If you feel like your life isn't worth a dime, and Mondays make you whine remember these...and count your blessings!
A fierce gust of wind blew 45-year-old Vittorio Luise's car into a river near Naples, Italy. He managed to break a window, climb out and swim to shore -- where a tree blew over and killed him.
Mike Stewart, 31, of Dallas was filming a movie on the dangers of low-level bridges, when the truck he was standing on passed under a low-level bridge -- killing him.
Walter Hallas, a 26-year-old store clerk in Leeds, England, was so afraid of dentists that he asked a fellow worker to try to cure his toothache by punching him in the jaw. The punch caused Hallas to fall down, hitting his head, and he died of a fractured skull.
George Schwartz, owner of a factory in Providence, R.I., narrowly escaped death when a blast flattened his factory except for one wall. After treatment for minor injuries, he returned to the scene to search for the files. The remaining wall then collapsed on him, killing him.
A Mrs. Carson of Lake Kushaqua, N.Y., was laid out in her coffin, presumed dead of heart disease. As mourners watched, she suddenly sat up. Her daughter dropped dead of fright.
A man hit by a car in New York got up uninjured, but laid back down in front of the car when a bystander told him to pretend he was hurt so he could collect insurance money. The car rolled forward and crushed him to death.
Surprised while burgling a house in Antwerp, Belgium, a thief fled out the back door, clambered over a nine-foot wall, dropped down, and found himself in the city prison.
A twenty-two-year-old Irishman, Bob Finnegan, was crossing the busy Falls Road in Belfast, when he was struck by a taxi and flung over its roof. The taxi drove away and, as Finnegan lay stunned in the road, another car ran into him, rolling him into the gutter. It too drove on. As a knot of gawkers gathered to examine the magnetic Irishman, a delivery van plowed through the crowd, leaving in its wake three injured bystanders and an even more battered Bob Finnegan. When a fourth vehicle came along, the crowd wisely scattered and only one person was hit, Bob Finnegan. In the space of two minutes Finnegan suffered a fractured skull, broken pelvis, broken leg, and other assorted injuries. Hospital officials said he would recover.
In a classic case of one thing leading to another, seven men, aged eighteen to twenty-nine, received jail sentences of three to four years in Kingston on Thames, England, after a fight that started when one of the men threw a french fry at another while they stood waiting for a train.
Hitting on the novel idea that he could end his wife's incessant complaining by giving her a good scare, Hungarian Jake Fen built an elaborate harness to make it look as if he had hanged himself. When his wife came home and saw him, she fainted. Hearing a disturbance a neighbor came over and, finding what he thought were two corpses, seized the opportunity to loot the place. As he was leaving the room, his arms laden, the outraged and suspended Mr. Fen kicked him stoutly in the backside. This so surprised the man that he dropped dead of a heart attack. Happily, Mr. Fen was acquitted of manslaughter and he and his wife were reconciled.
While motorcycling through the Hungarian countryside, Cristo Falatti came up to a railway line just as the crossing gates were coming down. While he sat idling, he was joined by a farmer with a goat, which the farmer tethered to the crossing gate. A few moments later a horse and cart drew up behind Falatti, followed in short order by a man in a sports car. When the train roared through the crossing, the horse startled and bit Falatti on the arm. Not a man to be trifled with, Falatti responded by punching the horse in the head. In consequence the horse's owner jumped down from his cart and began scuffling with the motorcyclist. The horse, which was not up to this sortof excitement, backed away briskly, smashing the cart into the sports car. At this, the sports car driver leaped out of his car and joined the fray. The farmer came forward to try to pacify the three flailing men. As he did so, the crossing gates rose and his goat was strangled. At last report, the insurance companies were still trying to sort out the claims.
Two West German motorists had an all-too-literal head-on collision in heavy fog near the small town of Guetersloh. Each was guiding his car at a snail's pace near the center of the road. At the moment of impact their heads were both out of the windows when they smacked together. Both men were hospitalized with severe head injuries. Their cars weren't scratched.