3 People Who Cheated Death Using Cartoon Physics
You know how sometimes in cartoons you'll see characters survive almost certain death through some truly improbable means? Like when Wile E. Coyote drops an anvil that somehow manages to reverse course and smash him instead of the Road Runner. It's always entertaining to see in cartoons, but you might be surprised to know it happens in real life too. Here are a few examples ...
Chinese Truck Driver Barely Avoids a Tumble
An unnamed truck driver in China had a few problems. One, he was a truck driver in China. That job probably blows in a country with that many people. On top of that, he had just lost control of the dump truck he was driving and flipped it over the edge of a 200-foot-high overpass. So that's like way worse than just having a bad job, you know?
Luckily for the doomed driver, his tire and a warped piece of metal just barely caught onto the edge of the overpass, and his truck kind of hung there:
Rescuers managed to pull the driver from the car, and nobody suffered any major injuries. Most notably absent were injuries caused by plummeting from a terrifying height to the unforgiving ground below. That's a hallmark of success in any "save the guy dangling from the cliff" operation.
Boy Gets Saved from Certain Death by His Ears
A 6-year-old Chinese boy adorably named Ming Ming was asleep in his eighth floor apartment when his grandfather left him alone to run an "errand," which, in stories like this, almost always means he was doing something awful. The boy woke up alone, tried to look out the window for his grandfather, slipped and fell.
Luckily, there were bars in place to catch anyone who happened to fall from the window. Unluckily, Ming Ming was so small that he slipped right through two of the bars.
But his ears were just wide enough that they caught on the bars and he hung there. By his ears. The full weight of his body. By his ears.
Hanging there with his entire body weight on his neck, the boy could have easily suffocated or fallen at any moment, but somehow he held out until firemen showed up and freed him with a hydraulic expander, which sounds like just the kind of thing you want in use next to your head.
Man Survives Trash Compaction
Deciding not to drive while drunk is usually done with safety in mind, but it only made things worse for Justin Gilpatrick. One night, he went and got drunk at the bar and decided that he was too drunk to drive, so he did what any logical person would do -- he slept off his buzz in a dumpster filled with cardboard. Because what else are you going to do?
Unfortunately, while he was asleep, a garbage truck picked up the dumpster with Gilpatrick's drunk ass inside. Imagine how confused you would be if you fell asleep in what you thought was a secure place and woke up in the trash compactor of the Death Star and you'll have a general idea of what Gilpatrick went through.
The driver compacted the truck twice with Gilpatrick inside and drove over a mile before he heard him screaming through the back of the truck. Somehow Gilpatrick only had minor injuries and wasn't pressed into a cube shape. The driver actually had to convince Gilpatrick to wait for the ambulance instead of just leaving. He lucked out and the truck was mostly empty. On a busier night, he would have been crushed to death. Hilarious!
When Kier isn't sleeping in a dumpster full of cardboard boxes, you can find him on Twitter or check out his blog.
