When I was a kid, my dad told me a story about a guy he used to work with who knew a guy whose brother once ate so many McDonald's hamburgers in a single sitting that he literally exploded. His stomach popped like a meat balloon, and all manner of guts and ooze and McInnards just plopped out. Boom, he's dead. I don't know if that story had a moral, but I remember thinking, "What a lightweight," and pondering how many burgers I could probably eat, which would no doubt be way more than this loser, before I actually died. And my death would be noble, not like this loser, because I would have eaten such a shit-ton of burgers, people would have been in awe of me. Not like that loser.
Why did I have such animosity toward a dead burger fan at age 7? I don't know. Why did I think if I did the exact same thing I'd somehow be cool? I don't know. But I did develop a fascination with the idea of being murdered by my dinner. Not like from E. coli or botulism -- those are predictable -- but just having my dinner turn against me as we struggle to dominate each other. And so here we are.
#6. Wine
George Doyle/Stockbyte/Getty Images
This would no doubt have been less appealing to me as a child, but I can see an upside today. Not to be too morbid, but let's face facts -- we're all going to die sometime, so why not make the best of it? Which is to say, this is an awful way to die, but there are worse things out there -- imagine being eaten by rats, for instance.
Nerea Perez was working at a local winery and doing as people do, walking across some kind of catwalk over a giant vat of wine. On the one hand, this may make you wonder how you prevent shit from your shoes from falling into the wine, but on the other hand, you may also wonder what happens when people get high off the fumes and fall into the vat. I have no answer to the first one, but if the second one happens, as it did to Perez, you simply drown. It's a bit unceremonious.
Medioimages/Photodisc/Photodisc/Getty Images
Albeit a lot more efficient than the traditional way one drowns in wine.
Officials believe the fumes from the wine overwhelmed Perez, who then tumbled into the vat. Fermentation fumes can be pretty hardcore, and the vats themselves can sometimes be large enough to hold 2 tons of product. Why have a catwalk over a vat of liquid that gives off intoxicating fumes? How should I know; why make guns that shoot snakes and chainsaws?
Sasa Maricic/Hemera/Getty Images, Thinkstock Images/Stockbyte/Getty Images
Trick question. The snakechainzooka is its own reward.
#5. Molasses
MonaMakela/iStock/Getty Images
The Boston Molasses Disaster is both tragic and stupid, and it's a remarkable piece of history. How does molasses, known for being as fast as a legless monkey rolling uphill, manage to kill not just one person but 21 and injure 150 others? Impeccable comic-timing and ridiculous mass.
Thinkstock Images/Stockbyte/Getty Images
I should probably clarify: It killed 21 without the aid of flour, butter, and decades of inactivity.
On Jan. 15, 1919, the temperature in Boston rose above 40 degrees. This was January, and the previous day had been remarkably cold, well below zero. That sharp shift in temperature acted on a massive tank of 2.3 million gallons of molasses being held in a shit-shack of a tank that was known to leak so badly they painted it brown to hide that fact at the Purity Distilling Company.
Boston Public Library
Which no doubt threw authorities completely off the trail when they went looking
for the source of Lake Diabetes.
Thanks to fermentation, carbon dioxide was already putting pressure on the tank internally. The sudden temperature shift only exacerbated the situation to the point that the rivets holding everything together literally exploded out of the structure; witnesses reported it sounding like gunfire. The tank toppled, and a shit-like wave of molasses crashed down at a whopping 35 miles per hour.
How does a person outrun 2.3 million gallons of molasses traveling at the speed of a galloping horse? They don't, which is why so many people died. The wave was so powerful it bent steel girders in nearby buildings when it hit, knocked a rail car off the tracks, and swept buildings off their foundations. For those who saw it coming, a massively thick, brown river, it must have been as though the Devil himself shat on the street and condemned mankind to the worst death ever.
#4. Chocolate
Mikael Damkier/iStock/Getty Images
"Death by chocolate" is an expression that is probably playing off of "death by misadventure" and has since been given to desserts, a short film, an album, and probably some kind of really perverse sexual maneuver you're better off not knowing about. It can also just be used to describe a literal situation, such as the case of Vincent Smith, who went full body into a vat of chocolate at a New Jersey plant and never came back up again.
LittleBee80/iStock/Getty Images
Calm your shit, "I'd love to drown in chocolate!" comment guy; this is about to get grim.
Smith was over a tank loading chocolate into it when he slipped and fell in. Unlike the rivers of chocolate at Willy Wonka's factory, this vat was filled with boiling chocolate that was being mixed by massive, brutal mechanical arms. Even though his co-workers managed to shut the mixers down, Smith was in the boiling brew for over 10 minutes before rescue workers arrived.
Unsurprisingly, after 10 minutes, there was nothing anyone could do to save Smith. There was no official word on what caused his fall in the first place. This incident, however, and the earlier one with the wine, does make you think maybe having unsteady platforms over massive tanks of potentially deadly substances is kind of a shitty way to run your business. Unless you're secretly in the business of drowning employees in food, in which case good work.
When a good Jokering is your best-case scenario, it's time for a redesign.
0 comments:
Post a Comment