ChaoticMusings

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Amazing True Life

Digger · Admin

When Roger Lausier was four years old, he wandered away from his mother during a trip to the beach in 1965. He made his way alone into the water and tried to swim, but an undercurrent pulled him down. He would have died, but a stranger named Alice Blaise dove into the water and pulled him to shore, where she revived him and saved his life.

Nine years later, 13-year-old Roger was out on the same beach when he heard a woman scream, “My husband is drowning!” Roger didn’t realize this was a woman he’d met before, but he rushed into action anyway. He jumped onto an inflatable raft, paddled out to the man, and pulled him on, saving his life.

Nobody there realized the strange, cosmic coincidence that had just happened until the news reported on it the next day.^[2] It wasn’t until then that Alice Blaise realized that the young man who had saved her husband’s life was the four-year-old boy whose life she’d once saved.

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Christopher Dempsey gave up half of his liver for someone he’d never met. He overheard a coworker he barely knew talking about a cousin who had stage-four liver disease. She needed a liver transplant, but there were 119,000 people on the transplant list before her. Unless she found a donor, she would only have two more months to live.

Dempsey didn’t know the family well, but he didn’t think it was right to let her suffer. And so he butted in to offer to get himself tested to see if he was a match. When he found he was, he agreed to donate part of his liver.

The woman whose life he’d save was named Heather Krueger, and they didn’t meet until after he’d promised to give her his liver.^[6] When they did, though, they fell in love. They started dating after the operation, and in 2016, two years after saving her life, Chris Dempsey got married to a woman he would never have met if he hadn’t agreed to give up an organ for a total stranger.

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Dr. Michael Shannon went through hell when his SUV was T-boned by a truck on the highway in 2011. The truck that smashed into him ended up pinning his vehicle down, trapping him inside as his engine caught fire. There was no way out, and the fire was spreading.

By the time the rescue team came, Dr. Shannon’s legs were on fire. The rescuers ultimately managed to put out the fire and get him out with the jaws of life, saving him from certain death.

A paramedic named Chris Trokey pulled Shannon from the wreckage and got him to the hospital, but he didn’t realize whose life he was saving until he got there. At the hospital, he heard the patient’s name, “Dr. Shannon,” and realized who he’d just rescued.

Trokey had been born premature, weighing just 1.5 kilograms (3.2 lb), and wasn’t expected to survive. Dr. Shannon, though, had spent sleepless nights working to keep him healthy. He was the only reason Chris Trokey survived his first day of life—and now, Trokey was the reason Dr. Shannon survived his accident.

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Darren Burton is kind of a turd. A 41-year-old committed grief troll, he dedicated a good part of his life to leaving messages like “Rot in Piss” on the Facebook pages of murdered children, justifying his actions by claiming Facebook is “an open forum,” because he doesn’t know what the word “justification” means. For most of us, the obvious response is to ignore such an annoyance and get on with our lives—but the BBC decided a change of tactics was in order.

Weirdly, brilliantly, amazingly, one of the most respected news organizations in the world decided to troll the troll.

The ordeal started when journalists “doorstepped” Burton for an unscheduled interview. This resulted in him being unmasked in front of his wife and child in broad daylight. Then, when Burton gave a grudging, unrepentant interview, the BBC broadcast it with his name and location included. What happened next was nothing short of sweet, sweet justice. Burton’s Facebook page was deluged with the exact same sort of abuse he’d been handing out to dead kids, ultimately causing him to delete his account and run away like a scared child. Because the “it’s an open forum” defence only counts when you’re doing the abusing, apparently.

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In the eyes of certain jerks, having ovaries immediately disqualifies you from being human. Jason Householder and his nitwit pal John Stockum were two such jerks. After getting drunk in their tiny Ohio town one day, the pair decided to show their affection toward a nearby woman by hurling beer bottles and abuse at her car. Unfortunately for them, and very fortunately for the rest of us, the local jail was overcrowded when cops brought them in for sentencing. So a local judge came up with a much more fitting punishment.

Householder and Stockum were both forced to put on dresses, wigs, and makeup and parade down Main Street for an hour, in full view of a crowd who taunted them, wolf-whistled, and even chucked a soda bottle. In other words, the two jerks got to experience exactly what they put their victim through—in stereo.

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If you’re still stuck in the 20th-century world of landlines, you’ll know what a pain cold calling can be. Lee Beaumont shares that pain. In 2011, he was getting an average of 30 calls a month from idiots trying to sell him double glazing and whatnot. Then one day, Beaumont decided to turn the tables on his anonymous harassers—and to do it in the simplest, most polite way possible.

Starting in late November 2011, Beaumont changed his home phone into a premium line number. From that point on, any company that rang him was charged 10p per minute to conduct its business. And you better believe Beaumont let them talk away. By July this year, Beaumont had made £300 ($470) from nothing more than sitting on his butt—paid for by call centres across the country. Since his story first broke, the amount has gotten even bigger. According to The Guardian, Beaumont is now also raking it in from eager journalists desperate to talk to him about his scheme. Beaumont: 1, Life: 0.

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One of the hardest things about being a parent must be discovering that you’ve accidentally raised a jerkwad. In 2011, an unidentified Spanish couple had this forcibly rammed home when their unemployed, live-at-home son sued them to get his allowance increased. Just to be clear, the son was 25 years old and the parents only stopped his allowance because he refused to find a job. In other words, he was probably the most punchable man in the whole of Spain—and fortunately, the country’s legal system recognized this.

When it came to trial, the judge not only threw the case out, he issued a court order giving the guy 30 days to get his act together and get out his parents’ house. Even better, he was legally required to find a job and (presumably) stop being such a crying baby.

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In October 2009, two Welsh thugs—Dean Gardener and Jason Fender—were out on the streets of Swansea, looking for trouble. Tanked up on 10 pints of cider, the two thought they’d found their ideal victims when they spotted a pair of transvestites walking down the street in full, garish drag. Thanks to a combination of being drunk and being awful human beings, Gardener and Fender proceeded to launch a verbal and physical assault on the pair. And that’s when things got real.

The two transvestites just happened to be cage fighters on a fancy-dress night out. When Gardener and Fender came at them, they sidestepped the first punches, before handing out a brutal smackdown. What followed was a deeply gratifying beating that saw the thugs reduced to—well, exactly the sort of sobbing, unconscious mess you’d expect from someone who just took on a trained cage fighter. When the dust had settled, the two transvestites simply shouldered their bags and strutted off into the Welsh night, leaving Gardener and Fender to be booked by some highly amused policemen.

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In 2008, an unnamed Australian woman came home to find her husband looking awkward in his underwear, the back door hanging slightly open and—most incriminating of all—a pair of lacy knickers stuffed under the pillow. Whereas most of us would probably either chuck our cheating spouse out or simply break down and cry at this point, the Aussie woman did something far more awesome.

She set up an eBay account and began flogging off the evidence of her husband’s affair.First up were the knickers, listed as “Tart’s Knickers” and coming with a description that noted they were big enough to use as a Halloween shawl. Second was the condom wrapper: “size small.” Third, and most-hilariously, was the husband’s Harley Davidson motorcycle—sold for 99 cents with no reserve. In no time at all, the scorned woman showed her unnamed husband who was the undisputed boss of bitter, hilarious revenge; and she did it without ever once stooping so low as to publicly name and shame her rival. Now that’s classy.

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If you’re a flabby weakling, going to the gym can be a dispiriting experience (trust me on this one). Aside from being forced to accept you’ll probably never lift anything heavier than your laptop, you’ve also got to deal with meatheads making comments about your less-than-impressive physique—or even taking mocking pictures. Unless, that is, Reddit happen to gets involved.

Last month, some Australian jock made the mistake of photographing other gym users and uploading the pictures to Facebook with insulting commentary. Somehow, both Reddit and 4chan’s “fit” board got wind of it and decided to harness their collective nerd rage to teach this punk a lesson.First, they got his personal information. Then they used it to call his mother and explain to her what a doofus her son was. Then they tracked down the guy’s gym and explained the same thing to the manager. Finally, they sat back and watched as the bully saw his life crumble around him.

In quick succession, his mother cut him off financially, his friends all decided he wasn’t much of a friend, and the gym owner banned him from the entire chain of gyms. What was that about revenge being a dish best served cold?

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In 2004, Iranian jerkmuncher Majid Movahedi showed the world what a terrible person he was by throwing acid over Ameneh Bahrami as she walked home from work, blinding her. Bahrami had previously turned down his offer of marriage, and in Movahedi’s disturbed little mind, that slight apparently demanded a face full of acid. But here’s where things get interesting.

Iran operates under strict sharia law, and sharia law allows “eye for an eye” style punishments. In Bahrami’s case, she took this literally. When Movahedi came to trial, she asked the court for a special favor. She wanted Movahedi blinded by acid.And the court said yes.For the next three years, Movahedi lived knowing he was going to feel the exact same pain and fear that his victim had.

In 2011, he was taken into Tehran hospital and sedated, knowing he’d be blind when he woke up. Bahrami called off the procedure at the last second, saying she’d never intended to actually go through with it and would rather forgive her attacker. Movahedi got to keep his sight, but crucially he got to understand exactly the sort of fear and misery his victim must have felt all those years before. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy.

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In winter 2010, a terrorist cell in Russia was preparing to commit one heck of an atrocity. With the year coming to an end, the three unnamed women were planning to strap on suicide belts, wander into the partying crowds of Moscow and detonate. The result would have been carnage on an unprecedented scale—a slaughter comparable to the 7/7 attacks in London. Only something went wrong.

Russian suicide bombers are often sent out with a cell phone wired to their belts. If someone texts the number, the bomb detonates—meaning their recruiters can remotely explode them if the bombers fail to carry out an attack. It’s a darkly impressive system, but one that can backfire if used by particularly stupid people—the kind of people who turn the phones on before they leave the safe house, say. (In an era when companies are sending out spam texts by the thousands, no less.)

An hour or so before the attack was supposed to be carried out, one of the women received an automated text wishing her a happy New Year. Her belt instantly detonated, killing her and wiping out the safe house, causing the other would-be terrorists to flee into the night, unarmed and harmless. Not a single civilian was hurt in the explosion, and the blast alerted Russian authorities to a possible attack. In other words, it was divine intervention at its absolute, hilarious best—and saved countless lives in the process. Now that’s justice.

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A woman in Xi’an, China found herself trapped in an elevator at the end of January 2016 after repairmen shut it off and let it rest on the first floor of the residential building she lived in. Unfortunately, the men only returned a month later and found the decomposing remains of the woman inside; her hands disfigured from trying to escape her steel prison.

It is alleged that the men never opened the elevator to check for passengers, but simply called out and upon receiving no answer, they shut the elevator off and left to celebrate the Chinese New Year. The victim is said to have been mentally disabled and was only identified by her surname. Her family reported her disappearance but did not undertake a search for her inside or outside the building.

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Waterloo is synonymous with historical calamities. 60,000 soldiers died on that Belgian field. What those soldiers never would have guessed is that they would become a crucial part of English gardening. A year after Waterloo, the fields were cleared. Companies collected all of the exposed soldier and horse bones. To maximise the space, they converted the bones into a powder. This practice was common on many of Napoleon’s other battlegrounds like Leipzig and Austerlitz.Newspapers at the time report that in total they hauled, “more than a million bushels of human and inhuman bones.”

The fallen French army were ground up in Yorkshire factories, marking their second defeat to the English. Putting the man in “manure”, the remains were mixed together as an additive in fertilisers. The oil from the marrow proved to be especially helpful, rivalling “almost any other substance.” With a positive spin on this wide-scale grave robbing, contemporary newspapers said “a dead soldier is a most valuable article of commerce. ”Sent in mass to Doncaster, the compound helped grow the plants in England’s agriculture centre. Local farmers could buy it to help grow their own crops. A generation of Europeans ate food made with the help of dead bodies

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Pope Pius XII had one simple request. He did not want to be embalmed. He wanted his body to be interred as God had made it. By his death in 1958, Pope Pius XII’s tenure had proven to be particularly controversial outside Catholic circles.

Serving as the Pontiff in the buildup to and aftermath of World War II, historians have debated the merits of the Pope’s leadership. But those debates aside, the pontiff’s history suffered a final and disturbing blow. Papal Court doctor Galeazzi-Lisi got his position purely through nepotism. Friends with Pius XII (whilst still Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli) before he ascended to the papacy, Galeazzi-Lisi was woefully unqualified to be appointed as the Pope’s personal physician.A quack with minimal medical training, Galeazzi-Lisi developed his own system of embalming.

Evoking the oil rituals of early Christian leaders, Galeazzi-Lisi’s process of “aromatic osmosis” soaked the body in natural oils. For 24 hours, the body laid, wrapped in cellophane. There is a reason scientists abandoned this practice as it allows internal gases in the organs to build as the body decays. Stewing in the Mediterranean heat, the corpse burst open while being carried in procession.After the corpse exploded, Galeazzi-Lisi was forced to re-embalm Pius overnight. It was too late. Pius XII’s nose and fingers had already flown off.

Decomposition discoloured the body. Displayed in St. Peter’s Basilica, mourners grieved over an “emerald green” corpse. Nearby guards fainted from the odour. Pius XII’s and Galeazzi-Lisi’s career were laid to rest the same day. Through ineptitude, he earned himself a place in history. He is the only person to have ever been banished from Vatican City

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The mad Russian scientist’s mind control experiments on helpless victims is as classic a horror trope as they come. Those mad scientists do not usually get the Nobel Prize though. Ivan Pavlov is the exception that proves the rule.

Though Pavlov is most famous for conditioning dogs, that is not where his experiments were destined to end. A pupil of Pavlov, Nikolai Krasnogorsky, extended his experiments to humans. Acquiring subjects from the local orphanage, he had a group of young children he could easily manipulate without the burden of getting any clearance from their parents.Repeating the set-up from his mentor’s famous dog experiments would have been impossible. Human beings are less willing than dogs to eat on cue. Bound with leather straps and metal head gear, the children’s mouths were locked open. Devices hooked inside the mouth measured their pooled saliva.

An electronic pad hit their wrist whenever food was about to be distributed. The kids were force-fed both cookies and foul food. Their reactions to the different samples were recorded.Though highly unethical, the research furthered the scientific understanding of conditioning on humans. Unlike Pavlov’s dogs, humans were less susceptible to slight changes in the stimuli. Through their suffering Kransngorsky’s children laid the groundwork for the modern theory of cognitive behavioural therapy.

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You might remember the mysterious spiral formation that was seen in Norwegian skies in 2009. You may also remember that said anomaly was caused by a failed Russian missile experiment. However, the Norwegian spirals are far from the only ones in history, and definitely not the strangest.

That honour goes to the Spiral UFO of 1981. Seen by over 10 million people, this giant shape advanced across the Chinese night sky at a speed of about a mile (1.6 km) per second. The UFO was visible for about six or seven minutes, until it disappeared.Many were—and still are—convinced that the phenomenon was a genuine UFO, but the U.S. Air Force was less than impressed. According to them, the spiral was a tail spiral caused by a particularly clumsy spy plane . . . although they do admit that this is just a hypothesis and would like someone who knows the truth to step forward.

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The term “affluenza” can refer to rich kids who were so spoiled rotten that they’ve lost all empathy for other human beings. The word has even been used in court to defend them when they commit a crime. Their lawyers’ rationale is that that these rich kids are so sheltered and privileged that they have absolutely no idea how horrible their actions truly are.

The du Ponts are a massively wealthy family in Delaware who are practically American royalty. They made their fortune from chemicals, and every generation is so rich that they never have to work a day in their life. Robert H. Richards IV was one of the heirs to the fortune. In 2009, he was arrested for raping his three-year-old daughter and sexually abusing his son. When he appeared in court, his lawyer claimed that the publicity from the case would be harmful to the children and that Richard shouldn’t be sent to jail. He claimed that since Richards was so soft from his pampered lifestyle, he wouldn’t survive the rough environment of prison.

That pathetically weak defence actually worked. What should have been an eight-year prison sentence was reduced to probation and psychological treatment. Despite the fact that the punishment was such a slap on the wrist, Richards completely ignored the judge’s orders and didn’t even go in for a single therapy session.

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In 2010, a 17-year-old girl named Orachorn Thephasadin Na Ayudhya was driving a car without a driver’s license. She was texting and driving, which is why she slammed into the back of a passenger van that was carrying 14 people.

Nine of them died, and the rest were seriously injured. Orachorn didn’t seem to care that the bodies of her victims were lying on the street. She casually plopped her designer purse on the ground and pulled out her cell phone to continue texting next to the wrecked vehicles. Someone snapped a photo, and it became an icon of the growing epidemic of sociopathic rich kids living in Bangkok.