Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents (32 page)

LIVE AND LET DIE

Englishman Liam Byrne’s first jump nearly became the last thing he ever did. But luckily he missed a church (barely) and landed next to it…30 feet up in a tree. Then he hung there for 45 minutes until firefighters could get him down. Despite six hours of training, “he was supposed to be in an arched position when he jumped so that he moved away
from the deploying parachute.” But Byrne, who said he was “nervous,” flailed when he exited the plane, and the chute became tangled in his arm. “What do I do?” he yelled into his radio. “Deploy your backup chute!” the instructor yelled back. So he did, but then the backup chute became tangled in the primary chute, and he went into a spin. Thankfully, the big tree saved Byrne’s life. He walked away with only a few scratches and bruises. “I normally don’t like heights,” he said—and he probably still doesn’t.

November 22, 1963, is a dark day in history
—that’s the day President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, Texas. A few hours later, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as president. But Johnson almost died an untimely death that day, too. At his residence in Washington, D.C., that night, his private Secret Service detail, Gerald Blaine, was routinely patrolling the premises. On high alert due to the Kennedy assassination, Blaine saw a dark figure coming out of the house. Blaine pointed his semiautomatic gun at the man, and put his finger on the trigger. That’s when he realized he was holding a gun— and had nearly shot—President Johnson. Johnson, Blaine later recounted, didn’t say a word, and went right back inside.

M
ichael Jackson was once the poster child for extensive plastic surgeries rendering a person nightmarishly unrecognizable, but he can’t hold a candle to Jocelyn Wildenstein. She’s a New York socialite who went under the knife numerous times in order to look more like an exotic cat.

Born into a middle-class family in Switzerland in 1940, Jocelyn Périsset started dating a movie producer at age 17 and joined the jetset, living in Paris and globetrotting in style. While on safari in Kenya in 1977, she met Alec Wildenstein, a French billionaire. Jocelyn, a skilled hunter, helped him track down a lion that was causing trouble on his family’s ranch. They got married in Las Vegas in 1978.

The Wildensteins continued to share a passion for big cats—they kept two tigers as pets in a “bulletproof glass cave” at the ranch. After a year of marriage, the two decided to visit a clinic for “his-and-hers eyelifts.” This is when Jocelyn developed an unhealthy desire to endlessly improve herself. Friends claim that Alec preferred women who were youthful and catlike, and that Jocelyn was eager—perhaps too eager—to please him as she grew older. Over the 1980s and 1990s, she underwent so many plastic surgeries that she took on an appearance somewhere between an alien and a feline.

Upon seeing his wife’s face after a series of drastic procedures, Alec supposedly screamed in horror, which only encouraged her to return to her surgeon for even more tweaks. He later told a reporter “she seems to think that you fix a face the same way you fix a house.” Total cost of the surgeries: reportedly in excess of $4 million.

And if her intent was to keep her cat-loving husband interested, it didn’t work: Jocelyn filed for divorce in 1997 after catching Alec in bed with a Russian model, presumably fresh off the catwalk.

I
t’s a baseball tradition to hand out free hats, shirts, and souvenir balls to fans. The Los Angeles Dodgers did this on August 10, 1995, gifting most of the 53,000 fans in attendance with a Dodgers-branded ball before a game against the St. Louis Cardinals. It was a routine day at the ballpark until the bottom of the ninth inning. The Cardinals led 2–1, and Cardinals pitcher Tom Henke struck out the Dodgers’ Raul Mondesi, who was caught looking; Mondesi immediately argued the call with home plate umpire Jim Quick.

Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda also came onto the field to argue with the umpire. Quick ejected both from the game. The crowd erupted, and reacted with the one tool at their disposal— thousands threw their baseballs onto the field. The Cardinals fled for the safety of the dugout until the barrage ended. After a few minutes they returned to the field… and then balls came flying out of the center-field bleachers. That was it—the umpires declared the game over, and, as is the rule in baseball, the home team, the Dodgers, forfeited.

I
CE-CREAM-KKKONE

It was a sunny day in Ocala, Florida, in 2012. Cars made their way along the main drag. Pedestrians walked to and from work and local eateries. And a bizarre Ku Klux Klan monster thingy stood in front of an ice-cream shop enthusiastically waving at passersby. Many of those passersby were outraged. One woman even called the ice-cream shop in tears to complain that she had to cross the street to avoid the jovial white supremacist. The owner of the shop, Liza Diaz, was confused by the uproar. She had never even heard of the “Ku Ku Klan” (as she described it to a reporter). All she knew is that her customers were gone and she was the scorn of the neighborhood. So what was all the hubbub about? Trying to drum up business, Diaz had hired a man to stand outside her shop wearing an ice-cream costume. “It’s just an ice-cream cone!” she said. But the top of the vanilla cone looked a lot like a pointy KKK hood. Diaz threw the costume away.

MAYOR McMEAT

In a similar costume mishap, London’s
Daily Mail
reported (as only they could), “Barmy councillor gives shocked onlookers the willies in costume that looks more like a terrifying eight-foot phallus than tasty banger.” Translated into American,
that goes: Jill Makinson-Sanders, mayor of Louth, Lincolnshire, England, dressed up in a sausage costume that made her look like a big pink penis. The 61-year-old mayor wanted to do something special when the Olympic torch was to be carried through her town in July 2012. So instead of wearing the traditional mayoral chain and robes, Makinson-Sanders decided to celebrate Louth’s most popular export—sausage— by dressing up as one. To most of the embarrassed townsfolk, she looked like a giant pink Johnson running alongside the confused man carrying the Olympic torch.