“Why yes, I hear Darfur is quite lovely this time of year.”
There’s no way to prove that luck as we know it exists. Most people believe it out of superstition or firsthand experience with improbable odds. With experiences like the following, it becomes much harder to disprove.
1.Frane Selak
If you’ve ever wondered where action movies get their increasingly bizarre scenarios from, look no further than the life of Frane Selak, a Croatian man who’s escaped more vehicle accidents than most people are willing to put up with.
This again? Oh, come on!
Selak’s history of WTF begins in the sixties when he was riding on a train that derailed into a river. This being January, the list of terrible things that could happen as a result of a train diving into a river were greatly increased. Selak wasn’t among the seventeen dead, having escaped with a broken arm. A year later, Selak (who had presumably sworn off of trains) was taking a flight on a commercial airliner when the cabin doors were blown off. Selak was blown away with nineteen other people. He was the only one to have survived, landing on a haystack and avoiding other injuries. A year after that, Salek tried his hand at buses and promptly found himself in a freezing river again. After being stuck by a bus and escaping a car explosion twice, Frane hit some good luck that didn’t involve near death in 2004 when he won the Croatian Million Dollar lottery.
2.Timothy Dexter
To make it in the business world nowadays you need some sort of education, a sense of direction and some sort of knowledge of the business world itself. Timothy Dexter, a 1700’s eccentric, defied this logic in every possible way. He couldn’t even spell properly but somehow became one of the most successful business men in New England.
Raised as a farmhand, a young Dexter picked up his trade seemingly on a whim and immediately found good fortune despite being publicly known as a poorly educated hick. His contemporaries were known to give him bad advice with the intention of ruining him financially. One such tip was importing warming pans to the West Indies, an area noted for its warmth. A captain on his ship sold them as ladles to a growing molasses company, turning a large profit. It was then suggested that he sell wool mittens to the same people, who in turn bought them all and sold them to Siberia. After being convinced to sell coal to Newport, he arrived just in time for a miner’s strike, making a small fortune. His entire career was made off of such success and it most likely wouldn’t have happened if people weren’t trying to undermine his non-integrity all the time.
Haters gonna hate.
At the age of fifty he published his memoir A Pickle for the Knowing Ones or Plain Truth in a Homespun Dress. Initially he gave the book away for free but soon found a publishing house that ran eight editions. Oddly enough, the book contains absolutely no punctuation within the text.
3.Jason and Jenny Cairns-Lawrence
People usually only get to directly experience a terrorist attack once in their lifetime. That is because terrorist attacks have the tendency to kill lots of people. However, Jason and Jenny Cairns-Lawrence are not among them. In fact, they’ve witnessed major acts of terrorism first hand three times without being harmed themselves.
Their feel-good story begins with a trip to New York City on September 11th, making them witnesses to the worst terrorist attack in American history. Four years later the duo was in London when bombs were detonated across the city’s transit system, killing fifty people. Rounding out this horrible trilogy, the couple happened to be vacationing in Mumbai when the city was under siege by terrorists. Their travel agent would later be revealed to be Satan himself.
“Why yes, I hear Darfur is quite lovely this time of year.”
Despite bearing witness to three of the worst events of their lifetime, the two keep a fairly optimistic view about it despite the fact that they were obviously cursed by a sorcerer at some point in their lives.
4.Vesna Vulovic
We don’t have an actual statistic to cite here, but we’re going to make the bold and perhaps controversial assumption that a vast majority of people who fall out of aircraft do not survive. In fact, the odds of survival only lower as the height of your fall increases. Again, no study to support this theory, but our loose understanding of science leads us to believe that gravity trumps all.
On January 26, 1972, a Yugoslav Airline carrying less than thirty people reached a height of thirty-three thousand feet before a bomb on board was set off, causing the plane to disintegrate and killing many of the passengers. Vesna Vulovic was a stewardess on the doomed flight through a mix-up (it was originally supposed to be a different stewardess named Vesna). Initially she was happy with the mistake because it would be her first trip to Denmark. However, she soon found herself regretting her decision to not call in sick at some point while she was cartwheeling through the sky over Europe.
Like this, but different.
Vesna survived without a parachute, suffering a fractured skull, two broken legs and a few broken vertebrae. At first she was paralyzed from the damage caused to her spine. However, after a series of operations she was able to walk once more. She currently holds the Guinness World Record for the longest fall without a parachute. Something tells me she would have appreciated the award more had it occurred under less explosive circumstances.
5.Tsutomu Yamaguchi
If there was ever a guy that deserved hazard pay, it was Tsutomu Yamaguchi.
Yamaguchi and two workers were staying in Hiroshima for a three month business trip. While preparing to leave the city Yamaguchi saw a plane in the sky then a tremendous flash. Suddenly he was lying on the ground blind, burned and half deaf. The explosion of the atomic bomb had occurred only two miles away but he survived, managing to crawl to a near-by shelter and meet up with his colleagues. The next day he returned to his place of residence in Nagasaki. Yeah, this isn’t going to end well.
On August 9h Yamaguchi was in his office describing his experience to a co-worker when the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The explosion itself was less than two miles away but he remained uninjured, though his ruined bandages led to a fever during the same week.
A perpetual case of the Mondays.
Yamaguchi was one of just over one-hundred people present for both bombings but stands as the only person recognized by the Japanese government as surviving both. At first it was believed that had been unaffected by the radiation left by the weapons and that the only injuries he suffered from the bombs were burns. However, this turned out to be untrue; in 2009 he was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer. It ultimately took his life at age 93, killing him in 2010. During his lifetime he continued working various jobs while speaking out against the use of atomic weapons.
