Another winner of the “determined to do something stupid” award, would to be the 46 year old Welsh coal miner Alan Urwin , who over three months in 1994 survived three separate self administered drug overdoses. Not one to be discouraged easily, Alan then decided to electrocute himself by wrapping a bare electric cord around his naked body and climbing into a full bathtub. He then plugged himself into the wall. He blew a fuse and suffered a damn good shock. But he survived.
However, showing a real “never-say-die” spirit, Alan then bent the wire to form a noose, which he suspended from an overhead beam. He stood on a chair, slipped his head into the noose and jumped into eternity, or would have except the wire was too thin to support his weight. It snapped under the tension, and Alan landed on his butt. Still not deterred Alan then broke the gas pipe in his room, laid down next to the open end and breathed deeply for several minutes. But even though the tiny house was now filled with toxic fumes, much to Alan’s dismay he was still alive. He grew impatient, and struck a match.
The resulting explosion blew the roof off his room, and blew out one of the walls. However Alan suffered nothing worse than flash burns. Whereupon his career as a dead man was cut short because he was convicted of arson and given two years probation, with the requirement that he undergo psychological counseling. Having finally gotten the message that the universe had been so persistently trying to deliver, Alan went into therapy and a year later was described as “cheerful".
Suicide can best be described as a permanent solution to a temporary problem. And death is rarely - very, very, very, very rarely - a solution to anything. It is even an ineffective way of punishing the survivors, from those who loved you to those strangers who have to clean up after you. But the one thing abundantly clear, is that no such rational explanation has ever deterred a suicide. It is an irrational act, the product of defective thinking, usually committed under the influence of a drug, usually alcohol, Amazingly it can often be prevented by the simple and prompt suggestion of, "Please don't do that." Social engagement, such as asking a person standing on the edge of bridge, "What are you doing?" can often be enough to delay the attempt for a few minutes. And such a delay is called life.
According to the Taiwan Fortean Times, a pair of lovers in Taiwan took the old adage “…till death do you part…” a little too literally.
In-laws and out-laws from both families opposed the match of Corporal Huang pin-jen and his girlfriend, Chang Shu-mei. Denied the right to marry but determined to prove their undying love for each other, the couple proved instead that attempted suicide can always reduce love to the level of farce. They jammed their heads into a single large plastic bag and tied it off at their necks. But the the drugs (or maybe his/her partner’s breath), induced one of them to nausea, and he/she threw up in the bag, reducing the level of romance substantially and forcing the other to choose life over humiliation. The partner clawed their way out of the vile bag, inadvertently rescuing their companion at the same time. How disappointing.
The devoted lunatics then tried to drive off a gorge along the Central Cross-Island Highway, If they survived the crash, they would surely drown in the river far below. But they missed the river and landed instead in a cushion of trees and bushes which left them unfortunately uninjured.
In desperation they checked into the honeymoon suite at the two-star Samantha Hotel in Taipei. (It has since closed). After a romantic last supper they tied bed sheets together to form a pair of nooses, which they then attached to ceiling rods. But they had misjudged the length and weight of their suicide pact. When they jumped from their chairs, instead of dangling by the neck, they landed on their feet and broke through the ceiling of the room below.
Luckily for them, the crackerjack staff of the Samantha Hotel failed to promptly notice the wrecked ceiling. So the lovebirds had time to rethink their meathodogy. They decided to use the gas powered fireplace to put a coda on their love pact. They fed several coins into the unit, turned the flames up to full and then blew them out. They quickly passed out from the toxic fumes, However, their cost consciousness proved the undoing of their undoing, and the timer on the gas jets ran out before the lovebird's numbers came up. They woke several hours later with splitting headaches.
Finally, in mounting desperation, the lovebirds jumped hand in hand, out the window of their 12th story hotel room. What could possibly be more romantic than that? It was a beautiful gesture – except it seemed the fates as well as their in-laws were opposed to this union till death do them part. They somehow missed the street, and landed instead on the tin roof of a five story restaurant. They thundered through the roof and crushing a large lobster tank, temporarily freeing dozens of doomed crustaceans, at least those that were not crushed instantly (a bunch of damned unlucky lobsters, if you ask me), and finishing their adventures in insanity by landing on a banquet table.
The lovers suffered numerous fractures and contusions and bruising but were finally stabilized in a stable condition at a local hospital. And when their families heard how dedicated pin-jen and Shu-mei were to killing each other rather than parting, both families agreed to accept the match. Which would have been the logical and compassionate solution from the beginning.
The lesson I take from all of this is that no matter how crappy your life may feel, you can always make it worse by trying to kill yourself. Don't be an idiot. Stick around and be miserable, like the rest of us. It's only fair.
- 30 -
"The Book of Bunny Suicides" (2003) originated in the twisted mind of Andy Riley
It began as a romantic’s quest. The Gold Rush would not begin for two years when they set out from Ohio, in April of 1846: George Donner and his brother Jacob and their families, along with the family of James Reed: including hired hands, thirty-three souls all together, with oxen and cattle and chickens, all bound for California. In mid-May, while crossing the Green Rive Basin over the Rocky Mountains, they met a misbegotten bunch who had read of a “better way west”, a shortcut called the “Hastings Cutoff”. It was the brainchild of Landsford Hastings, a better author than a trailblazer. And on Monday, 31 August, 1846, the two groups elected George Donner as their leader. They then turned their backs on the established trail at Fort Bridger, Wyoming. Their numbers had grown to 89 humans in 21 wagons.
The “Cutoff” was a disaster from the very beginning. It twisted and wound up and through and over the Wasatch Mountains. You cannot imagine the difficulties until you have walked a hundred yards up hill, straight through a dense wood. Now imagine trying to clear a path through those same woods for a Conestoga wagon, five feet wide and sixteen feet long, without springs, with iron sheathed stiffened wooden wheels, pulled by four oxen and loaded with seven tons of everything you think you might require to start your life over. At the summit they walked themselves to the very edge of a cliff with no room to turn around, and had to unload the wagons and then lower them and their cargo and their oxen on ropes to the valley below. They finally rejoined the trail on Saturday, 26 September. The shortcut of the “Cutoff” had left them three weeks behind.
After the mountains, came the desert, where, at the “Humboldt Sink”, an entire river is consumed by the heat. By the first week in October the bold romantics had started to die. A sixty year old farmer from Ohio, known to them only as Mr. Hardcoop, was the first member of the Donner Party to die. His feet had swollen to bursting, and he was abandoned beneath a sage brush in the Nevada desert. Finally, on Thursday, 15 October they reached the valley of the Truckee River, and at Truckee Meadows - modern day Reno - they paused, spending six precious days gathering their strength for the hurdle that faced them; the abrupt, front wall of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Stand on the shore of Mono Lake (to the south of the Truckee) and you see what gave these romantics pause. A sudden and steep wall of granite rises 1,500 feet straight into the air. And that is only the first step of a staircase that quickly climbs to over 12.000 feet. The “notch” or “Pass” through the mountains that the Donner party sought out stands at 7,000 feet high. And there the moist Pacific air climbing the gentle western slope of the Sierra, meets two lakes (Tahoe and Donner) and produces 415 inches of snow in an average year. In an average year winter storms produce ridge line winds of 100 miles an hour and higher, and temperatures down to -45 F. It was into this that the Donner Party began to climb the last days of October, 1846. There was already a dusting of snow in the pass. But this was not destined to be an average year in the Sierra.
It started to snow heavily on Saturday, 31 October 1846 - Halloween. The party was already broken. A wagon had flipped over and snapped an axle. George Donner and his family had stopped along Alder Creek to repair it. Meanwhile the majority had pressed six miles farther on. They had actually reached the summit of the Sierras. They were at the very edge of safety. Had they been one day, maybe one hour, sooner, they might have made it. They would have all lived. But within hours of that first gentle flake floating down to melt on a human cheek, six feet of snow fell, driving the romantics back to the eastern shore of the lake where there was a cabin and level ground. And there they stayed. And there almost half of them died.
The wonder is not that so many died, or that they were reduced to cannibalism, but that any at all lived. In that endless winter, 41 died and 46 survived. Out of fifty-five males, thirty-two died. Out of thirty-four women just nine died. All the single males over twenty-one years old starved to death.
If you get the chance to walk Alder Creek meadows, or the trails around the Eastern edge of Donner Lake please, say a prayer for all of those who preceded you. And for all of us who are destined to follow.
As a 16 year old high school student Tom Petters leased an office in downtown St. Cloud, Minnesota, out of which he sold stereo equipment to college students. When his father found out about the venture the budding entrepreneur was pulled up by his short hairs and forced to close it all down. But Tom was just starting slow.
Tom’s entire house of cards folded like…well, like a house of cards. Just a month prior to his personal Goetterdaemerung, Tom explained to the fawning students of the Carlson School of Management, “You’ve got to figure out how to leverage and move things forward and not backwards. Sometimes sideways and left and not always how you had anticipated.” But evidently Tom did anticipate what was coming because he is heard on one of the tapes the F.B.I. made with Ms. Coleman's help, admitting he cheated on his taxes, and used an employee to create false documents to fool investors, but that he “didn’t know what choice” he had. I guess, in his mind, honesty was not a viable choice.
The Feds alleged that for ten years Tom has been showing investors purchase orders to prove he was selling merchandise to Walmart. But when one investor finally checked with Walmart, the Arkansas firm said the P.O. numbers were fake and they had never bought anything from any of Tom’s many, many companies. This revelation led to a full Federal audit of PGW which showed $1.9 billion in the “in” drawer and $3.5 billion in bills. As near as it can be figured, Tom and his business partners stole about $11 billion. And since the Feds lack the creative accounting of Wall Street types, owing more than you own equals bankruptcy. Ah, if they only had the imagination of Tom Petters or Charles Ponzi or Donald Trump, they would know that being in debt was just another opportunity.
Veronica Lucan, (
