Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents (31 page)

Ah! “Alligator”!
Responding to a call of an alligator threatening kids in an Independence, Missouri, neighborhood in May 2011, police officers located the creature in a yard belonging to Rick Sheridan. They fired two rounds into the animal. That’s when Sheridan came running outside, yelling, “What are you doing? It’s made of concrete!” When asked why he had a concrete alligator in his yard, Sheridan explained that it works better than a “No Trespassing” sign, or at least it usually does.

F
ire bad.
New Mexico fire officials started a prescribed burn in May 2000 on Cerro Grande Mountain, not far from the town of Los Alamos, intending to clear out underbrush in order to make the area more resistant to forest fires. The high winds and drought conditions should have given officials a clue that maybe it wasn’t the best time, but they were concerned that a worse fire might break out if they didn’t. But it quickly got out of control. The Cerro Grande Fire lasted four months, burned through 48,000 acres, and destroyed 235 homes in Los Alamos. Total cost of the disaster: $1 billion.

Mind the gap.
New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority officials were left red-faced in January 2009 when the opening of a new subway station had to be postponed. Reason: The gap between the platform and the train car was four inches wide. Although that distance wouldn’t pose a danger to most people, it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, which specifies that the gap can be no larger than three inches. The goof was blamed on the engineers, who had failed to take into account the slight curve of the platform. Cost of the extra inch: a two-month delay in opening the station and $200,000 to extend the platform.

L
OVE AND DEATH

A man and woman were visiting the grave of one of the woman’s relatives in Ahavath Israel Cemetery in Hamilton, New Jersey, in May 2011. Things took an amorous turn (as they do in cemeteries), and the two ended up engaging in what police called “extracurricular activities” up against a headstone. Not sexy: The headstone fell on the woman’s leg and broke it. Her partner called 911, and the woman was rushed to a hospital. Police investigated the matter and decided to not press charges against—or publicly identify—the duo.

LOVE TAKES WORK

In November 2007, an Australian woman was on a business trip in a rural Australian town, and one night while there she met up with a friend for dinner. Afterward, they went back to her hotel room, where they had sex. While having what was apparently quite a rambunctious time, a glass light fixture was knocked off the wall above the bed—and landed on the woman’s face and broke. She required treatment for facial lacerations at a local hospital. The case made international news because the woman filed for worker’s compensation for her out-of-town, after-hours, sex-related injury—and got it. Comcare, Australia’s worker’s compensation organization, initially refused the
woman’s claim, but in April 2012, after more than four years of legal wrangling, a federal judge ordered them to pay. “If the applicant had been injured while playing a game of cards in her motel room, she would be entitled to compensation,” the judge said, and ruled it was the same for any other “legal recreational activity.”

LOVE ON THE SILVER SCREEN

An Egyptian man identified only as “Ramadan” visited an Internet café in April 2012 and watched some porn videos. One of them, he noticed, starred his wife. He ran home, and his wife angrily denied the scurrilous accusation…and then confessed when the man showed her the proof. (He had found her in no fewer than 11 different homemade porn videos, Egyptian newspapers reported.) The woman went on to tell her husband that she had never loved him (they had four children together) and that she had been having an affair with (and filming sex acts with) a boyfriend (whom she had known before her marriage) for years. At last report, the husband said he wasn’t sure if he’d be asking for a divorce. Bonus: The man told reporters that it was the very first time he had ever watched porn in his life. And that he’d only done it because he was “curious.”

LOVE AND PROTECTION

A Romanian couple with five children decided in September 2004 that they didn’t want to have any more kids—but they wanted to keep having sex. They decided that the husband, 43-year-old
Nicolae Popovici, would start using condoms. Popovici secured his first prophylactic with Super Glue. When he was later unable to remove it, he went to a hospital where doctors spent several hours removing the condom. The couple told doctors that part of the reason they had glued the condom on was because it was a bit “roomy,” and the glue had helped it stay on. A nurse who had treated the man added that Mr. Popovici “thought the condom could be used several times, and he wanted it stuck on his penis so he could use it again later.”

LOVE ON THE RUN

One night in September 2012, Amanda Linscott engaged in sexual activity with a man she had met at a bar in Port Charlotte, Florida. The man was driving a car while said activity was occurring. Sometime during the encounter, Linscott demanded that the man give her money. The man said he didn’t have any, so Linscott pulled a revolver out of her purse and pressed it to the man’s head. The man grabbed the gun, punched Linscott, the two fought, the car careened into a palm tree, went airborne, and plowed through two yards before finally coming to a halt. Linscott jumped from the car and fled, but was arrested a short time later. She was charged with armed robbery. The man was not charged with a crime.

T
he Elf on the Shelf is a gift-shop staple and a modern-day Christmas tradition. Parents buy their kids a Santa’s elf doll and name it, thus imbuing it with magical powers. It then sits somewhere in the home and serves as Santa’s eyes and ears in the weeks leading up to Christmas, supposedly giving a report to the Man in Red each night before moving to a new perch in the child’s home. One big rule: Kids are not allowed to touch the elves, as it drains them of their elfin magic…and reflects poorly on the children when Santa is making his naughty-or-nice list.

However, as you probably know, Santa Claus isn’t real, and the Elf on the Shelf doesn’t really have magical spying capabilities. But it’s a vital part of the delightful Santa tradition in millions of American homes. In December 2012,
Good Morning America
ran a segment on the Elf on the Shelf phenomenon. It included video of parents talking about how they hide their elf, along with video of parents moving the elf. Reporter Lara Spencer even manhandled one, robbing the elf of his magic! Spencer had to apologize on the air after hundreds of parents complained to
GMA
that their kids had seen the report and figured out the truth. Spencer backpedaled, claiming the elf she touched hadn’t been named yet, and so was safe.

D
IE ANOTHER DAY

“It was terrifying!” said Fearless Felix, negating his own nickname. To be fair, he did spend four and a half terrifying minutes hurtling toward earth while caught in a “death spin.” Fearless Felix is Felix Baumgartner, 43, an Austrian “supersonic skydiver.” In 2012 he attempted to become the only human being to ever break the sound barrier without the aid of a vehicle. He ascended to the stratosphere 24 miles above Roswell, New Mexico, in a helium balloon made just for the stunt. Then—wearing a 100-pound insulated, pressurized suit—he jumped out (from a world-record highest altitude) and assumed an arrowlike “delta position” to gain momentum. “The exit was perfect,” he said, “but then I started tumbling. I really picked up speed, it got very brutal.” Amazingly, Baumgartner maintained consciousness while spinning at 830 mph in thin, subfreezing air. He finally got out of the spin at about 5,000 feet, but when he opened his parachute, his hand got stuck in the cord. After he freed his hand, he looked up to see that the strings had twisted around the main parachute. Luckily, the chute untangled just in time to not kill him. Afterward, Baumgartner became engaged to his girlfriend and he promised to take up a safer hobby—piloting rescue helicopters.

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE

Two skydivers whose combined ages were 135 met their end in tandem. The older of the two, 75-year-old Claudette Porter, had listed skydiving as one of her bucket-list items. So in 2011, her granddaughter, Anna Vera, set up the jump in Mesquite, Nevada, as a birthday present. Porter’s instructor, James Fonnesbeck, 60, had more than 11,000 successful jumps to his name (including one as a skydiving Elvis in the 1991 film
Honeymoon in Vegas
). Vera was jumping, too, also in tandem with an instructor. Up in the plane, Porter smiled at her granddaughter and then jumped out. Vera and her instructor followed. Everything went fine for the younger pair, but Vera watched in horror as something went horribly wrong with her grandma’s jump. Neither of the chutes opened properly and the pair spun toward the ground. Vera screamed. Her tandem instructor just kept repeating, “Don’t look.” Neither skydiver survived.