Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents (28 page)

H
ey, I don’t think this is working. I’m breaking up with you.

   
I’m your wife. You can’t exactly break up with me. I’m living in your house. You could just walk over to the other side of the room and tell me you want to get divorced.

Oops, sorry. That was meant for someone else.

   
Oh ok
Wait…WHAT?

........................................................................................................

How’s our pregnant little daughter?

   
Mom! How did you know that?

I meant precious. Sorry, typo. WAIT, WHAT?

........................................................................................................

Your mom and I are going to divorce next month.

   
What? Why! Call me please?

I wrote Disney and this phone changed it. We are going to Disney.

........................................................................................................

Where is Granny? I thought she was going to be here for Thanksgiving?

   
Grandma is in the grave.

What grave? What are you saying?

   
Oops, sorry. Garage.

........................................................................................................

Do I look like a cow?

   
Moo

Great

   
Moo

Be nice! That’s mean

   
That was the worst autocorrect ever. I said Noooooo, I swear to God.

R
oamin’ Roman.
Roman Retynski often described himself as invincible. He was not. Trying to channel his inner Indiana Jones one night, the 34-year-old Alaskan was driving his pickup truck at 60 mph on a bumpy rural road. “Grab the wheel!” he shouted to his girlfriend. Then he was out the window and onto the hood and gone. The next day, Retynski’s friends told reporters they were sad the avid car surfer was dead, but not all that surprised.

Le manteau de la mort.
On a freezing February morning in Paris in 1912, a crowd gathered at the Eiffel Tower to watch Austrian tailor Franz Reichelt test his new invention: an overcoat with a built-in parachute. He’d received permission to perform the test—on the condition that he use a dummy. When Reichelt arrived, he announced that
he
would be the dummy. Onlookers tried to dissuade the “Flying Tailor” (as he called himself), but Reichelt was adamant. He carried his bulky contraption up to a platform nearly 200 feet above the ground, stepped up onto a chair next to the railing, peered out over the edge, and stood there. He looked down again, and stood there some more. And then some more. Finally, Reichelt took a deep breath (his last) and stepped off. His parachute did not open, and he slammed face-first into
the rock-hard ground at 130 feet per second. He left a crater nearly six inches deep.

BMW DOA.
A century later in Germany, some adventurous young men were filming a
Jackass
-like web series called
Bavarian Dumbasses
. A 20-year-old daredevil named Tobias tied one end of a rope to a playground merry-go-round and the other end to a BMW. His friends then duct-taped him to the outer railing of the merry-go-round. Tobias gave the signal, and his buddy floored the BMW, sending the merry-go-round spinning at breakneck speed…which is exactly what happened to Tobias. The duct tape was no match for the centrifugal force, and the stuntman was flung into the air. He hit the ground so hard that his neck broke and his skull cracked open. Not only did Tobias succumb to his injuries, but the merry-go-round was later removed from the playground.

Lion in wait.
In 2006 Ohtaj Humbat Ohli Makhmudov, 45, set out to prove that God exists. He went to the lions’ den at the Kiev Zoo in Ukraine, used a rope to tie himself to a railing, and climbed in. As onlookers yelled at him to get out of there, Makhmudov walked in between four lions and announced, “Because God loves me, the lions will not harm me!” An atheist lioness named Veronica pounced on him and nearly bit his head off. He died instantly.

Drawing a blank.
Jon-Erik Hexum was an up-and-coming actor until he got bored one day in 1984.
During a halt in filming his spy series,
Cover-Up
, Hexum started messing around with a .44 Magnum that his character was going to load with blanks. Blanks aren’t bullets, Hexum surmised, so the gun couldn’t hurt him. But blanks consist of gunpowder (which explodes) behind a wad of paper (which keeps the powder in the chamber). So a gun loaded with blanks not only fires, it also has a severe kickback. Not knowing that, Hexum placed the barrel on his temple and then said to the cast and crew, “Let’s see if I get myself with this one.” The bad news: Hexum got himself. The good news: A dying man got his heart; an elderly blind man got one of his corneas; a blind little girl got his other cornea; an ailing grandma got one of his kidneys; a dying five-year-old boy got his other kidney; and a severely burned toddler got some of Hexum’s skin.

Go Vikings!
Of course, the ultimate way to show off is to carry around the severed head of your slain enemy. After a ninth-century battle, Sigurd the Mighty, the Viking Earl of Orkney, defeated his greatest foe, Máel Brigte. He carried the dead man’s head as he rode home on his horse, eager to show the gruesome trophy off to his people. But during the ride home, one of Brigte’s teeth gouged a hole in Sigurd’s leg. With antiseptic cream still a millennium away, Sigurd’s wound became infected and he died a slow, painful death.

B
urning question.
Robert Michelson of Farmington, Connecticut, called 911 one day in February 2011. When the dispatcher asked if there was a crime in progress, Michelson said, “Possibly. I was just growing some marijuana and was just wondering how much trouble you can get in for one plant.” After a long pause, the dispatcher replied, “It depends on how big the plant is.” “It’s only a seedling,” said Michelson. The dispatcher informed him that having a plant
does
constitute possession of marijuana. Michelson thanked her and hung up. The dispatcher alerted the police, who arrived at Michelson’s house a short time later. However, there was no plant. Michelson told police he was only thinking about growing marijuana. However, he was still arrested, as he was in possession of marijuana, marijuana seeds, and several bongs.

Must-stash.
In February 2011, Joel Dobrin, 32, of San Diego, California, was driving down a road in Sherman County, Oregon. Some marijuana and hashish rode shotgun on the front seat of his pickup truck. He was pulled over by a sheriff’s deputy, but before the cop could get to his window, Dobrin grabbed a sock that was lying on the floor of the truck and stashed his drugs inside it. But his dog, a pit bull, grabbed the sock and
started playing tug-of-war with it, and the sock flew out the open window of the truck. The sheriff simply retrieved the sock and found the drugs. “I wish everyone traveled with their own personal drug dog,” a sheriff’s spokesman told reporters.

Green giant.
Ramiro Gonzalez, 30, of Progreso, Texas, was driving a tractor-trailer filled with papayas in the far south of the state one day in January 2011. A sheriff’s deputy pulled the truck over and found 3,103 pounds of marijuana underneath the papayas. Gonzalez was arrested on felony drug trafficking charges. He probably would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for the expired tags on his truck, which was the only reason he’d been stopped in the first place.

Above the law.
Robert Watson was driving down an East Haven, Connecticut, road late one night in April 2011. Watson came across a police sobriety checkpoint—where police found marijuana in his car. (He had also been drinking, but was just under the legal limit.) Watson was arrested for possession of marijuana. A blood test found that he also had small amounts of cocaine in his system. Unfortunately, Watson was a member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives—and had a record of stridently opposing marijuana legalization, and of voting for stiff penalties for drug offenses. As of press time, Watson had pleaded not guilty to all charges.

I
n May 2012, a video appeared on YouTube showing closed-circuit tape of the inside of a laundromat. A couple and a small boy can be seen at a machine not far from the camera. The man picks the boy up off the floor and sticks him in a large front-loading washing machine. He closes the door, steps back, and looks at the child in what seems like a harmless game.

Then the machine automatically starts spinning. And filling with water. The man and woman rush to the machine—but they can’t open the door: It automatically locked when the machine started. The couple frantically try to get the door open, run to get help, and try again to open the door as a crowd grows around the machine. Finally a man runs up, throws some tables out of the way, opens a hatch behind the machine, reaches into it—and the machine stops running. The door finally opens and the boy is taken out. Luckily, the boy was fine—he only got a few bruises.

But, weirdly, if it hadn’t been for the video being posted on YouTube, the child’s mother might never have known about the incident. The laundromat was quickly identified by YouTube viewers as the Federal Laundromat in Camden, New Jersey. A news station there played the video, and the child’s mother, Sakia David, saw it—and saw her
one-year-old son Saimeir being put into a washing machine by a man she didn’t know.

The woman in the video? She was the boy’s babysitter. And when she’d brought him home with bruises that day, she told Sakia that Saimeir had fallen down some stairs. Camden police investigated the incident and said that nothing criminal had occurred—the man was simply playing “peek-a-boo” with the boy—and said the man and woman in the video would not be facing charges.