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Real Life Events....unlucky People In The Whole World by Nobody: 4:07pm On Jul 15, 2017 |
Entire village wins lottery – except for one
guy
Every Christmas in Spain, there’s a lottery
draw so massive it’s called El Gordo, which
translates as “the fat one.”
And the tiny village of Sodeto had some
serious cause for celebration after all of the
70 households — except for one —
purchased tickets. And these lucky locals’
number came up (58268), resulting in them
getting a share of the monster $950 million
first-place prize. Do the maths.Sure enough,
the residents, mainly farmers and
unemployed construction workers, walked
away with millions.
Apart from one unfortunate guy called
Costis Mitsotakis. Poor old Costis. It seems
that the good folk from the homemakers’
association, who were selling the tickets,
had neglected to knock on his door.
Bummer.
8
The Human Lightning Conductor
They say lightning never strikes twice – but
it struck Roy Sullivan a whopping seven
times. Yes, seven. Roy was a U.S. park
ranger in Shenandoah National Park in
Virginia, and holds the Guinness World
Record for the amount of times lightning
has struck one human being.
Ponder this for a moment – the odds of
being struck by lightning once in your
lifetime are roughly 3,000 to 1. Being struck
seven times has odds of around twenty-
two septillion to one. That’s
22,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1!
You’d think that after the sixth time you’d
probably just stay inside… or start buying
lottery tickets – but not Roy! The final time
was arguably the most impressive.
After Roy was struck while he was fishing, a
bear then added insult to quite severe
injury by trying to steal a trout from his
fishing line. Having none of it, Sullivan had
enough energy to strike the bear with a
branch and get his fish back. That’s tough.
7
The Haunted Bullet
In terms of being unlucky, it’s hard to top
Henry Zeigland – the man who thought he’d
dodged fate. But perhaps it was all just
poetic justice.
It all started in 1883, when he broke off a
relationship with his girlfriend, who then
killed herself from the distress. Her brother
went so crazy that he vowed to kill Ziegland
no matter what. He hunted him down and
shot him. Believing him dead, the brother
then turned the gun on himself and ended
his own life.
But Ziegland wasn’t dead. The bullet had
only grazed his face and then lodged in a
large tree behind him. He thought himself
an incredibly lucky man.
But the story didn’t end there. Years later,
Ziegland decided to cut down the tree,
which still had the bullet lodged in it. The
task seemed so tough that he decided to
blow it up with a few sticks of dynamite.
The explosion sent the bullet out straight
into Ziegland’s head, killing him instantly.
Now that’s freaky – or incredibly unlucky.
6
World’s Hairiest Man
Ladies, if you’re complaining about how
hairy your man is – time for a reality check.
Spare a thought for Yu Zhenhuan, officially
the hairiest man in the world.
96% of Yu’s body is covered with hair, the
result of a rare condition. In fact, Yu had to
undergo surgery to remove hair from his
ears as it was affecting his hearing.
A stringy black fuzz covers every inch of his
lanky frame besides the palms of his hands
and the soles of his feet. He’s covered with
an average of 41 hairs per sq. cm (0.16 sq.
inch) of his skin – a condition doctors call
atavism. He’s not exactly the luckiest guy in
that department.
Yu has chosen to make use of his unique
physical appearance, placing photos of
himself on his websites www.maohai.com
and the appropriately named
www.hairboy.com as part of a drive to land
a recording contract and become China’s
newest rock star.
Now he’s looking for a wife. We wonder
how far he’ll go.
5
Unluckiest Woman in America
After losing four houses to four hurricanes,
Melanie Martinez was arguably America’s
unluckiest woman. There was Betsy in
1965, Juan in 1985, George in 1998 and
Katrina in 2005. Such was the peril of living
on a flood plain in Louisiana.
But then the school bus driver’s luck
changed. A reality TV show selected her
ramshackle house in Braithwaite, south of
New Orleans, for a makeover. The team
spent a week and $20,000 transforming the
Martinez home with a new kitchen, new
cupboards, and new appliances – including
a 50 inch smart TV. “They did a real good
job. I loved it,” says Martinez.
But on Wednesday 29 August – the seventh
anniversary of Katrina – a category 1
hurricane named Isaac howled in from the
Gulf and hit her again.
Martinez and her family were rescued by
boat along with their five kittens and three
dogs. Everything else was lost. “Now I’ve
lost five houses to five storms. Every time a
wipe-out.”
Melanie, please go find a hill to live on.
4
Britain’s Unluckiest Man
‘Calamity’ John Lyne is often called Britain’s
unluckiest man – suffering 16 major
accidents in his life, including lightning
strikes, a rock fall in a mine and three car
crashes. Then there was the time a stone,
propelled by a catapult, hit him in the mouth
smashing eight teeth.
Mr Lyne’s mishaps cover a lifetime. When he
was born – one of five children to a
farming family – it was uncertain whether
he would survive. He had underdeveloped
lungs and needed steroids and special care.
But – setting a pattern for later in life – he
beat the odds.
Curiosity was his first foe, when he toddled
aged 18 months into his grandmother’s
bathroom and took a fancy to a drink from
a plastic bottle. Unfortunately it contained
disinfectant, and he had to be rushed to
hospital to have his stomach pumped and
his system flushed through with water.
Perhaps his most famous incident occurred
when he was a teen. After breaking his arm
falling from a tree, he went to the hospital
for treatment. On the way home from the
hospital, the bus he was traveling on
crashed – so he broke the same arm again
in a different place. Oh yeah, and it was
Friday 13th.
Reality is often stranger than fiction.
3
Tree Man of Indonesia
Dede Koswara was born healthy. But at age
10 – after he fell and scraped his knee in the
forests of Indonesia – small warts sprouted
around the wound. Slowly, they spread to
his feet and hands.
For years, he watched helplessly as his limbs
broke out in a swath of grotesque bark-like
warts that sapped his energy and limited
his mobility. Now he shuffles along on
blackened, bloated feet – a prisoner of his
own mutinous body.
At one point, he seemed to sprout contorted
yellow-brown branches 3 feet long.
Koswara, it appeared, was becoming half-
plant — turning into the verdant green
jungle around him.
His mysterious ailment cost him his
marriage, career and independence. He was
forced by his poverty to join a traveling
freak show, billed as the Tree Man of Java.
He suffers from a double whammy: the
common human papillomavirus, a condition
that usually causes small warts in sufferers;
but also a rare immune deficiency that
allowed these lesions to run wild. Last year,
Indonesian surgeons used an electric saw
to cut off 13 pounds of warts and decaying
matter. But it all grew back again.
Now that’s unlucky.
2
Double Nuked
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was the only officially
recognized survivor of both the Hiroshima
and Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts at the end
WW2.
On 6 August 1945, Yamaguchi, a young
engineer, was visiting Hiroshima. Seconds
after getting off a tram at 8.15am he saw a
massive flash of light and was knocked to
the ground by the force of the bomb, and
passed out as it detonated 600m above the
city.
Around 140,000 of Hiroshima’s 350,000
people perished instantly. Though less than
two miles from Ground Zero, Yamaguchi
suffered only serious burns to his upper
body and a perforated eardrum. He spent
the night in an air-raid shelter, with people
dying and screaming in pain all around him.
The following day, Yamaguchi navigated
through the piles of burnt and dying bodies
to catch a train 180 miles back home to
Nagasaki – which, like Hiroshima, was an
important industrial and military base.
At 11.02am, and once again less than two
miles from the centre, Yamaguchi saw a
familiar flash of light. This time a 25-kiloton
plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki,
throwing Yamaguchi to the ground.
As well as almost total deafness in one ear,
his skin wounds were bandaged for 12
years, and his wife was poisoned from the
radioactive fall-out. She died in 2008, aged
88, of kidney and liver cancer. Their son,
exposed to the Nagasaki radiation at six
months old, died in 2005 – aged 59.
Before his death of stomach cancer,
Yamaguchi became a passionate anti-
nuclear weapons campaigner – but he
never expressed any anti-Americanism.
1
Dog Retrieves Dynamite
Picture this: it’s deep winter in the far north.
Harry Jenkins and his two buddies go ice
fishing one day at Ten Mile Lake in Akeley,
Minnesota. The lake is completely iced over.
In an attempt to quickly create a large hole
for fishing, Mr. Jenkins first lights, then
tosses, a stick of illegally obtained dynamite
across the ice.
To his horror, his pet dog Jerry, a Labrador
retriever (doh!) races across the ice in an
attempt to retrieve the dynamite – thinking
that his master is throwing a stick for him.
This isn’t going to end well, is it?
The dog picks up the dynamite – despite
screams from the men – then starts to run
back towards them with a wagging tail. The
three men realize they’re in worse danger
than they thought, so they begin to run for
their lives in the opposite direction, with the
dog chasing them.
The men narrowly escape death – but the
explosion not only blows up the dog; it also
cracks the ice near the truck, which then
sinks through the surface and plunges to
the bottom of the lake.
In addition to losing his dog, Mr. Jenkins
became a double loser when the insurance
company refused to pay on his claim for
the sunken truck.
Not ideal, let’s face it. |
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