HOME |
RSS | 
A 48-year-old truck driver was the victim of a bizarre accident in New Zealand. It must have been horrific, but it reads like a classic cartoon script.
Steven McCormack was standing on his truck’s foot plate Saturday when he slipped and fell, breaking a compressed air hose off an air reservoir that powered the truck’s brakes.
He fell hard onto the brass fitting, which pierced his left buttock and started pumping air into his body.
“I felt the air rush into my body and I felt like it was going to explode from my foot,” he told local media from his hospital bed in the town of Whakatane, on North Island’s east coast.
“I was blowing up like a football,” he said. “I had no choice but just to lay there, blowing up like a balloon.”
Co-workers released a valve to stop the air pressure, and he was taken to a hospital. Doctors say the air inflated McCormack’s body under his skin as it separated fat from muscle. He is expected to recover. Link -via J-Walk Blog
John Gill and Gary Arold of Hurley, New York built a compressed air cannon in 2006 that can fire a pumpkin (but they prefer squash as ammunition) up to a mile away. Adam Bosch writes in the Times Herald-Record:
The cannon is mostly used on weekends to attract people to Gill’s Farm Market on Route 209 in Hurley, but sometimes the guys get together at the 1,500-acre farm and blast it when nobody’s around. Just for fun.
They’ve shot pumpkins, scuba tanks and a basketball filled with corn and foam insulation. They once scattered some geese by accidentally shooting into the flock. Then there’s the time they shot a bowling ball more than a mile.
“The first time we shot a bowling ball, that’s was probably the worst thing we ever did,” Arold says. “It kept going and going and going.”
Link via CrunchGear
