bushes he had depended on to break his fall were actually holly bushes, and landing in them caused a massive number of cuts. He also had the misfortune of landing squarely on a holly bush branch, effectively impaling himself. The knife, which he had accidentally released 15 feet up, now landed and stabbed him in his left thigh. He was in tremendous pain.Enter his friend Robert Uhlenake.
Uhlenake had observed the series of tumbles and realized that Young was in trouble. He hit upon the idea of lowering a rope to his friend and pulling him up and over the fence. This was complicated by the fact that Uhlenake was outweighed by his friend by a good 100 lbs. Happily, despite his drunken state, he realized he could use their truck to pull Young out. Unfortunately, because of his drunken state, Uhlenake put the truck in reverse rather than into drive. He broke through the fence and landed on Young, killing him. Uhlenake was thrown from the truck and subsequently died of internal injuries.
"So that's how a dead 255 lb. man with no pants on, with a truck on top of him and a stick up his ass, came to be" said Commissioner Appleton.
"The old lady spent a week hunting those bums down -- and when she found them, she took revenge on them in her own special way," said admiring Melbourne police investigator Evan Delp. "Then she took a taxi to the nearest police station, laid the gun on the sergeant's desk and told him as calm as could be: 'Those bastards will never rape anybody again, by God.'
Cops say convicted rapist and robber Davis Furth, 33, lost both his penis and his testicles when outraged Ava opened fire with a 9-mm pistol in the seedy hotel room where he and former prison cellmate Stanley Thomas, 29, were holed up.
The wrinkled avenger also blew Thomas' testicles to kingdom come, but doctors managed to save his mangled penis, police said. "The one guy, Thomas, didn't lose his manhood, but the doctor I talked to said he won't be using it the way he used to," Detective Delp told reporters. "Both men are still in pretty bad shape, but I think they're just happy to be alive after what they've been through."
The Rambo Granny swung into action after her granddaughter Debbie was carjacked and raped by two knife-wielding creeps in a section of town bordering on skid row.
"When I saw the look on my Debbie's face that night in the hospital, I decided I was going to go out and get those bastards myself 'cause I figured the police would go easy on them," recalled the retired library worker. "And I wasn't scared of them, either -- because I've got me a gun and I've been shootin' it all my life."
So, using a police artist's sketch of the suspects and Debbie's description of the sickos' car, tough-as-nails Ava spent seven days prowling the wino-infested neighborhood where the crime took place till she spotted the ill-fated rapists entering their flophouse hotel.
"I knew it was them the minute I saw 'em, but I shot a picture of 'em anyway and took it back to Debbie and she said sure as hell, it was them," the ornery oldster recalled. "So I went back to that hotel and found their room and knocked on the door -- and the minute the big one, Furth, opened the door, I shot 'em; got right square between the legs, right where it would really hurt 'em most, you know. Then I went down to the police station and turned myself in."
Now, baffled lawmen are tying to figure out how to deal with the vigilante granny. "What she did was wrong, but you can't really throw an 81-year-old woman in prison." Det. Delp said, "especially when all 3 million people in the city want to nominate her for sainthood."
The recent craze for hydrogen beer is at the heart of a three-way lawsuit between unemployed stockbroker Toshira Otoma, the Tike-Take karaoke bar, and the Asaka Beer Corporation. Mr. Otoma is suing the bar and the brewery for selling toxic substances, and is claiming damages for grievous bodily harm leading to the loss of his job. The bar is counter-suing for defamation and loss of customers.
The Asaka Beer corporation brews "Suiso" brand beer, in which the carbon dioxide normally used to add fizz has been replaced by the more environmentally friendly hydrogen gas. Two side effects of the hydrogen gas have made the beer extremely popular at karaoke sing-along bars and discotheques.
First, because hydrogen molecules are lighter than air, sound waves are transmitted more rapidly, so individuals whose lungs are filled with the nontoxic gas can speak with an uncharacteristically high voice. Exploiting this quirk of physics, chic urbanites can now sing soprano parts on karaoke sing-along machines after consuming a big gulp of Suiso beer.
Second, the flammable nature of hydrogen has also become a selling point, though it should be noted that Asaka has not acknowledged that this was a deliberate marketing ploy.
The beer has inspired a new fashion of blowing flames from one's mouth using a cigarette as an ignition source. Many new karaoke videos feature singers shooting blue flames in slow motion, while flame contests take place in pubs everywhere. "Mr. Otoma has no one to blame but himself. If he had not become drunk and disorderly, none of this would have happened. Our security guards undergo the most careful screening and training before they are allowed to deal with customers," said Mr. Takashi Nomura, Manager of the Tike-Take bar.
"Mr. Otoma drank fifteen bottles of hydrogen beer in order to maximize the size of the flames he could belch during the contest. He catapulted balls of fire across the room that Godzilla would be proud of, but this was not enough to win him first prize since the judgment is made on the quality of the flames and the singing, and after fifteen bottles of lager he was badly out of tune."
"He took exception to the result and hurled blue fireballs at the judge, singeing the front of a female judge's hair and entirely removing her eyebrows and lashes, and ruining the clothes of two nearby customers. None of these people have returned to my bar. When our security staff approached Mr. Otoma, he turned his attentions to them, making it almost impossible to approach him. Our head bouncer had no choice but to hurl himself at Mr. Otoma's knees, knocking his legs from under him."
"The laws of physics are not to be disobeyed, and the force that propelled Mr. Otoma's legs backwards also pivoted around his center of gravity and moved his upper body forward with equal velocity. It was his own fault that he had his mouth open for the next belch, his own fault that he held a lighted cigarette in front of it, and his own fault that he swallowed that cigarette."
"The Tike-Take bar takes no responsibility for the subsequent internal combustion, rupture of his stomach lining, nor the third degree burns to his esophagus, larynx and sinuses as the exploding gases forced their way out of his body. Mr. Otoma's consequential muteness and loss of employment are his own fault."
So you think you're having a bad day? In California, wildfires are part of the natural cycle of the forest. They are caused by lightning, by arson, by acts of God. Brave firefighters earn their livings extingiushing these ravenous blazes.
Recently, Fire Marshals found a corpse in a rural section of California while they were assessing the damage done by a recent forest fire. The deceased male was dressed in diving gear consisting of a recently-melted wetsuit, a dive tank, flippers, and facemask. Apparently the man had been participating in recreational diving fairly recently.
A post-mortem examination attributed death not to burns, but to massive internal injuries. Salt water was found in his stomach. Dental records provided a positive identification of a man who had been reported missing a week before, and the next-of-kin were notified. Investigators then set about determining how a fully clad diver ended up in the middle of a forest fire.
It was discovered that, on the day of the fire, the deceased had set out on diving trip in the Pacific Ocean. His third dive was 20 kilometers away from the location of a large brush fire which which was threatening the saftey of a nearby town.
Firefighters, seeking to control the conflagration as quickly as possible, had called in a fleet of helicopters to saturate the area with water. The helicopters towed large buckets, which were dropped into the ocean for rapid filling, then flown to the fire and emptied.
You guessed it! One minute our diver was marveling at the fish species of the Pacific, and in the next breath, he found himself in a fire bucket 300 meters in the air. He experienced rapid decompression caused by the altitude change, suddenly followed by a plummet into burning trees.
As a consolation to bereaved relatives, investigators calculate that the man extinguished roughly 1.78 square meters of the fire, approximately the area covered by a splattered human body. Bereaved are also consoled by the knowledge that he had enjoyed two rewarding dives preceeding his fatal third dive.
Divers and pilots alike are being warned to remain on the alert. Divers are encouraged to remain calm if scooped from the water, and to hang onto the bucket when the water is dumped on the fire. Decompression chambers will be available immediately upon landing.
One day, Jack's co-workers returned from their break to find Jack missing. All that remained was his lunch pail and, curiously, his work boots. No one could explain his continuing absence. After several days, the company launched an investigation. The truth came to light, though it took a bit of persuasion to extract the story from his reluctant co-workers.
Jack's doctor had recently warned him that his cholesterol and blood pressure were both dangerously high. The doctor suggested regular mild exercise. Jack had little spare time on his hands, but thought that he could fit in some exercise during his lunch break. Jack would eat his lunch, and then change into sneakers and hop onto the coal runner to jog until his break was over. Because he was self-conscious about his weight, he always made sure nobody was around when he exercised.
Jack's body was never found. Fortunately he had confided his novel exercise regime to a few people at the power plant, or we would never have learned of his tragic demise. Jack must have passed out and been converted into power for hundreds of homes, paving the way for a new, ecologically sound replacement for fossil fuels:
Thurston Poole, 33, of Des Arc, and Billy Ray Wallis, 38, of Little Rock, are listed in serious condition at Baptist Medical Center. The accident occurred as the two men were returning to Des Arc after a frog-giggin' trip.
On an overcast Sunday night, Poole's pickup truck's headlights malfunctioned. The two men concluded that the headlight fuse on the older model truck had burned out. A replacement fuse was not available, but Wallis noticed that the .22 caliber bullet from his pistol fit perfectly into the fuse box next to the steering wheel column. Upon inserting the bullet, the headlights again began to operate properly and the two men proceeded on eastbound toward the White River Bridge.
"Thank God we weren't on that bridge when Thurston (shot his intimate parts off) or we might have been dead," stated Wallis. "I've been a trooper for 10 years in this part of the world, but this is a first for me. I can't believe that those two would admit how the accident happened," said Snyder.
Upon being notified of the wreck, Lavinia, Poole's wife, asked how many frogs the boys had caught.
These are the facts:
When Sherry dropped her husband off for his first day of work, she kissed him goodbye and flashed her breasts at him. "I'm still not sure why I did it," she said. "I didn't think anyone would see, and besides, it couldn't have been for more than two seconds."
Unbeknownst to her, the cab driver did see her breasts, and he lost control of his taxi. It careened over a curb and into the corner of the Johnson Medical Building, where Pamela, a dental technician, was cleaning Bryan's gums. When the car came through the wall, Bryan bit down in shock, severing two fingers from Pamela's righthand.
Breast-flasher Sherry was injured by masonry falling from the Johnson Medical Building.
Overcome by the romantic locale, the lissome lass succumbed to his pleas. Soon they tossed their clothes off, made a bed of their garments, and began to make love. The heavy storm clouds rolling overhead mingled with the low rumble of thunder inside them. The excited lovers never looked up to see the charred remains of trees on the knoll.
Their idyllic clearing was a hotbed of electrical activity that night. With a blinding light, a bolt of lightning struck the high point on the knoll, which happened to be the pre-med student's ass, and sought the path of least resistance straight down. Incredibly, he survived, albeit in excruciating pain.
The heat of the bolt had fused together flesh and latex so that the two lovers were now stuck together. The woman unfortunately did not survive the lightning strike. When the student looked down into the vacant eyes of his girlfriend and realized she was dead, his immediate repulsion caused him to jerk away from her. When he found that he couldn't, a wave of pain and nausea made him vomit into the girl's face and open mouth.
Heaving only caused more pain and illness. Finally he passed out. Attracted by the smell, a bear found its way to the lovers and began to lick semi-digested pizza and buffalo wings from the dead girl's face. The student roused from his exhaustion. When he saw the bear, he realized that there was nothing he could do but lay silently in fear.
At 11:35AM, a group of camping girl scouts arrived at the lover's tryst, where the pre-med student's car was parked. Minutes later, three screaming girls discovered the student, who had regained consciousness several times in the night and had managed to drag himself and the partially-eaten girl several meters towards the road.
Doctors managed to separate the student from the corpse.
According to a hospital source, his penis resembled "a small piece of cauliflower" in its flaccid state. The first hint of arousal resulted in so much pain that the student was unable and unwilling to achieve an erection. It is doubtful that it will ever again function in a procreatory sense.
In complete disregard of common sense, he dropped a large lit firecracker, equivalent in strength to a quarter stick of dynamite, into his aluminum straight mute, and then stuck the mute into the bell of his new Yamaha in-line double-valve bass trombone.
Later from his hospital bed he explained to a reporter through a mask of bandages, "I thought the bell of my trombone would shield me from the explosion and focus the energy of the blast outwards and away from me, propelling the mute high above the orchestra like a rocket."
However Paolo was not to speed on his propulsion physics, nor was he qualified to wield high-powered artillery. Despite his haste to raise the horn before the firecracker exploded, he failed to lift the bell of the horn high enough for the airborne mute's arc to clear the orchestra. What happened should serve as a lesson to us all during our own delirious moments of divine inspiration.
First, because he failed to sufficiently elevate the bell of his horn, the blast propelled the mute between rows of musicians in the woodwind and viola section, where it bypassed the players and rammed straight into the stomach of the conductor, driving him backwards off the podium and directly into the front row of the audience.
Fortunately, the audience was sitting in folding chairs and thus they protected from serious injury. The chairs collapsed under the first row, and passed the energy from the impact of the flying conductor backwards into the people sitting behind them, who in turn were driven back into the people in the third row and so on, like a row of dominos. The sound of collapsing wooden chairs and grunts of people falling on their behinds increased geometrically, adding to the overall commotion of cannons and brass playing the closing measures of the Overture.
Meanwhile, unplanned audience choreography notwithstanding, Paolo Esperanza's Waterloo was still unfolding back on stage. According to Paolo, "As I heard the sound of the firecracker blast, time seemed to stand still. Right before I lost consciousness, I heard an Austrian accent say, "Fur every akshon zer iz un eekval unt opposeet reakshon!" This comes as no surprise, for Paolo was about to become a textbook demonstration of this fundamental law of physics.
Having failed to plug the lead pipe of his trombone, he paved the way for the energy of the blast to send a superheated jet of gas backwards through the mouthpiece, which slammed into his face like the hand of fate, burning his lips and face and knocking him mercifully unconscious.
The pyrotechnic ballet wasn't over yet. The force of the blast was so great it split the bell of his shiny new Yamaha trombone right down the middle, turning it inside out while propelling Paolo backwards off the riser. For the grand finale, as Paolo fell to the ground, his limp hands lost their grip on the slide of the trombone, allowing the pressure of the hot gases to propel the slide like a golden spear into the head of the third clarinetist, knocking him senseless.
A terrible diet and room with no ventilation are being blamed for the death of a man killed by his own gas. There were no marks found on his body, but an autopsy revealed the presence of large amounts of methane dissolved in his blood.
His diet had consisted primarily of beans and cabbage, just the right combination of foods to produce a severe gas attack. It appears that the man died in his sleep from breathing the poisonous cloud that was hanging over his bed.
Had his windows been open, the flatulence wouldn't have been fatal, but the man was shut up in a nearly airtight bedroom. He was an obese man with an unlimited capacity for creating the deadly gas. Three rescuers became sick and one was hospitalized.
A circus dwarf met a disastrous demise, when he was swallowed by a hippopotamus in a freak accident in northern Thailand.
Od the Dwarf had just astounded the audience with a trapeze performance, when he dismounted onto a trampoline at a bad angle. He was launched sideways into the mouth of a yawning hippopotamus waiting to appear in the next act. Hilda the Hippo gagged and instinctively swallowed the small man while spectators continued to applaud, not realizing their tragic mistake.
Horrified circus members rushed to save the dwarf, but were unable to extract him from the traumatized beast. Veterinarians defended Hilda by pointing out that she was a vegetarian, and had never before digested a circus performer.
The trampoline is being subjected to forensic analysis.
The circus is now hiring.
Baker had been suspended on a safety violation once last year, according to Northern Manatoba Signal Relay spokesperson Tanya Cooke. She noted that Baker's earlier infraction was for defeating a safety shutoff switch and entering a restricted maintenance catwalk in order to stand in front of the microwave dish. He had told coworkers that it was the only way he could stay warm during his twelve-hour shift at the station, where winter temperatures often dip to forty below zero.
Microwaves can heat water molecules within human tissue in the same way that they heat food in microwave ovens. For his Christmas shift, Baker reportedly brought a twelve pack of beer and a plastic lawn chair, which he positioned directly in line with the strongest microwave beam. Baker had not been told about a tenfold boost in microwave power planned that night to handle the anticipated increase in holiday long-distance calling traffic.
Baker's body was discovered by the daytime watchman, John Burns, who was greeted by an odor he mistook for a Christmas roast he thought Baker must have prepared as a surprise. Burns also reported to NMSR company officials that Baker's unfinished beers had exploded.
The entire front end had been ripped off, which is an odd damage pattern. The owner offered the following tale.
He had allowed the motorcycle to sit idle for several months. When he attempted to start it again, the wait had drained the battery. Undeterred, he attempted to bump-start the bike. A manual-transmission vehicle rolling with sufficient speed, popped into second gear, will often start right up, and this is called a bump-start.
The owner lived at the top of a long hill. After a number of repeated and unsuccessful attempts to bump-start the bike, he was left with another problem: a stalled bike sitting at the bottom of a long incline.
The man called his girlfriend to bring her truck and tow the bike back up the hill. A length of rope was procured. One end of the rope was affixed to the truck's bumper, and the other was affixed to the waist of the bike owner "riding" the stalled motorcycle up the hill.
They set off, she in her truck and he on his bike. All was well until he chose to make one final attempt to bump-start the motorcycle. As soon as the clutch engaged, the engine turned into a brake. The bike stopped cold. The owner did not.
His girlfriend was blissfully unaware of what was happening behind her and proceeded to drive to his house, dragging him slowly behind her.
Despite his injuries, he is expected to recover.
The machine started its cycle, and Strickson, unable to free himself, started thrashing around as the machine's agitator went into gear. Strickson's head banged against a nearby shelf in the laundry room, knocking over a bottle of bleach, which poured over Strickson's face, blinding him. Forensic reports
At about the same time, according to police, a large box of baking soda fell from the shelf, startling the dog, who then urinated. Urine, like vinegar, is acidic, and the chemical reaction between the urine and the baking soda resulted in "a small explosion," according to police reports. The dog, however, escaped unharmed. Strickson remained stuck in the washing machine, which eventually went into its high-speed spin cycle, spinning Strickson around at about 70 miles per hour, according to forensic experts. Strickson's head then smashed against a steel beam behind the washing machine, immediately killing him. A neighbor heard the commotion and called 911, but Strickson was pronounced dead at the scene.
Thinking that the tractor was not moving fast enough to warrant stopping -- or perhaps just not thinking at all -- he jumped down and ran in front of the tractor to collect his hat. It was still being blown around by the wind, and after chasing it for a bit, he finally caught up with it. Meanwhile, the harvester had caught up with him, and his body was found scattered across the wheat field.
Local authorities were contacted by a neighbor who noticed the tractor crossing Highway 96 with no driver.
"All that really happened was that an amateur taxidermist had brought the dead fox in and asked if he could pump some air between the fur and the skin to loosen the pelt. He just overdid it a bit, then fled in embarrassment." There were animal parts scattered all over the forecourt, and a cluster of shocked and horrified people.
"The garage has been under siege for several days following a report on calling the act ???sick and disgusting.'" Animal rights activists have been calling the station and threatening reprisals. "Nobody will work here alone anymore."
Its hard enough to hold a living fox, let alone insert an airline up its rectum, I should imagine".
Police confirmed that they had identified the taxidermist, and are convinced that no criminal act has taken place. However, they did warn the fox-stuffer about the advisability of inflating animals in public places.
"Most 'Pumpers' use a standard bicycle pump," he explained, "inserting the nozzle far up their rectum, giving themselves a rush of air, creating a momentary high. This act is a sin against God." Charnchai took it further still. He started using a two-cylinder foot pump, but even that wasn't exciting enough for him, and he boasted to friends that he was going to try the compressed air hose at a nearby gasoline station. They dared him to do it so, under cover of darkness, he sneaked in.
Not realizing how powerful the machine was, he inserted the tube deep into his rectum, and placed a coin in the slot. As a result, he died virtually instantly, but passersby are still in shock. One woman thought she was watching a twilight
"Pumping is the devil's pastime, and we must all say no to Satan," Ratchasima concluded. "Inflate your tires by all means, but then hide your bicycle pump where it cannot tempt you."
"Juliet" told her friend, a pharmacist, that she was having trouble sleeping before exams, and asked her for potent sleeping pills. The pharmacist secured for her a small bottle of pills, plastered with warnings, "Danger! Use strictly as directed! Do not operate a moving vehicle!"
The two lovers locked themselves in a friend's dormitory room and tossed the key out the window. They shared a bottle of wine, made love, and then took the sleeping pills and kissed each other goodbye. Half an hour later, they began to feel curious rumblings in their intestines. Soon they realized that Juliet's friend had given them laxatives, not sleeping potion!
The stench spread quickly throughout the building, alerting other residents. A security guard was summoned, who forced the lock and poked his face 'round the door. He quickly swung it shut, nearly overcome by the fumes. The unfortunate couple had to be rescued by the SWAT team, protected by gas masks. They were taken to the hospital and treated for severe dehydration.
It turned out that the friend at the pharmacy was alarmed by the request for sleeping pills with no prescription. She contacted the parents, who conferred with one another and realized that something had to be done. Thus, the outcome: the marriage was belayed, both students were suspended from college, and both sets of parents were relieved.
One day, a farmer was heading back to his house after a hard day's work in the fields. A small stone had worked its way into his boot, so he leaned against the side of the house and tapped his foot on the ground to move the stone into the heel, where he could reach in and remove it. Just then, the farmer's wife came around the corner of the house. She saw her husband leaning on the fusebox with his foot hitting the ground, and thought he was being electrocuted! Leaping to his aid, she seized a nearby lump of wood and hit his arm with it. The farmer ended up with a broken arm and an apologetic wife.
Apparently the dentist did not trust anyone else to work on his teeth, so he provided his own dental care. That was his first mistake. He was observed entering the bathroom in his dental office with a syringe of epinephrine**. When it is injected into the area around an afflicted tooth, it constricts the blood vessels and reduces the bleeding. The epinephrine was his second mistake. To prepare for the injection, he placed a piece of gauze adjacent to the tooth, which was his third mistake.
an informant's theory is that when he injected the epinephrine into his gums, a significant amount entered his bloodstream and constricted the blood vessels in his head, making him loose consciousness. He then fell to the floor and aspirated (inhaled) the gauze into his trachea. By the time his staff realized something was amiss, the dentist had been down and out for 15 minutes.
He died the next day.
Doctors are blaming a rare electrical imbalance in the brain for the bizarre death of a chess player whose head literally exploded in the middle of a championship game. No one else was hurt in the fatal explosion, but four players and three officials at the Moscow Candidate Masters' Chess Championships were sprayed with blood and brain matter when Nikolai Titov's head suddenly blew apart. Experts say he suffered from a condition called Hyper-Cerebral Electrosis, or HCE.
"He was deep in concentration with his eyes focused on the board," said Titov's opponent, Vladimir Dobrynin. "Suddenly his hands flew to his temples and he screamed in pain. Then, as if someone had put a bomb in his cranium, his head popped like a firecracker."
Incredibly, Titiov's is not the first case in which a person's head has spontaneously exploded. Five people are known to have died of HCE in the last 25 years. The most recent death occurred in 1991, when European psychic Barbara Nicole's skull burst. Miss Nicole's story was reported by newspapers worldwide.
"HCE is an extremely rare physical imbalance," said Dr. Anatoly Martinenko, famed neurologist and expert on the human brain, who performed the autopsy on the brilliant chess expert. "It is a condition in which the circuits of the brain become overloaded by the body's own electricity. The explosions happen during periods of intense mental activity when current is surging through the brain. Victims are intelligent people with great powers of concentration. Both Ms. Nicole and Mr. Titov were intense people who tended to keep their cerebral circuits overloaded. They were literally too smart for their own good."
Although Dr. Martinenko says there are probably many undiagnosed cases, he hastens to add that very few people will die from HCE. "Most people who have the condition never realize it. Medical science still doesn't know much about HCE, and since fatalities are so rare, it will be years before research money becomes available." In the meantime, the doctor urges people to take it easy and not think too hard for long periods of time.
How to Tell if Your Head's About To Explode
Although HCE is very rare, it can kill. Dr. Martinenko says that being aware of the condition can greatly improve your odds of surviving it. A yes answer to any three of the following seven questions could mean that you have HCE:
1. Does your head sometimes ache when you think too hard? Head pain can indicate overloaded brain circuits.
2. Do you ever hear a faint ringing or humming sound in your ears? It could be the sound of electrical activity in the skull cavity.
3. Do you sometimes find yourself unable to get a thought out of your head? This is a sign of too much electrical activity in the cerebral cortex.
4. Do you spend more than five hours a day reading, balancing your checkbook, or other thoughtful activity? A common symptom of HCE is a tendency to over-use the brain.
5. When you get angry or frustrated, do you feel pressure in your temples? Friends of people who died of HCE say the victims often complained of head pressure in times of strong emotion.
6. Do you overeat ice cream, doughnuts and other sweets? A craving for sugar is typical of people with too much electrical pressure in the cranium.
7. Do you tend to analyze yourself too much? HCE sufferers are often introspective, over-reflective of their lives.
The city Paks (pronounced pa:ksh) was a little village in the 1600s and today is a small city boasting Hungary's single nuclear plant. In the past, the village had trouble with a neighboring village. They kept sending their cows to graze on Paks land, and vice-versa, knowing my ancestors.
Once a foreigner attacked the Paks herdsman, beat him badly, and confiscated his cows. But this was not just any herdsman, it was the son of the mayor! The people of Paks took up arms - or rather, work tools they could wield as arms. The result was a small battle between the two villages, in which dozen of peasants bit the dust.
The brave Paks army retreated in defeat.
The mayor of Paks, undaunted, ordered his men to fabricate a cannon to blast the enemy to smithereens. It was easier to order it than to do so, as they did not have the necessary tools and materials to build a cannon. "No matter," said the wise mayor, "Chop a tree down, and create the cannon from its trunk!"
During the night the people of Paks created the first wooden cannon in history, ready for deployment. They towed it up a nearby hill, and the entire village gathered around to watch the victory.
The Gunmaster loaded the cannon with gunpowder, put a large rock projectile in the barrel, pointed the weapon towards the enemy village and fired it... KABOOMM!!
Twenty people near the cannon died, and many others were seriously wounded. However the mayor survived, and immediately issued a victory message for his people, saying: "If we have so many dead, how many can there be of the enemy?"
"Read your handbook!" manufacturers warn. Motorola, Ericsson, and Nokia all print cautions in their user handbooks that warn against using mobile phones near gas stations, fuel storage sites, chemical refineries, and nuclear reactors.
Electronic devices at gas stations are protected with explosive containment devices, making them safe to use around volatile hydrocarbons. Cell phones, on the other hand, and other high-voltage battery appliances, are not shielded. They are in clear danger of producing small sparks.
Exxon has begun to place warning stickers on its gasoline pumps. All I can say is, finally! A solution to the obnoxious cell phone driver problem!