Man Won Lottery on Ticket He Bought the Day He Died
Donald Peters has got to be both the luckiest and unluckiest man on the day of his death. Well, unlucky because he suffered a heart attack and died, but lucky because he just bought the winning lottery ticket that provided for his family:
The Peters children think their father would have appreciated the irony.
Peters bought two Connecticut Lottery tickets at a local 7-Eleven store on Nov. 1 as part of a 20-year tradition he shared with his wife Charlotte. Later that day, the 79-year-old retired hat factory worker suffered a fatal heart attack while working in his yard in Danbury. [...]
"He’d be very mad, he just passed away and she won a lot of money," said Brian Peters, one of the couple’s three children. "He’d say, ‘Figures!"’
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Wanna Buy The Big Bopper’s Casket?
If your goal in life is to own the most tasteless rock memorabilia, then you best be heading to eBay soon. The Big Bopper was moved to a new casket recently and that means his previously used casket is now up for sale on the internet.
The casket is in good condition, having some minor rust damage and a little lime sentiment that shows water once entered the outside vault, although it seems the interior never suffered water damaged.
If you’d like to see the item in person before you place a bid, it is currently on display in the Texas Musicians Museum.
Link Via BoingBoing
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Cheating Death
The final Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss for 2008 challenges you to cheat death -retroactively. Match the famous dead person with the object that might have prevented his or her death. Some are easy; other I had to guess, and I ended up with a score of 70%. Link
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Cuddly Toys of Death
If you’re sick of all the cute, sweet plushies out there, then these great toys are for you. They’re by artist Patricia Waller who has a ton of other awesome designs as well. These specific toys belong to her “Accident” series and the “How to kill your first love” series. I love the teddy bear myself.
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Sallie Mae to Father of Dead Marine: Pay Up!
Ian McVey wanted to serve his country, so he joined the Marines after college. He was supposed to go to Iraq, but died not long before his unit shipped out in a motorcycle accident.
Ian’s father, John McVey, had to settle Ian’s college loans. He wrote to the lenders, asking the debts to be forgiven and two agreed. The third, Sallie Mae (originally founded as Student Loan Marketing Association in 1972, as a government-sponsored enterprise), decided that it’d rather have the money:
John McVey then wrote a very personal letter to Sallie Mae:
"In the process of his education, Ian amassed considerable loans. But Ian was steadfast in his desire to serve our country rather than begin a life in business where his income would have been double or triple his Marine service payment. Giving to our country was Ian’s calling, and we admired and supported his choice of service. He was a good and noble son and better friend.
"We are asking that you forgive Ian’s loans as his federal loans are being forgiven on the basis of Ian’s choice of service to our country as a patriot and so that our family may not have to bear these financial burdens while we deal with the inconsolable grief over the senseless, tragic and untimely loss of our son. While life has not been fair, we pray that you will be."
Sallie Mae responded with a computer-generated letter that, aside from a "Please accept our condolences for your loss" stuck in the middle, was a demand for $53,144.
There was no name on the letter. John McVey’s attempts to get a human being to talk to him about this have been met with computer-generated voices.
Kevin Cullen of The Boston Globe has the story (since the article was published, Sallie Mae suddenly had a change of heart and had forgiven the debt): Link
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RIP Bettie Page: 1923-2008
Pin up star Bettie Page passed away last night after suffering a heart attack on December 2. She was 85 years old.
Bettie was a beautiful woman and a wonderful icon, her work was influential to pin up girl pictures, art and women in general. She will be missed, but her legacy will not be forgotten.
The LA Times has a great biography with more information on her life and her influence on society.
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Wal-Mart Worker Trampled To Death on Black Friday
How crazy are people on Black Friday? Are the deals so good that they would trample someone to death? Here’s a tragic Wal-Mart stampede that left one worker dead and got several people (including a pregnant woman) injured:
The Black Friday stampede plunged the Valley Stream outlet into chaos, knocking several employees to the ground and sending others scurrying atop vending machines to avoid the horde. [...]
"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby, 43. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. "They took me down, too … I didn’t know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back," Overby said.
Damour, a temporary maintenance worker from Jamaica, Queens, was gasping for air as shoppers continued to surge into the store after its 5 a.m. opening, witnesses said.
Even officers who arrived to perform CPR on the trampled worker were stepped on by wild-eyed shoppers streaming inside, a cop at the scene said.
"They pushed him down and walked all over him," Damour’s sobbing sister, Danielle, 41, said. "How could these people do that?
If that’s not bad enough, even after being told that someone was killed, they kept on shopping!
Link (with video tape of the stampede)
(Photo: Augustine for The Daily News)
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The Demon Core
In 1945, physicist Harry Daghlian was working on a 6.2 kg (14 lb) spherical mass of plutonium at the Los Alamos laboratory. He was stacking bricks of tungsten carbide around the plutonium core when he noticed a nearby neutron counter signaling that the addition of the final brick would make the assembly supercritical. Daghlian immediately withdrew his hand ... and the brick slipped onto the center of the plutonium core and the assembly went critical. Daghlian was able to dissemble the bricks (the core didn't explode), but he died from radiation poisoning 28 days later.
Nine months later, physicist Louis Slotin, an expert in triggering devices, and seven other scientists gathered in the laboratory to perform a dangerous experiment he called "tickling the dragon's tail." The experiment involved creating the beginning steps of a nuclear fission reactor by placing two half-spheres of beryllium around the plutonium core. The trick was to keep the beryllium from touching the plutonium core, which Slotin had done many times before.
But on that day, Slotin decided to use a screwdriver instead of shims, and his hand slipped and the beryllium hemisphere touched the plutonium core, which instantly went critical. Slotin realized his mistake, and used his hand to lift the beryllium just a fraction of a second later ... but that was enough to give him a lethal dose of radiation. The other scientists saw a "blue glow" of air ionization and felt a "heat wave" - they were saved from immediate death (though later 3 of them died from side effects of radiation years later). Slotin, on the other hand, died 9 days later.
Both of Daghlian and Slotin's accidents were on Tuesday the 21st, both used the same plutonium core, and both died in the same room at the same hospital. The plutonium core was later named the "Demon Core" and was put to use in the Able test of the Operation Crossroads nuclear weapon test at the Bikini Atoll in the summer of 1946.
The Able test of Operation Crossroads, July 1, 1946.
Photo: Office
of History & Heritage Resources
Further readings:
- Demon Core [wikipedia] - via Futility Closet and Scribal Terror
- Louis Slotin [Wikipedia]
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Writers Who Suffered From the Sylvia Plath Effect
I’m in a book club (we’re looking for a quirky-yet-clever name for ourselves if anyone has any suggestions) and last week we discussed The Bell Jar. It’s one of those books we all felt we should have read at some point during our high school careers and never did, so it was long overdue. In my research about the similarities between the book’s main character and the book’s author I came across something called Sylvia Plath effect.
It’s a relatively new theory in the world of psychology – in 2001, James Kaufman conducted a study that showed creative writers, especially female poets, are more susceptible to mental illness than other types of professions.
Being a female writer (not a poet, though), I was understandably interested in this theory. There really is a disproportionate amount of writers who have committed suicide over the years, so to brighten your day I thought I’d look at a few of them here.
Sylvia Plath
It makes sense to start with the theory’s namesake, I think. For those of you who haven’t read The Bell Jar, it’s a thinly disguised autobiography about one girl’s spiral into depression including suicide attempts, hospital stays and shock treatment therapy.
The bell jar is used as a metaphor for the feeling the main character has when she’s going through her depression – she feels like she’s trapped under a bell jar, stifled and numb. Sylvia predicted her own future when she wrote from the perspective of her protagonist – “How did I know that someday - at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere - the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”
Despite marriage, children, a successful career as a poet and a promising one as a novelist, Sylvia’s own bell jar did descend again. On February 11, 1963, she killed herself by putting her head in the oven with the gas on. (Photo from A.J. Marik via Find a Grave)
Virginia Woolf
Poor Virginia Woolf seemed doomed from the start. She suffered a nervous breakdown when her mother died when Virginia was just 13. Her father died just nine years later, causing another breakdown which resulted in a brief period of institutionalization. She and her sister were subjected to sexual abuse by their half brothers, which certainly did not help her state of mind.
On March 28, 1941, Virginia decided she had had enough, loaded up her pockets with heavy rocks and walked into the River Ouse near her home. Judging by her symptoms and behavior, modern-day doctors think she probably suffered from bipolar disorder.
Sara Teasdale
Sara Teasdale was a talented poet, which, according to James Kaufman, put her at a serious disadvantage when it came to battling depression. In 1918, she won the Columbia University Poetry Society Prize, which was the precursor to the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Toward the end of the 1920s, though, things headed downhill for Sara. The Great Depression hit the same year she decided to divorce her husband.
Plagued by financial problems, her close friend and former suitor Vachel Lindsay killed himself by drinking Lysol in 1931. Vachel was a poet, so you could say his suicide contributes to Kaufman’s theory that creative writers are more susceptible to mental illness.
In 1933, Sara reunited with Vachel when she took an overdose of sleeping pills in her apartment in New York City, drew herself a warm bath and never got out of it. (Photo from quebecoise via Find a Grave)
Anne Sexton
Anne was never shy about admitting to her mental health problems and openly talked about her lifelong battle with bipolar disorder. She was somewhat of an instant success in her poetic career – after attending a workshop taught by poet John Holmes, she immediately had poems published in The New Yorker, Harper’s and the Saturday Review. By attending workshops and adopting a writing mentor, Anne became friends with poets such as Maxine Kumin, W.D. Snodgrass and none other than Sylvia Plath. She was such close friends with Sylvia, in fact, that she wrote a poem entitled Sylvia’s Death about, well, Sylvia’s death. She outlived Sylvia by 11 years, though – on October 4, 1974, Anne had lunch with Maxine, returned home and killed herself by sitting in her garage with the door down and the gas running.
Sarah Kane
Kaufman’s theory holds up even with contemporary writers. Sarah Kane was a playwright and screenwriter who suffered from severe depression. She was voluntarily admitted twice to the Maudsley psychiatric hospital in London. She channeled her depression into plays which were performed by the Royal Court. Critics weren’t too impressed when the plays debuted which may have lead to her suicide in 1999. After an overdose of prescription medication landed her in King’s College Hospital but failed to kill her, she ended up hanging herself in a hospital bathroom. (Photo from IainFisher.com)
So, that was morbid. But it does provide some supporting evidence for Kaufman’s Sylvia Plath effect. What do you think? Does the Sylvia Plath effect make sense? The other side of the coin is that there are a number of suicides with any occupation and these are just more public given the public nature of the work.
I’m not really sure which side I believe, but I am a little bit relieved to know I have no talent for poetry whatsoever.
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