‘Mark O’Dwyer owes his life to a 14-year-old punk rocker and an edgy television science program.
The 54-year-old was waiting at Lisarow train station on the Central Coast at 2.45pm on October 19 when he fainted and toppled two metres from the platform onto the tracks below, as a freight train bore down on the station.
Julian Shaw, who is 180 centimetres tall and weighs 70 kilograms, was travelling home from school with classmates when he saw Mr O’Dwyer, who is 187 centimetres tall and weighs 110 kilograms, fall. Julian leapt into action. [..]
“[As the train roared past] the noise pierced your ears and there was a suction that pulled us in,” Julian said.
“I’d seen that on MythBusters, so I stayed right back and pulled Mark back towards me.”‘
‘A Scottish woman has avoided a prison sentence after she admitted putting dog excrement in her husband’s curry.
Jill Martin, 47, took drastic action after her marriage broke down and burst out laughing when her husband Donald started eating the dish at their home in Newton Mearns, Glasgow, Paisley Sheriff Court in central Scotland heard.
She admitted culpable and reckless conduct in May following the incident in March.
But Sheriff Susan Sinclair said that she would not send her to jail because her circumstances are “quite different” than at the time of the attack. She was discharged without punishment.’
Followup to Wife put excrement in man’s curry.
‘A Chelan County fire chief says a couple were lucky they weren’t killed by a cow that fell off a cliff and smashed their minivan.
District 5 Chief Arnold Baker says they missed being killed by a matter of inches Sunday as they drove on Highway 150 near Manson.
The 600-pound cow fell about 200 feet and landed on the hood of the minivan carrying Charles Everson Jr. and his wife Linda of Westland, Mich., who were in the area celebrating their one-year wedding anniversary. They were checked at Lake Chelan Community Hospital as a precaution.
The van was heavily damaged, including a broken windshield.’
‘<third_planet> The other night my friend had some pot and wanted me to smoke it with him, but we had nowhere to smoke it because both our parents were home.
<third-planet> So we drove around looking for a place to park so we could smoke in the car.
<third-planet> We eventually settled on a Wendys parking lot..
see it here »
‘You might think this big shaggy Newfoundland dog, named Jackson, read the firefghter’s survival manual. The dog did everything right when a fire destroyed its Farmingville, Long Island home on Monday.
Firefighters say they found Jackson in the bathtub with his nose pressed against the drain getting fresh air.
The dog’s owner, Debbie Credidio, said that Jackson likes to lay in the bathroom to escape the heat. Going to his favorite spot may have saved the 3-year-old Newfoundland’s life.
Firefighters Vince Egbert and Edgar Trejo pulled aside a shower curtain and found the dog “actually sucking air out of the drainpipe, which is an old-school thing that a fireman would do.”’
‘A 15-YEAR-old Russian boy suffered acute frostbite after riding the wing of a Boeing-737 plane on a 1300km two-hour flight.
With temperatures hitting minus 50C and the plane at a cruising speed of 900km/h, the teenager Andrei Shcherbakov collapsed onto the tarmac when the plane landed.
He had clung on for the entire flight from Perm in Russia’s Ural region to Vnukova Airport in Moscow.
His arms and legs were so severely frozen that rescuers were at first unable to remove his coat and shoes.
He was taken by ambulance to hospital where doctors are trying to save his hands.
When he awoke, Andrei told police that he had decided to run away from his alcoholic father and their home in Perm.’
‘An Croatian motorbike rider was knocked unconscious when lightning struck his penis during a roadside toilet break.
Metro.co.uk reported Ante Djindjic, 29, escaped relatively unscathed from the incident, suffering only light burns to his chest and arms.
He said: “I don’t remember what happened. One minute I was taking a leak and the next thing I knew I was in hospital.
“Doctors said the lightning went through my body and because I was wearing rubber boots it earthed itself through my penis.”
“Thankfully, the doctors said that there would be no lasting effects, and my penis will function normally eventually.”‘
‘The RPG that had plowed into Moss’ lower abdomen stretched from one hip to the other. If the RPG went off, it would kill everyone within 30 feet of him. Yet Angell stayed close, bandaging his wounds and stabilizing the weapon so that movement wouldn’t cause it to explode.
Moss was still fully conscious, so Angell ordered him to not look down at the injury. He didn’t want Moss to panic.
“I’m gonna do everything I can,” Angell said to Moss. “You keep fighting with me and I’ll keep fighting with you.” [..]
Reports of injuries had been radioed to the medical evacuation helicopter (MEDEVAC) base in Salerno, Afghanistan — minus one crucial piece of information.
“We didn’t tell them that, you know, Moss had live ordnance in him,” Mariani said, “because there was that possibility that, you know, they might not want to transport him with live ordnance in him.”‘
‘A pilot made an incredible escape after crashing his small plane on a busy highway in Florida yesterday.
Robert Robertson was left conscious and sitting in his seat after the cockpit disintegrated around him on.
The bloodied 34-year-old, who was alone on the flight and remarkably suffered only minor injuries, remained in his seat waiting for nearby emergency crews to take him to hospital. [..]
Witnesses said the plane lost power, did cartwheels in the sky, clipped its wing on a warehouse and came to a halt in roadside grass.’
The dragster disintegrates and explodes at top speed, but this guy gets nothing but a small burn on his pinky finger.
(3.7meg Flash video)
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‘The 25-year-old was driving out of a car park off the Nepean Highway at Frankston South, south of the city, when the accident occurred just before 12am (AEST) yesterday.
Police said the woman backed her sedan through a wooden safety fence before plunging 20m over a cliff.
“She is very, very lucky,” a police spokesman said.
“It’s a very steep cliff and pretty well a straight drop down to a beach.”
The woman was unconscious and smoke was coming out of the car’s engine when police arrive, he said.’
‘An Oregon man was sentenced to 10 years in prison Friday after hiring another man to kill his wife.
Susan Kuhnhausen fought off the hit man and actually strangled the attacker with her bare hands killing him.
During Friday’s sentencing hearing held up a picture taken of her bruised face after the attack and said, “This is what I would have looked like if I die.” [..]
Susan called it a cowardly plan.
“If I ever believed you deserved to be dead, I would at least have had the balls to kill you myself,” declared Kuhnhausen.’
‘A missing Bowie State University student was found alive on Saturday night, a week after he disappeared.
Julian McCormick, 18, was badly injured and trapped in his wrecked car after he drove off Powder Mill Road into a creek in Beltsville, officials said.
He was last seen Sept. 1 on his way to pick up his girlfriend, his family said.
According to officials, McCormick managed to free himself, telling family he crawled through a creek bed, under a bridge and up an embankment to a road where two women spotted him on Saturday.’
‘At 76, Doris Anderson has astounded her doctor by surviving nearly two weeks in the thick woods of Eastern Oregon.
Lost on a hunting trip, she was lightly clothed and had no supplies or survival gear as temperatures dropped into the 30s and rescue teams dwindled.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said her emergency room doctor, Steve DeLashmutt. “For being out in the mountains for a couple of weeks she was in pretty good shape, amazingly good shape.”
Anderson was extremely dehydrated, cold and incoherent when she arrived at St. Elizabeth Health Services in Baker City after two law enforcement officers working on their day off found her. [..]
“I would say for her peer group that she did remarkably well,” DeLashmutt said. “Other 76-year-old folks, two weeks in the mountains they wouldn’t have survived.”‘
‘A bus driver has described the harrowing seconds when he had to fight off a man who allegedly tried to steer his bus into oncoming traffic during this morning’s peak hour, and then allegedly said he had a bomb on board.
Greyhound bus driver Con Jansen, 47, from Chatswood, was four hours into his shift driving a Brisbane to Sydney charter bus with 26 people on board when a man suddenly tried to grab the large bus’s steering from him.
“I was driving along, the next minute I’ve got a guy grabbing the steering wheel,” said Mr Jansen, who had been driving the bus on Pennant Hills Road, near the corner of Beecroft Road, in Sydney’s north-west about 8.25am when the attack occurred.
“You’re just sitting down driving, you don’t expect anyone to jump on top of you.”‘
‘A “bungling” voyeur who spied on a 22-year-old woman in a tanning booth has been given a suspended jail term.
Stephen Strange, 43, of Chippenham, who admitted voyeurism, watched the woman undress and lie on a bed in July 2005.
But two minutes into the session, there was a crash and she saw Strange’s face appear in a gap in the ceiling. [..]
“She was naked, face up on this tanning machine, when you appeared through a gap in the ceiling.
“You can imagine how terrified she must have been, not knowing after you had acted in that bizarre way, what else you might do.”‘
During testing for a new design, the pilot jiggles the control stick to see what happens.
(1.5meg Flash video)
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‘The Meng brothers felt pretty good about their chances of making it out of the collapsed coal mine, until the sound of digging from outside stopped.
With no food or water, they were forced to eat coal and drink their own urine from discarded bottles. When they were too exhausted to try to dig themselves out, they slept huddled together in the cold and dark.
Meng Xianchen and Meng Xianyou finally clawed their way to the surface after nearly six days underground – a rare tale of survival in China’s coal mines, the world’s deadliest, where an average of 13 workers are killed every day.
The two even managed to crack jokes about their wives remarrying once they were dead after they emerged Friday from the illegal mine – which had no oxygen, ventilation or emergency exits – in Beijing’s Fangshan district.’
‘A man who was impaled by a metal post said he was walking on his own the day after it was removed from his body.
James Graham, a truck driver, was seriously injured on Aug. 16 when a 10-foot pole went through the driver’s side door and into his body after he crashed his 18-wheeler into a chain-link fence.
Graham said he remembered the crash, but doesn’t remember the pole going through his body.
“I didn’t even know I was stuck until a bypasser got up on the truck and said, ‘Oh man, you’ve been stabbed with a pole,”‘ Graham said. “I was like, ‘What?'”‘
‘Hordes of people flocked to a Queenstown ATM this week after the machine started doubling their money.
Police said a concerned taxi driver alerted them to the problem on Tuesday night after the driver saw queues of up to 20 people lining up at the Kiwbank ATM.
“There were queues of 15 to 20 people at any one time for a good six hours from about 10pm until 4am,” the taxi driver said.
“It was a backpacker bonanza.”
A KiwiBank spokesman Bruce Thompson said a contactor had incorrectly stacked the ATM with $20 notes in the $10 box and vice versa.’
‘Steven Earp, 48, was eating a fast-food sandwich Wednesday morning, said police Sgt. Doug Mozan.
Earp choked and blacked out. His 1997 Honda sedan hit a parked car. After the wreck, Earp came to.
Mozan attributed his revival to a “seat-belt-induced Heimlich maneuver.”
Witnesses told police Earp got out of his car, and they asked if he was OK.
“No, I’m not,” he said, and collapsed again.’
‘He survived against all the odds; now Peng Shulin has astounded doctors by learning to walk again.
When his body was cut in two by a lorry in 1995, it was little short of a medical miracle that he lived. [..]
Skin was grafted from his head to seal his torso – but the legless Mr Peng was left only 78cm (2ft 6in) tall. [..]
Doctors at the China Rehabilitation Research Centre in Beijing found out about Mr Peng’s plight late last year and devised a plan to get him up walking again.
They came up with an ingenious way to allow him to walk on his own, creating a sophisticated egg cup-like casing to hold his body with two bionic legs attached to it.’
see it here »
‘Cape York stockman David George has spent seven nights up a tree in a crocodile-infested swamp, bleeding and with little food – and lived to tell the tale.
The father-of-one and co-manager at Silver Plains cattle station yesterday told his remarkable tale of survival and rescue by chopper in rugged bushland near Coen, in the state’s remote far north.
“Every night I was stalked by two crocs who would sit at the bottom of the tree staring up at me,” Mr George recalled yesterday.
“All I could see was two sets of red eyes below me and all night I had to listen to a big bull croc bellowing a bit further out.
“I’d yell out at them, ‘I’m not falling out of this tree for you bastards’.”‘
‘An exotic dancer is credited with reviving a client who passed out during a private strip show early Friday morning, police said.
Karnesha Nantz, 25, was hired early Friday morning to perform a personal show for Daniel Karpinski, 46, at Karpinski’s home on the 400 block of Southeast Evans Avenue in Port St. Lucie, police said.
According to a police report, while Nantz was dancing, she turned and faced away from Karpinski for approximately 20 seconds. When she turned around again to face him, Karpinski was slumped down on the couch and was having trouble breathing, police said.’
‘Today I come rushing home because it’s the end of the semester and I have finals coming up and I need to write two papers tonight so that I can go camping this holiday weekend with peace of mind so I get home and GIL says, hey honey, you’re just in time! I’m cooking french fries!
Oh that’s good, I say, because I haven’t eaten yet and I have all this work to do. Let me just put my bike away. I walk into the kitchen and notice my computer’s not on the kitchen table. Which. Means. It’s…. oh, SHIT!!!!
I open the over door. No fries. Just one miserable looking laptop. (STOP: EXPLANATION OF WHY I KEEP MY LAPTOP IN THE OVEN: I keep it there because I live in a high crime area in a house with windows that don’t even lock. I figure the oven’s actually a very safe place. Who would think to look there for valuables? and if the house burns down the computer’d be okay. The system worked just fine when I was living alone.)’
‘This holidaymaker found herself stranded in her deckchair as the tide came in and started lapping at her feet. The woman, estimated by some onlookers to weigh as much as 20 stone, had been unable to get out of the chair after its legs became firmly wedged in the shingle. [..]
But it took coastguards in yellow jumpsuits and wellington boots to rescue the turbanwearing tourist, said to be 49 and from Belgium. Two of them prised her free just as the water came up the beach, watched by a crowd of onlookers.
Ronald Coleman, 74, one of those who witnessed the distressing scene at Westcliffon-Sea, Essex, said: “The tide was racing in. She was lucky.”‘
‘An extremely rare “living fossil” caught by a fisherman in Indonesia is being examined by scientists.
The 1.3m-long (4.3ft), 50kg (110lb) coelacanth is only the second ever to have been captured in Asia and has been described as a “significant find”.
An autopsy and genetic tests are now being carried out to determine more about the specimen. [..]
Scientists previously thought the fish group had died out about 70 million years ago, but were shocked when in 1938 they discovered that a specimen had been caught in a fishing net off the east coast of South Africa.’
‘Three men who dug up a young woman’s corpse to have sex with it after seeing her obituary photo cannot be charged with attempted sexual assault because Wisconsin has no law against necrophilia, an appeals court ruled Thursday.
A judge was correct to dismiss the charges against twin brothers Nicholas and Alexander Grunke and Dustin Radke, all 21, because lawmakers never intended to criminalize sex with a corpse, the District 4 Court of Appeals said in a 3-0 ruling.
The three men went to a cemetery in Cassville in southwestern Wisconsin on Sept. 2 to remove the body of Laura Tennessen, 20, who had been killed the week before in a motorcycle crash.’
