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Closest you've come to winning Darwin Award? (1 Viewer)

Hooper31

Hooper31

Footballguy
Had a portion of a tree come down in wind storm a few weeks ago. It snapped about thirty feet up, but didn't come all the way down. Used chainsaw to limb as much as I could near the ground. Top half that came down was forming a tall thin right triangle. Ground wasn't level. Awkward situation. Eventually I figured I need to cut away the hanging portion as much as I could. Figured I had a good idea which way it would fall when it came down. Notched it one a side to see if it would start to give. No dice. Pushed, kicked, pulled on it. Wouldn't budge. Went back to work with chain saw and it just let go and whole think came down. I dropped chain saw away from me and bolted. Of course the broken section of tree came right after me. Hit me like a ton of bricks in the top left shoulder. Thinking it just missed my head. Felt like I got hit by a car. Really lucky it didn't land on me.

CLIFFS: Got hit by portion of tree that I cut down on myself.

DAMAGE: Giant bruise behind left shoulder. Ego bruised even more so.

Lucky to be alive. :bag:

 
In high school a buddy of mine had a van, we used to drive into Boston to go to the dog track as that place would serve us beer. We lived an hour away and on the way back through country roads we would take turns playing Teen Wolf by Van surfing. So damn stupid but I did it a bunch of times and could have easily died if we hit a bump or I lost my balance.

 
There's a back road in my area nicknamed seven hills cuz, well, it has seven hills. It also has some twists and turns and is lined with beautiful and tall evergreens. It's a nice ride through the woods. Unless you decide to make your car fly by gunning the engine on the way up the highest, steepest hill. Once you crest you go airborne. Awesome feeling but also incredibly stooopid because as it turns out you have zero control over your car once your tires leave the ground.

The last time I tried this feat of doom I almost crashed as once airborne my car started to turn a bit sideways so when I landed I had to correct and break in order to avoid crashing head-on into one of those lovely evergreens. Talk about heart pounding. You know that scene in Plane, Trains and Automobiles where Martin and Candy have to extracate their fingers from the dash? Yeah, it was like that.

 
dutch said:
There's a back road in my area nicknamed seven hills cuz, well, it has seven hills. It also has some twists and turns and is lined with beautiful and tall evergreens. It's a nice ride through the woods. Unless you decide to make your car fly by gunning the engine on the way up the highest, steepest hill. Once you crest you go airborne. Awesome feeling but also incredibly stooopid because as it turns out you have zero control over your car once your tires leave the ground.
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Some kids actually got killed less than a mile from where I grew up doing this, quite a few years ago. Sorry to be a downer.

 
IvanKaramazov said:
dutch said:
There's a back road in my area nicknamed seven hills cuz, well, it has seven hills. It also has some twists and turns and is lined with beautiful and tall evergreens. It's a nice ride through the woods. Unless you decide to make your car fly by gunning the engine on the way up the highest, steepest hill. Once you crest you go airborne. Awesome feeling but also incredibly stooopid because as it turns out you have zero control over your car once your tires leave the ground.
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Some kids actually got killed less than a mile from where I grew up doing this, quite a few years ago. Sorry to be a downer.
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Yep, stoopid reaches it's heights when your 16-26 years old and it only dissipates after you've had a near miss to wake you up. Some don't get the opportunity for the miss...

 
When I was like 11 or 12 years old my friend and I used to roller blade down this insanely steep hill that fed right into a 4 lane main road. It would take 2 or 3 minutes to get all the way to the bottom and you got up to a pretty crazy speed. There were also many turns (including 2 that were too tight to take without jumping a section of the curb) and the occasional car coming up over a blind section of the hill. We even had to dodge a deer in the road a couple of times (it backed up against a mountain preserve) Combine this with the fact that I always took the brakes off my skates (for hockey purposes) and the only way to stop (At those speeds) was to dive into the grass once you got like 30-40 feet from the bottom.

We used to do this 2 or 3 times in a day once or twice a week. I honestly don't know how we avoided serious injury or death. I wasn't THAT strong of a skater and my buddy was even worse.

 
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stood as close i could to a train speeding by...if there had been some random piece of metal sticking out a foot or so, i'd be dead.

 
When I was 11 we Filled a small alleyway between two houses with dried leaves, filled two small ice cream pails with water and lit the leaves on fire... shockingly the two pails weren't nearly enough.. ran to get the hose but it wasn't attached...

To this day I don't know how 1. We didn't start at least one house on fire and 2. How we got away without anyone noticing the flames and/or smoke and calling the fire department. :eek:

 
DA RAIDERS said:
stood as close i could to a train speeding by...if there had been some random piece of metal sticking out a foot or so, i'd be dead.
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in college an acquaintance of mine had his arm taken off by trying this stunt....you were very lucky.

 
Night driving on a gravel road. Buddy and I were heading home from a party. I was driving pretty fast. There was someone about 1/4 mile ahead of me and they kicked up a lot of dust. I didn't slow down. Came over a hill (could only see about 40 ft in front of me) and down the other side going about 60. All the sudden the dust disappeared. I had run a stop sign and was crossing a divided 4 lane blacktop road. Thank God the gravel continued on the other side and there was a turn lane off the 4 lane divided highway. And there weren't any cars. I literally just went across and kept going. My buddy behind me did the same thing.

 
16 years old - friend borrowed a Yamaha Midnight Special from a friend and rode over to another friend's house and drank some beer. On the way home on an unlit road, my friend wanted to see how fast he could get it to go. I think he topped it out at 120 mph. No helmets, but honestly if anything had happened at 120 I don't think it would have mattered. The year before my girlfriend's brother totaled his truck on the same road at night when he hit a bull.

A couple of years later I was in the Navy and my friend moved to Dallas and got killed. Never got the full story, but basically it boiled down to running with a bad crowd. ... and all these years later I've put my life to good use by running with you fellas here in the FFA.

 
12 years old, i raced my bike down a steep hill ans couldn't brake enough so I enter the busy cross street at the bottom of the hill and cars swerved to avoid me.

 
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I hydroplaned on the NJ tpk going around a curve while driving to job site one heavily raining election day morning. I was driving a mostly empty ford passenger van, the back end slid out on me, van went sideways and nose hit the center rail flat. At that point, the van rolled over onto the passenger side, hit the ground and flipped over doing a 360 and landing back on the three remaining wheels. I swear that we were upside down high enough that I could see over the guard rails and across to the other side of the highway.

I wasn't wearing my seat belt and ended up on top of the other front seat passenger in the wheel well on the other side of the van. Funny thing is that the van was still running and aside from the front passenger wheel and assembly laying on the road where the crash started, the van looked like it was ready to keep driving away. It was worse then I am making it sound, as the back picture window was smashed out and the rear quarter panel was crunched from where it bounced us off of the ground.

Boss wanted to know if I was going to go to the site after that. Crazy moment.

 
When I was a single man, loading the dishwasher in a certain order wasn't a top priority so things got put in wherever they would fit. One time I'm reaching for a bowl in the very back - this normally wouldn't be a problem but I left a steak knife blade up in the silverware portion. I absolutely bludgeoned by wrist and arm area and it bled... profusely. I went to the ER.

I remember thinking I should write an anti-suicide note just in case to let everyone know I didn't want to kill myself, I'm just stupid.

 
This past 4th of July at the beach it was pretty close to high tide at around 9 PM. I went down to the beach with my 9 year old son with a few fireworks - fist nigh at the beach this year, so a little rusty on the technique - lit off a few mortars, etc. and then went to the cake aerials. Second one was the Cajun Pageant:

http://www.76fireworks.com/MS295_Cajun_Pageant

We lit it and ran backwards - first few went off no problem, but then the wind blew it over towards the dunes and the fireworks were being shot at us and all of the other people on the beach. Given the high tide there wasn't a ton of room to run. It was terrifying. We hit the deck. Fortunately nobody and nothing were hit. As I apologized profusely afterwards, the other people on the beach were laughing and joking about it. Needless to say that ended my son's interest in fireworks for the rest of the summer. I am so f'in lucky it wasn't a tragedy. JPP wouldn't have been the leading dummy in the papers the next day.

 
Pulled an all nighter in University and drove home through early rush hour traffic (it was going against me). Fell asleep at the wheel and only awoke as I crossed the grass median. Fortunately there was a red light ahead so the lanes were empty or I would probably have been dead,

 
With a couple of purple microdot in me I chose to swing on a broken fire escape ladder about 10 stories up an old hotel in downtown Dayton. Loved it.

I am afraid of heights, but that never entered my mind at the time. Still gives me the willies thinking about it.

 
msommer said:
Pulled an all nighter in University and drove home through early rush hour traffic (it was going against me). Fell asleep at the wheel and only awoke as I crossed the grass median. Fortunately there was a red light ahead so the lanes were empty or I would probably have been dead,
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I had a summer job in northern Michigan back in college. The last day there I woke up early, worked all day, then left Traverse City to drive to Nashville. Picked up a coworker in Big Rapids, we stopped in Battle Creek and drove around the projects looking for some coke, walked into a strange drug dealer's house and was offered crack, settled for a couple of joints, drove through the night. As I was approaching Nashville it was during morning rush hour and I wake up realizing I am driving/drifting 60 mph down I-65 with my eyes closed and people honking at me. My buddy was completely asleep in the passenger seat. We probably should have died several times that night.

I also left a money bag with around $20k in cashiers checks at a random truck stop somewhere in Indiana when we stopped to eat. Unfortunately I didn't have any receipts or remember what town it was in. Luckily I was able to track down the place (pre-internet days, had to call every exit from the MI/IN border south asking if they found a bag full of checks) and some stranger mailed the bag to Nashville for me.

 
msommer said:
Pulled an all nighter in University and drove home through early rush hour traffic (it was going against me). Fell asleep at the wheel and only awoke as I crossed the grass median. Fortunately there was a red light ahead so the lanes were empty or I would probably have been dead,
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At 16 I went to a Iron Maiden Concert.. Had WAY too many :banned: Friends of mine, who didn't have a drivers license, found some girls who lived in the same city and they agreed to drive me back to our city.

But they lived on the opposite side of the city than I did so stopped at the Mall where they could walk home.. I should have just slept it off there but didn't want to get in trouble with my parents so decided to drive home..

I barely recall the drive home.. Woke up the next morning and found my car parked half on the lawn and half on the street.. Later I drove the route I would have taken home and saw tire tracks going up the curb many times.. at one point the tracks were on the sidewalk and missed a Fire Hydrant by a mere foot, and a Electric pole by about the same distance..

Extremely stupid, and extremely lucky I didn't kill myself or someone else.. :wall:

 
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Growing up in the 70's gave all kinds of opportunity for stupid behavior....one time me and my buddies needed to get to the next town which was 12 miles away. No car and of course no phone to call anyone. We had stolen track torpedo's out of a caboose and used them to stop a local (we thought) freight train. Unfortunately it turned out to not be a local and by the time we hit the next town the train was moving at 60 plus, we had to jump off and one of my friends broke his arm. Probably shouldn't have been doing that!

 
Made a dry ice bomb in high school out of a huge Costco sized pickle jar that had unnecessarily uber thick glass, was probably only 30 ft. away looking right at it when it went off. A 3-inch triangle of the glass buried itself half way into my leg (shorts and tshirt, no protection of course), and it bled like a sieve. I can only imagine if it had caught me in the neck/face/eye.

 
Bonfire said:
Made a dry ice bomb in high school out of a huge Costco sized pickle jar that had unnecessarily uber thick glass, was probably only 30 ft. away looking right at it when it went off. A 3-inch triangle of the glass buried itself half way into my leg (shorts and tshirt, no protection of course), and it bled like a sieve. I can only imagine if it had caught me in the neck/face/eye.
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Something tells me you like fire. You are like the fire dude from The stand

 
bigmarc27 said:
When I was a single man, loading the dishwasher in a certain order wasn't a top priority so things got put in wherever they would fit. One time I'm reaching for a bowl in the very back - this normally wouldn't be a problem but I left a steak knife blade up in the silverware portion. I absolutely bludgeoned by wrist and arm area and it bled... profusely. I went to the ER.

I remember thinking I should write an anti-suicide note just in case to let everyone know I didn't want to kill myself, I'm just stupid.
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My wife had a similar accident where she stabbed herself in the wrist with a razor-sharp steak knife while unloading dishes. I drove her to the ER. They asked me a ton of questions about her mental state because they thought maybe she tried to kill herself. Took me a while to convince them that it was 100% an accident and that we had a house full of people we were entertaining, which made it a very inopportune time to do this if it was intentional.

 
I guess mine would be going 155 mph on a relatively empty interstate late one night...I think I passed maybe 3-4 cars. They were like blurs and they were going 65+. It's scary how fast they went from tail lights on the horizon to headlights behind me. If anyone had changed lanes, We'd all be dead. If a deer had jumped out, we'd be dead...if my tires didn't like the speed, we'd be dead...I was really dumb when I was in my early 20's.

 
Lit a tiny puddle of gasoline on fire in my parent's garage when I was ~10. Gas is really flammable it turns out.

 
Plenty in cars when I was in my teens.

Had a decent bike in college, a Yamaha 700 something or other. Where I lived was about 20 minutes away from mom & dad so one day i decided to see how fast I could get there since it's all highway. I hit 120 and the front tire started to float, kinda realized it was a zero sum game at that point and backed it down to ludicrous speed.

More recently was wiring up a light that I thought I had turned the power off to. It wasn't, lesson learned.

 
In college in Boston rode home from the bars several times on the back of Green Line MBTA trains standing on the metal thing that connects trains to each other, holding on to the windshield wiper on the back window.

It terrifies me that my son might someday be this stupid.

 
Nigel said:
In college in Boston rode home from the bars several times on the back of Green Line MBTA trains standing on the metal thing that connects trains to each other, holding on to the windshield wiper on the back window.

It terrifies me that my son might someday be this stupid.
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I was on an NYC subway train one time when a kid tried THIS. (not my picture, just one of someone doing the same thing) I basically moved down as far away from that door as possible and looked the other way because I 100% expected the kid to clip a post and be smeared on the outside window, and I had no desire to have that image in my head.

 
Hooper31 said:
Bucky86 said:
Can we do stories about near death not caused by our own actions?
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Go for it.
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So, I was at a work site and they had these two separate large cranes that had wires attached them, and between the two cranes, those wires connected to a large steel square. Basically they were both supposed to be lifting that large square thing up in the air at the same time.

I had my back to this and apparently one of the cranes had their wire detach, or slip which caused this large square metal thing to lower and swing in my direction. To this day I have no idea how I knew to turn around and with a split-second to process it all, I fell flat on my back as this swung towards me at head/neck level. No doubt I would've been killed.

 
Just after my first son was born I was assembling an ikea closet at 1 in the morning by myself while my wife, the baby and the cat snoozed in the adjacent room. Even though the instructions clearly showed 2 cartoon dudes standing it up I tried to do it myself. The entire thing exploded and sounded like a gunshot. Everyone woke up with a start and found me bleeding in about 10 different places from particle board shrapnel. So dumb. Sleep deprivation is real people!!

 
Did you ever play the game with friends where you shoot an arrow straight up and then run. My friends thought it would be funny if we shot 6 at one time. 10 people scatter. Shockingly after several rounds no one died. Though there were a few close calls.

My friend stole a car from a party once and convinced me he would give me a ride home. I lived a quarter mile away and was drunk enough to think it was a good idea. Three hours later we are walking down a fire trail under the high voltage power lines because he got it stuck in a creek about 2 miles from my house. I was in and out through the three hours but I remember fishtailing on back roads, almost going through the plate glass at 7-11, and getting stuck in the creek. The creek and the 7-11 are roughly 12 miles apart.

 
As a teenager I was curious to see whether I could open my car door, get out of the car and run next to the car and jump back in. Totally nailed the first two parts. Second two parts, well, not too much. Buddy was in the passenger seat and was trying to reach over with his hand and press the brake. By the time he reached it the car had side-swiped another car (parked car). Once I got out of the car I proceeded to fall down rapidly, with the tires narrowly missing my skull.

 
I was 11 and school was closed because it was "too cold." So my friend and I went outside to play in the woods. A creek ran through the woods and it was a cold winter so it was frozen over thick in most places.

We had been walking on the creek for a bit when I decided I wanted to touch one of the waterfalls. It might have been about 4-5 feet deep at that point. I could hear the water flowing underneath it and knew that the ice would be thinner close to the falls. For whatever reason, this did not deter me.

I touched the falls and immediately heard the cracking and fell through. I touched bottom and reached up to find that I wasn't under the hole I made in the ice. My hands hit frozen ice in all directions. There were bubbles and flowing water all around so sight was very limited.

My buddy saw my hands a few feet away from the hole I had made and cannonballed in on top of me. After a fair amount of work, we both got up on the snow embankment in our heavy winter clothes. Dripping wet, we both went home to change and such. That was a difficult one to explain to my panicked mother when she saw me dripping wet in -25 degree weather or whatever it was that day.

 
dutch said:
There's a back road in my area nicknamed seven hills cuz, well, it has seven hills. It also has some twists and turns and is lined with beautiful and tall evergreens. It's a nice ride through the woods. Unless you decide to make your car fly by gunning the engine on the way up the highest, steepest hill. Once you crest you go airborne. Awesome feeling but also incredibly stooopid because as it turns out you have zero control over your car once your tires leave the ground.

The last time I tried this feat of doom I almost crashed as once airborne my car started to turn a bit sideways so when I landed I had to correct and break in order to avoid crashing head-on into one of those lovely evergreens. Talk about heart pounding. You know that scene in Plane, Trains and Automobiles where Martin and Candy have to extracate their fingers from the dash? Yeah, it was like that.
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Thought you were talking about seven sisters hills in Farmingville, NY on Long Island. My brother was in a pretty serious accident where he was speeding, lost control and was thrown out of his car. He flew through the air and landed head first in the back window of a parked car. His friend said some idiot ran out of the house where the parked car was and yelled into his house that "some dead guy" crashed through the back window of his car. He ended up in a coma for over a week. Funny thing is when he was coming out of the coma they asked him what his name was. He said his name was Fernandez (not his name) and he was a professional hockey player.

 
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Almost got hit by a glass-bottom boat while snorkeling at Catalina Island.

I was getting a hang of breathing with the snorkel so I kept floating further and further away from shore with my head down looking at fishies. I felt someone pull on my ankle, and it was my friend that stopped me from getting smashed by a boat 10 feet in front of me.

 
Cold Dead Hands said:
Did you ever play the game with friends where you shoot an arrow straight up and then run. My friends thought it would be funny if we shot 6 at one time. 10 people scatter. Shockingly after several rounds no one died. Though there were a few close calls.
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WTF? :lmao:

 
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