But perhaps a better testimony to the stoic balls and immeasurable skill of this bicyclist is not what's in the video, but what it's missing. Watch past the crash, to the immediate aftermath. See how everybody in the area wanders out into the street? They're totally shell-shocked. Even complete bystanders who just happened to glance up and see this are left standing dumbstruck in the road, marveling at all the pretty disaster around them. Notice anything missing?

The bicyclist.

He's not even there. He barely ducked out of being the finger cuffs in a car/bike gangbang, and that didn't even warrant a stop on his commute.

The Pure Luck Version:

It's tempting to chalk every close call up to luck: If one thing had gone even slightly differently, somebody would be dead. And there's some truth to that, sure, but let's not sell these people short. Their actions, no matter how small, still had some hand in saving them. And I can prove it, because there are plenty of close calls where that is not at all the case, and the only reason anybody survived is because they once saved a leprechaun's life and now he owes their ass big.

Welcome to Russia, where your average driver's first response to a vehicle slowing -- even a little bit -- is to wrench the wheel violently into oncoming traffic, because even acknowledging the existence of brakes is for little pansy men with hairless faces who wince when they drink vodka. Sometimes there is a downside to driving like an alpha dickhead, and sometimes that downside is a giant friggin' semi truck Tokyo drifting across the entire roadway.

Watch as the driver's instincts and reflexes completely fail him: He can't do anything but stop directly in the path of the giant metal squeegee wiping the road clear in front of him. Then he sits quietly and waits for death, like he finished his assignment early and the teacher just didn't have any more work for him.

The Pure Luck Version:

You think you know what's going to happen here when you see the truck start to pull out at the last possible moment. You think they're going to T-bone, but that is foolish. Because again, this is Russia, and braking is for women and consumptives.

The driver of the oncoming truck sees the accident coming, but he doesn't even try to slow down: He spits in the face of logic and reflex, and just calmly moves the wheel a little to the right to hit the turning truck parallel. The end result? An objectively ridiculous amount of death barreling down on one harmless old Russian dude, just trying to fill up at the gas station. Wait, you're about to be hit by two dump trucks, side by side, as they ram you into an active gas pump? Holy shit, dude: Nobody has ever died that hard. Bruce Willis didn't die that hard. Did you bone Death's wife or something?

This is how he reacts:

Don't laugh. That's exactly what every one of us would do in the same situation. Nobody expects that much Fucked to come flying at their face out of nowhere. It's almost cartoonish how screwed he is. So he closes his eyes, hunches up his shoulders and kind of turns around a little bit, like an uncoordinated kid would do if you unexpectedly tossed a baseball to him. But the two trucks don't hit him: They smash together two feet in front of his face, then bounce away to either side. They hit so hard and so close that you can actually see the little whirlwind of debris from the impact blow over the man, but nothing actually touches him. When it's all over, he opens his eyes and checks around him, then pats himself down, as if to say, "Really? Fucking really, I survived that? Is bullshit! Totally unrealistic!"

Clearly, that kind of reckless irres- holy shit, somebody else is going after him?!

The man in black's move was risky enough, but he saw the train coming and had enough time to cross safely. The guy in white doesn't even check: He sees a barrier, he fucking vaults it. You don't tell his legs what to do, you goddamn arrogant signal lights. And he's not callously hopping in front of just any train: No, this is the friggin' Flash of passenger trains. It's blasting through that busy pedestrian intersection at full throttle. Watch just after the train passes him -- see that little white thing flipping away?

That's how narrowly he escaped; Death took his shoe as a consolation prize. But the man in white does not care. For there is another barrier at the other side of the tracks, taunting him with its presumptuous authority.

It must be vaulted.

The Pure Luck Version:

Listen, riding the subway drunk is great -- in fact, it's generally not recommended that you ever do it sober. It's like an alcoholic's international waters: You can sleep on the benches, throw up in the drinking fountains and pee literally anywhere. Everywhere. It is a beautiful, blurry, anarchic Eden. There is only one rule: Don't stand anywhere near the tracks when the world starts spinning.

This lady not only strolls right up to the edge of the platform, ignoring the fact that her knees are openly rebelling against the rest of her body, but when she falls onto the tracks, she manages to immediately flail herself into the third rail just as the train arrives.

It looks like she's overachieving at suicide (oh, what, just getting killed by one thing isn't good enough for you, showoff?), but somehow, she survives, and the train coasts to a stop directly over her head.

So what's the first thing she does, now that she's survived, like, eight totally justifiable, simultaneous drunken deaths? She jumps to her feet ... and falls directly backward again to bash her head on the rail. Listen: If that pussy train isn't going to crush her skull, she'll damn well do it herself.

It is just plain fucking wrong to hunt a vulnerable (read: almost endangered) species just because you're having a midlife crisis and the dealer was out of motorcycles that day. But when that lion comes charging out of the brush at those hunters, it is plainly evident that silly hats and khaki shorts are not sufficient armor against a few hundred pounds of furry murder.

To the hunter's credit, it wasn't one of the other 12 armed dudes it apparently takes to kill one cat that made the fatal shot: The lion charged the hunter, and that hunter killed the charging lion. He was staring right into the jaws of bounding, slavering, totally justified death, but he made the shot, and the lion skidded to a stop right at his feet. By all means, hate the guy, but you give him his due.

I mean, if it's any consolation, sometimes a guy has balls so big that all they really do is highlight how tiny his penis is by comparison.

The Pure Luck Version:

It's kind of a tragedy that the guy having fun with guns the right way is the one who comes off looking like a lucky idiot, but here you go. This guy is out shooting targets in the desert with a .50 caliber rifle, which, you'll note, is a hell of a lot of calibers, when something goes wrong. And you know what's coming the second you hear that sound:

I've never heard that noise before in my life. But if I ever did, I would know, instinctively, that I just did something dumb and now I'm going to die for it. After the rapidly approaching whine of death, there's a little puff of dirt on the ground, and then a man is dead. Or by all goddamn rights he should be: The bullet came so close to his head that it knocked his ear protection off.

Can you appreciate how astoundingly unlikely that is? He fired a bullet away from him, and it traveled God knows how far out into the desert before hitting its target and inexplicably ricocheting back in the exact direction it was fired, where it bounced off the dirt, redirected again, and then homed right in on the face of the man who shot it. I'm not sure if that means God loves this guy or hates him so much that it's like a knife in the Almighty's gut just to think of the bastard, but if I were the shooter and I survived something like this, I'd join the priesthood and then immediately burn a church to the ground, just to hedge my bets.