by Don Voorhees
In 2011, a pilot in a holding pattern around New York’s LaGuardia Airport stepped out of the cabin for a moment to use the restroom. He somehow got locked inside and could not get out. He pounded on the door to alert passengers. A man with a thick accent knocked on the cockpit door to tell the copilot, but spooked him instead. Thinking terrorists were taking over the plane, the copilot radioed for help. Fighter jets were alerted and the FBI met the plane upon landing.
In 2012, the TSA at Las Vegas McCarran Airport refused to allow a woman on a plane because there was gel-like frosting on a cupcake she had in her carry-on bag.
In 2011, model Lauren Scruggs was severely injured when she accidentally walked into the still-spinning propeller of the small plane she had just flown in. Scruggs lost her left hand and eye and had extensive facial damage.
In 2010, a teen snuck into the wheel well of a plane waiting to take off from Charlotte Douglas International Airport and bound for Boston. He plummeted to his death when the landing gear was lowered outside of Boston before landing. Naturally, his parents have sued the airline.
Also in 2010, a small plane in the Democratic Republic of the Congo crashed, killing twenty passengers, after a crocodile smuggled on board got loose and caused everyone to rush to the front of the craft in a panic and the pilot to lose control. One passenger and said crocodile survived.
In 2006, an unnamed airline mechanic was sucked into the engine of a jetliner at El Paso International Airport, with predictable results.
NO TANKS!
In 2004, the city council of Monza, Italy, outlawed the keeping of goldfish in curved bowls since the bent light would give them a distorted view of the outside world.
GUEST SERVICES
Vanisha Mittal, daughter of a billionaire steel magnate, married investment banker Amit Bhatia in 2005. The $60 million wedding featured invitations mailed in silver boxes, plane fare, accommodations at five-star hotels in Paris and Versailles, and gift bags filled with jewels for the guests. Kylie Minogue performed at the reception.
STICKUPS
In 2008, in broad daylight, the Harry Winston jewelry store in Paris was robbed of jewels with a retail value of $110 million. One year earlier, the same store had been robbed of 10 million euros worth of jewels.
In 2011, a modern-day Robin Hood was arrested shortly after holding up a Boston bank and then being found handing out cash to children in a park.
BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME
In 2012, a man apparently trying to kill himself went over Niagara Falls and survived the 180-foot drop, swimming to shore afterward.
Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff and his wife both attempted suicide by taking overdoses of prescription sleeping pills on the Christmas Eve after his crimes were exposed. While both survived, the Madoffs’ son, Mark, hung himself in December 2010.
RAILROADED
A Chicago court ruled that a man who was killed by a train while crossing the tracks at a station could be held liable after part of his body flew into and injured a bystander. In 2008, an unspecified part of Hiroyuki Joho’s body was flung into Gayane Zokhrabov. She sued Joho’s estate for damages and won. The court found that “it was reasonably foreseeable” that the train would hit Joho and hurl his body toward the platform.
In 2012, two different men were killed on opposite sides of the state of Florida (435 miles away) by the same train on the same day.
NICE TRY
In 2011, one Michael Fuller was arrested at a North Carolina Walmart after trying to pay for his purchase with a $1 million bill. He insisted it was real and refused to leave until police arrived on the scene.
GET STUFFED
In 2011, six-hundred-pound Donna Simpson, holder of the Guinness World Record for the “World’s Heaviest Mother,” shut down her “feederism” website and decided to promote healthy eating. “Feederish” is a type of fetish where people get excitement by watching extremely fat women eat. Simpson pulled in ninety thousand dollars a year from subscribers who would pay to view her stuff herself with various foods, while trying to pack on as many pounds as possible. Some men would even send her additional money and a grocery shopping list with foods they wanted to see her eat.
Twenty-one-year-old Kerry Trebilcock of England has eaten more than four thousand sponges and one hundred pounds of organic soap since being infected with hookworm in 2008. She enjoys the sponges with BBQ sauce or ketchup.
BIGGEST LOSER
Englishman Paul Mason used to be billed as the “world’s fattest man.” By the end of 2012, he had shed 650 pounds after a gastric bypass procedure and diet modification. Before this, he weighed 1,000 pounds and ate twenty thousand calories a day, including up to forty bags of potato chips.
BOOZE NEWS
The American Automobile Association (AAA) has instituted a “Tipsy Tow” program, where members too drunk to drive themselves home can call and get their car towed home and a ride with the driver. The program is offered in select areas on certain days, such as Thanksgiving, New Year’s Eve, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Super Bowl Sunday.
DR. NO!!
In 2011, a woman in Florida, who aspired to work in a nightclub, went to a person she believed to be a doctor to have her buttocks enhanced. Oneal Ron Morris, a man posing as a woman and claiming to be an MD, injected the woman’s behind repeatedly with a mixture of cement, flat tire sealant, and mineral oil for the sum of seven hundred dollars. Predictably, the woman ended up hospitalized.
In 2012, a fake doctor in San Francisco performed liposuction on a woman while smoking a cigar and making her hold her IV bag during the procedure. The woman, who thought she was getting a real bargain, came to regret her choice of “physicians” after the inevitable complications developed.
Among the bizarre items found in people’s rectums at emergency rooms in 2011 were a Buzz Lightyear doll, a Barbie, a large kitchen knife, and a revolver. The explanations of how these things got there were often as bizarre as the items themselves.
Like a scene from a bad movie, Pennsylvanian Ed Juchniewicz died in 1991 after the unattended ambulance stretcher he was strapped to rolled down a hill and turned over.
In 2001, six-year-old New Yorker Michael Colombini was killed during an MRI procedure. A portable oxygen tank was brought near the machine’s magnetic field and flew into the boy’s head.
In 2010, a U.S. military veteran’s penis got frostbitten in a VA medical center and required amputation after nurses left an ice pack on his member for nineteen straight hours following a surgical procedure down there.
In 1974, British health food advocate Basil Brown died after drinking too much carrot juice.
ONE WEDDING AND A FUNERAL
In 2012, a Thai man married his girlfriend of ten years after she died, in a combination wedding/funeral ceremony. She was buried in her wedding dress.
PIGGING OUT
In 2012, an Oregon farmer, Terry Vance Garner, was eaten by his pigs, some of which weighed seven hundred pounds. All that remained was the man’s dentures and a few body parts.
BIG MAC ATTACK
In 2012, a North Carolina woman who didn’t feel like waiting in line at the local McDonald’s drive-thru, bypassed the order speaker, cut in line to the pickup window, and tried to place her order there. When employees denied her service, she refused to leave and the police were summoned after twenty minutes. She was Tasered after resisting arrest, and her two-year-old daughter was taken into protective custody.
FISHY FINGERS
In July 2012, a man lost four of his fingers while wakeboarding on a lake in Idaho. Two months later, a fisherman on the same lake caught a trout that had one of the man’s fingers in its belly.
SHOCK AND AWE
An iPhone 4 survived a fall of 13,500 feet when it came out of the pocket of its skydiving owner. The screen shattered, but the phone still worked.
HIS DAYS WERE NUMBERED
Dominic Ca
lgi’s New York license plate number—5V 17 32—matched the date of his death—May 17, 1932.
CASHIN’ IN
A rare copy of the first Superman comic book sold for $1 million in 2010.
In 2011, a tintype photograph of Billy the Kid, the only known image of him, sold for $2.3 million.
In recent years, several paintings by American artist Martin Johnson Heade were accidentally discovered by lucky people. Two works were purchased for $60 at an estate auction in Arizona in 1996 and sold for over $1 million. Another was bought for $29 at a Wisconsin rummage sale in 1999 and sold at auction for $882,500. In 2003, a Heade was found in an attic outside Boston and auctioned off for more than $1 million. A Florida woman’s son had her get an appraisal on a little painting hanging in her living room, purchased for a few dollars years earlier, after seeing a Heade work on TV. It sold at auction for $218,500 in 2004.
The world’s oldest still-running automobile is an 1884 steam-powered De Dion Bouton et Trépardoux Dos-a-Dos Steam Runabout that sold for $4.62 million in 2011.
A Peugeot once owned by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sold for $2.4 million.
VIRGIN AIRWAYS
In 2012, twenty-year-old Brazilian Catarina Migliorini auctioned off her virginity for the documentary Virgin Wanted. The anonymous winning bidder came up with $780,000 and will deflower the young lady aboard a flight from Australia to the United States to avoid prostitution charges.
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
As of 2012, a New Jersey scofflaw has racked up over $120,000 in fines for blowing through various tolls over the years to buy drugs in New York. Worse yet, Peter Davis used his mother Jean’s car and now she is on the hook for the money and is reported on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey website as owing the most of any scofflaw.
THE WORLD’S BREAST ICE CREAM
In 2011, a London ice cream shop—Icecreamists—sold “Baby Gaga,” an ice cream made from human breast milk blended with vanilla bean pods and lemon zest. It sold for $22.50 a serving, until local health authorities put an end to it.
BURN NOTICE
In 2012, the maker of Banana Boat sunscreen recalled five hundred thousand bottles of its spray-on lotion because several people caught on fire after applying the product and getting too close to an open flame.
ODDS ARE
In 2009, the same six winning numbers (4, 15, 23, 24, 35, and 42) came up in two consecutive drawings of the lottery in Bulgaria. Eighteen Bulgarians profited by playing the six numbers on the second drawing, after no one won the time before.
Also in 2009, the numbers 4-1-9 came up in consecutive Pick 3 drawings in Michigan and the numbers 3-7-5 came up in two consecutive New York drawings.
In 2000, a Washington State newspaper accidentally printed the Pick 4 winning numbers for the Oregon lottery the day before the drawing. They did this by mistakenly publishing the prior day’s winning Virginia numbers (6-8-5-5) for the previous day’s winning Oregon numbers, which happened to be the next day’s winning Oregon numbers.
BATHROOM BLAST
In 2012, more than 2 million Flushmate III pressure-assisted flushing systems, a water conservation device installed in toilet tanks, were recalled because they might explode. Some 304 reports of exploding toilets, many resulting in severe lacerations and impact injuries, prompted the action.
KIDS DO THE DARNEDEST THINGS
A boy in the Ukraine found his parents’ savings hidden in the couch and spent nearly four thousand dollars on candy over the course of several days in 2012.
In 2011, a thirteen-year-old Albuquerque, New Mexico, student was arrested, handcuffed, and hauled away by police for burping in gym class.
In 2012, a Pennsylvania boy destroyed thirty-six thousand dollars’ worth of computers in his elementary school by urinating on them.
The National Transportation Safety Board found that a fatal 2010 helicopter plane crash in Phoenix, Arizona, was caused when the billionaire owner of the craft let his five-year-old daughter sit on his lap while he was in the copilot’s seat and she kicked the flight controls, sending five people to their deaths.
KILLER KITTY
In a fifteen-month stretch of time from 2011 through 2012, a large man-eating leopard devoured fifteen different people in Nepal.
BAZOOKA GUM
In 2009, Ukrainian chemistry student Vladimir Likhonos accidentally put a piece of gum he was chewing in an explosive mixture he was working on. When he resumed chewing, he blew off his jaw and lower face.
EVERY VOTE COUNTS
After the 2012 presidential election, an Arizona woman ran over her husband with her car because he didn’t vote.
TILL DEATH DO US PART
In 2012, a Kansas couple who had been married for sixty-two years died within hours of each other. Just after Melvin Cornelson succumbed to cancer, his wife Doris, who had remained at his side, went off to bed and never woke up.
PREMATURE IGNITION
In 1960, more than one hundred Soviet scientists and officials were burned to a crisp when the rocket booster engine they were preparing for launch suddenly ignited after a switch was accidentally turned on.
Wordsmith
Originally, the word pea came into the English language as “pease,” for the singular form (as in pease pudding) and “peasen” for the plural.
The word autumn for the season between summer and winter began to gradually replace the word “harvest” in English in the fourteenth century. By the seventeenth century, “harvest” was gone and the word “fall” came into usage. Since the nineteenth century, the word “autumn” has been predominate, while “autumn” and “fall” are used interchangeably in the United States.
Pit stop refers to the practice of servicing autos in the days before lifts, which involved working from a pit beneath the car.
The dumb blonde stereotype probably arose from a famed blond sixteenth-century French courtesan named Rosalie Duthe, who was known for hesitating a long time while speaking, making her appear dim-witted and mute (dumb). She was satirized in a 1775 play.
Can’t hold a candle to comes from the days when an apprentice would hold a candle so the more experienced craftsman could see what he was doing. The candleholder was thus the inferior.
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth has to do with the buying of a horse, where it was common practice to inspect its teeth to see how old it was. This practice also is the origin of the phrase long in the tooth.
A blockbuster was a very powerful bomb used during World War II. The word has since come to mean anything that makes a big impact, such as a hit movie.
As with the term “blockbuster,” bombshell for a beautiful woman comes from World War II and the many pinup girls of the time.
The term cameo role, which is a small part in a production, comes from the small but beautiful jewelry of the same name.
The word fanny used to describe the human backside comes from the 1749 book Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland, also known as Fanny Hill. It is considered the first work of erotic prose in the English language.
A ham is someone who overdoes it while acting or showing off for the camera. The term comes from the days when minstrel performers wore black makeup on their faces and used ham fat to remove it.
Pulling strings in order to get something done behind the scenes derives from the puppeteers of days gone by who controlled marionettes while out of sight.
A blurb is a short endorsement cited in promotional usage. The word comes from the fictional Miss Belinda Blurb. In 1907, humorist Gelett Burgess displayed a fake book jacket at a publishing convention featuring a beautiful woman with a brief “endorsement” from the fictitious Miss Blurb.
In the 1500s, noblemen wore stockings and were quite concerned with the appearance of their legs and feet. At balls and other social functions they would stand with what they believed to be their more at
tractive foot forward, giving rise to the expression best foot forward.
Hanky-panky came into usage for a secret activity during the nineteenth-century when magicians would wave about a handkerchief with one hand to distract the audience from what they were doing with the other.
Someone on a high horse feels superior to others. In days of yore, peasants rode mules, tradesmen rode horses, and the powerful rode great stallions.
To read the riot act is to rebuke and warn someone about his or her actions. The expression comes from English King George I, who issued a decree in 1716 that any time twelve or more people gathered to protest, officials would read them the act and disperse them.
The word tycoon comes from the Chinese meaning “great prince.”
Feather in one’s cap comes from the time when warriors were given feathers to put in their hats for worthy deeds.
Wet behind the ears can be traced to newly born animals that emerge wet from the womb. The area behind the ears is often the last to dry.
Break the ice comes from the icebreakers that needed to open a path for ships in northern European ports before they could get started during winter months.
Kingpin comes from the early German bowling game ninepins, where one pin was taller than the rest—the king pin.
Getting one’s ducks in a row harks back to early America when settlers played ten pins, a kind of bowling game. The pins were thought to resemble ducks and were called duckpins. They had to be arranged in rows before each frame was bowled.
Jackpot comes from draw poker, where a pair of jacks or better is required to open. Hands are dealt and antes are put into the pot until someone can open, often resulting in very large pots.
On a roll comes from the game of craps. Someone rolling a streak of winning dice throws was on a roll.
