Complex Numbers

Brain Farts

I think my random number generator is determined to clear out all the Cracked links from my queue.

    5 Deaths That Make You Say, ‘Well, He Was Asking For It’  

That's a comedy site, and death is very much not funny... except when it is, like when someone falls off a cliff trying to take the perfect selfie.

When someone brings about their own downfall, people sometimes say they were hoisted by their own petard. We avoid using that expression ourselves because what exactly is a “petard” anyway?

Now, that's French I knew before I started learning French. The first translation I heard was "little fart." The linked article goes into more detail. Not about farts, but the word "petard."

5. The YouTube Demonstration of How Bullets Can’t Go Through Books

We like to make fun of those damn kids and their tikkytokky, but people posted Stupid Human Tricks on YouTube since approximately the day it was released.

This particular one, though, is from 2017, well over 10 years after the site launched.

As for Ruiz, he will sadly never get to fulfill the promise he made with some of his last words: “Every week, I’m gonna be bringing you guys new videos!”

This is why I never make promises. As soon as I start to do so, my mind goes to all the dumb ways I could die and thus break the promise. I'd rather die than break a promise, so I avoid having to make that choice.

4. The Thieves Who Stole Cobalt-60

You know, this wouldn't be the karmic justice that it obviously is if it had happened back when Marie Curie was doing her Nobel Prize-winning shit. But this was in 1999, long after Chernobyl, and in another part of the former USSR.

One of the thieves dropped dead within 30 minutes. This was the member of the gang who actually held the material. Sources differ on exactly what happened to the rest, with some saying that two others died next. At least one thief did survive, which meant he went to the hospital and then got arrested.

And sadly, not sentenced to help clean up Chernobyl.

3. Ripping Down a Crash Mat, and Crashing

In case it wasn’t obvious, all the men had been drinking.

Don't freakin' blame booze for this. Booze enhances what's already there, be it stupidity, like these guys, or, in my case, genius.

2. The Trophy Hunter, Crushed by His Trophy

Every so often, you’ll hear about some rich American going to Africa to kill a big-game animal and pose with the kill. Theunis Botha was not one of these casual trophy hunters. Botha was an expert trophy hunter, who led hunts in Zimbabwe and South Africa for decades.

This one is satisfying on at least two levels. Not only do we get treated to jungle justice, but also we can make "Many Bothans died" Star Wars reference jokes.

1. Joseph Stalin, for Being Stalin

One of the few good things you can say about Adolf Hitler is that at least he killed Hitler.

Apparently, one can say something similar about Stalin, only his victim was Stalin. It was just a little more indirect, in his case. Kind of a Rube Goldberg self-destruction machine.

His staff did not summon his personal physician. They couldn’t, as the man was currently being tortured in the basement of border security headquarters.

There's a lot more fatal idiocy you can read about at the link that contributed to his death, but ultimately... he was hoist by his own petard.