Not Your Ordinary Newspaper Obituary

September 26, 2006 9:08 AM

"He spent much of his life recovering from the misadventures that plagued him even in the womb."A most unusual obituary that illuminates the life of a Denver-area man with unusuably horiffic bad luck.
posted by huskerdont (40 comments total)

Bummer. Then you have guys like this.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:16 AM on September 26, 2006

Lost Dog: 3 Legs, blind in left eye, missing right ear, tail broken, large burn scar on back, recently castrated...

Answers to the name of "LUCKY".
posted by BobFrapples at 9:22 AM on September 26, 2006

I guess somedays you're the pidgeon (sic), others you're the statue.
posted by grateful at 9:22 AM on September 26, 2006

Sounds like he was not very good at anything other than recovering. It seems like everything he did almost killed him. But from child to computer programmer in a year, that is impressive.
posted by Mr_Zero at 9:22 AM on September 26, 2006

Then there's the writer/editor with the unusuably horiffic bad spelling.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:27 AM on September 26, 2006

!
posted by Dr-Baa at 9:27 AM on September 26, 2006

Moral of the story: Don't leave the house, and don't do anything while you're in there.

/Shrouds self in bubble wrap
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:34 AM on September 26, 2006

Weapons-Grade: I accidentally read US Weekly this morning and lost ten IQ points in the process. My sincere apologies for the spelling faux pas.
posted by huskerdont at 9:34 AM on September 26, 2006

Reminds me of a joke...

There's this guy who goes through life constantly "picking the black marble" whenever he's faced with a bivalent decision: Do I turn left or right? Should I stay or should I go? It causes him no end of aggravation, like being bitten to death by ducks, but at least he manages not to take God's name in vain when exasperation drives him to swearing out loud.

So...he happens to be an industrial sales rep, and after a call at some manufacturing company in a remote area, he takes the only available flight out. The aircraft he's on runs into incredibly bad weather: Lightning hits the plane, one engine flames out, the other catches fire, wild up- and downdrafts cause the flight crew to lose control of the stricken airplane completely -- hydraulic pressure's zero and the electrical system's fried -- so that now the plane's nose-down and corkscrewing rapidly toward terra firma.

Our hero offers a hasty prayer, and since he happens to be devoutly Roman Catholic, he asks his favorite saint to intercede on his behalf: "Saint Francis, I don't know why it's been my cross to bear that every time I choose I lose, but I've borne it as best I can, and this time I chose to take the only available flight out, and now look what's happening! Please save me!"

And...a huge metaphysical hand reaches from a dimension we can't see, plucks our hero from the doomed bird, bears him aloft into the light, and as his utter terror begins to turn to wonder and joy, a vast voice that booms at him from nowhere and everywhere: "Fear not, my son! I have seen you bear your burden with with dignity, with patience and humility, and your faith never deserted you...Oh, by the way, I was just wondering: Were you praying to St. Francis Xavier or St. Francis of Assisi?"
posted by pax digita at 9:36 AM on September 26, 2006 [4 favorites]

Back when I was regularly advertising for people to do text-editing work for my company, I twice got replies from people who spelled the word "editting".

When I wrote back to say I wouldn't be taking their application any further, because they couldn't spell the name of the job they'd applied for when one of the primary critera for the job was being able to spell, one of them had the chutzpah to tell me that the error had been made in an email and therefore "didn't count".

Some people make their own unluck, is what I'm saying.
posted by Hogshead at 9:37 AM on September 26, 2006

Life imitating art (or at least tv).
posted by Gamblor at 9:37 AM on September 26, 2006

Are we sure this guy wasn't just reckless?

At any rate, sounds like a very hard life.
posted by agregoli at 9:49 AM on September 26, 2006

I think I would have packed it in sometime around the third time I had to learn how to wipe my own ass.
posted by quite unimportant at 9:53 AM on September 26, 2006

It was hard not to think of The Simpsons' Frank Grimes as I read it.

Although you have to feel bad for the guy, you have to admit that there's something pathetically funny about someone who had such shitty luck all his life. There's a message in there about "God's twisted designs", for those whose beliefs are so inclined.
posted by clevershark at 9:56 AM on September 26, 2006

And still the cast of Jackass goes on living.
posted by StarForce5 at 10:00 AM on September 26, 2006

To continue his rotten streak, he might end up in hell because of an accounting error.
posted by clevershark at 10:02 AM on September 26, 2006

Staff Writer Claire Martin certainly unpacked her adjectives, didn't she?
posted by padraigin at 10:09 AM on September 26, 2006

Actually, he miraculously revived, but they already had buried him... Bad luck, huh?

I feel dirty...
posted by splice at 10:11 AM on September 26, 2006

Born to lose, my every hope is gone
It's so hard to face that empty dawn
You were all the happiness I knew
Born to lose and now I'm losing you.
posted by Astro Zombie at 10:19 AM on September 26, 2006

Too bad I don’t have any of his blues albums.
posted by Smedleyman at 10:37 AM on September 26, 2006


George : It's not working, Jerry. It's just not working.
Jerry : What is it that isn't working?
George : Why did it all turn out like this for me? I had so much promise. I was personable, I was bright. Oh, maybe not academically speaking, but ... I was perceptive. I always know when someone's uncomfortable at a party. It became very clear to me sitting out there today, that every decision I've ever made, in my entire life, has been wrong. My life is the opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every of life, be it something to wear, something to eat ... It's all been wrong.
...
The Opposite.

posted by blue_beetle at 10:44 AM on September 26, 2006

It's like a Darwin lifetime achievement award.
posted by delmoi at 11:54 AM on September 26, 2006

Interesting. This is a tale much like my father's who is now 70 and has no sign of stopping the plague of accidents.
posted by Kickstart70 at 12:10 PM on September 26, 2006

Old Russian Joke:

A cowboy is riding along in the desert, when suddenly he is attacked by a thousand Indians.

"Oh, shit!", he thinks. "Now I'm in trouble".

"Not at all", says his inner voice. "Shoot the one with the big feathers -- that's the chief".

The cowboy obeys his inner voice, and shoots the chief, who drops dead off his horse.

"Now you're in trouble", says the inner voice.
posted by unSane at 12:14 PM on September 26, 2006 [1 favorite]

It sounds like he had a disorder that caused him to bleed heavily. The skull thing, the spleen thing, and a bunch of the other unnamed problems were probably all related.
posted by Eideteker at 1:28 PM on September 26, 2006

MetaFilter: Like being bitten to death by ducks.
posted by jimmythefish at 3:04 PM on September 26, 2006

Am I a bad person for not feeling sorry for this guy, or just terribly optimistic? Sounds like he had an interesting life, at least.
posted by zennie at 3:12 PM on September 26, 2006

This reminds me of... me. Over 800 stitches by the time I left a small town in Iowa. Many accidents too humorous to mention.

There was only one surgeon in the county and we had become well-aquainted. Once, as he was boarding a plane for his bi-annual trip back to Ireland, I ran a mower over my foot. He got the call, de-boarded and drove 100 miles back.

Waking up from the gas, I saw his familiar face shaking his head and grinning (earlier in our doctor-idiot relationship he would attempt a scold but soon gave up to a simple look of incredulity). "Heck of a mow, eh?" is about all he could say. I had lost the middle three toes outright- he stitched up the rest - so my main concern was "Doc, will I walk with a limp?"

And with that impish smile and irish accent he replied "Naw, yewl walk jest fayn (pause) ... but when ye swim yewl swim en circles!"
posted by hal9k at 4:00 PM on September 26, 2006 [1 favorite]

"That was when he broke his back for the first time."

That was the "holy shit" line for me. Noticed no stops, think Dr. has the right of it.

!
posted by absalom at 4:03 PM on September 26, 2006

A victim of the Nicoll Effect.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 5:06 PM on September 26, 2006

Hard Luck
posted by hortense at 6:01 PM on September 26, 2006

I would never have imagined that I would find two funny jokes in this post.

Bitten to death by ducks, indeed.
posted by malaprohibita at 6:58 PM on September 26, 2006

I have a friend who has this sort of luck. He's been hit in the face with a garage door slamming shut; fallen out of a tree on a golf course and broken his arm (and then got a bizarre infection in his arm, apparently from goose poo); injured his knee, had surgery, and then gotten hit by a car and broken his shoulder blade on his way to the doctor for his final checkup before returning to work. Among other things.
posted by oneirodynia at 7:49 PM on September 26, 2006

Claire Martin should go work for The Onion. Even the photo was perfect.
posted by Ynoxas at 7:58 PM on September 26, 2006

I hear he caused a train crash looking for some security guard named Dave Dunn.
posted by Smedleyman at 8:32 PM on September 26, 2006

"The injuries reduced Cook's physical abilities to those of an infant, requiring more than a year of treatment at Craig Hospital, which specializes in spinal cord and traumatic brain injury rehabilitation.

'He had to learn to walk and talk and potty-train and feed himself again,' Eitani said.

When at last Cook recuperated, he found a job as an assistant computer programmer at Denver's Medicare office."

I really don't mean to say anything about "l33t haxxorzes" really.
posted by davy at 9:07 PM on September 26, 2006

Hey WGP, how did that bike accident video get made? Was it a cop surveillance video or what?
posted by davy at 9:24 PM on September 26, 2006

davy: looks like a fixed traffic camera to me. Could be one of those cameras they install to catch red-light runners, perhaps?
posted by Ynoxas at 7:58 AM on September 27, 2006

Yes, I think it's a traffic camera, likely only recording vehicles entering against the red light, which in this case was the woman in the car. One amazing and lucky flight that guy had. Easier to see if you pause the video at intervals. Check out the way he lands. Horseshoes.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 6:01 PM on September 27, 2006

Yeah, some people are just born unlucky, there's no doubt about it.

I remember seeing that episode of Sienfeld and thinking "holy shit, that could be me talking".
posted by dg at 8:12 PM on September 27, 2006