Humans
can, and often do, end up suffering terrible tragedies for often retarded
reasons. Sometimes, despite the horror
of the mass carnage, the reasons are not only stupid but quite funny. Sometimes.
But only a really sick sort of way.
It helps if you’re drunk. We know.
Here are a few key items of evidence that will be brought up a the trial when the animals rise up and drag us off to determine if mankind really deserves the top spot of the evolutionary ladder.
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#6. The Defenestration of Prague |
“Defenestrate” literally means “to throw someone out the window”. Yes, our language actually has a word for that, thus suggesting that at some time in history this action was common enough that someone felt they needed to coin a word to describe it.
Why would anyone want to throw someone out a window?
Oh.
So
what happened?
In Prague in 1617, a group of Protestants decided to build
some churches on land that they owned.
The Catholic Church didn’t like that much at all because they said the
land was theirs. The Protestants
said that the land was royal and therefore not owned by the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church said “It’s ours
because we’re the friggin’ Catholic church! We have a pope. Do you have a pope?
Pfft.”
Rather than just settling it in court or buying the lot next door and building there, they decided to fight about it in the true medieval fashion of the arbitrary application of mindless violence.
At Prague Castle on May 23, 1618 a group of Protestants led by Count Thurn (I swear I’m naming my next kid Thurn) tried two Imperial governors, Jaroslav Borzita and Vilem Slavata for violating the Letter of Majesty (whatever that means).
The horror!!
They were convicted and because the appeals process those days largely consisted of the right to scream in abject terror as you’re being dragged away to a gruesome death, both men were thrown out the window of the Bohemian Chancellery. Just to be jerks they also threw their scribe, Phillip Fabricius out the window too. Thus bringing in the third and most lethal party to the lawsuit: gravity
Here is gravity trying to kill a baby.
You’re kidding, right?
And because Fate wasn’t done screwing with them yet, they fell 90 feet and landed in a pile of, I kid you not, poop. And survived.
There are a lot of great stories out there about different peoples’ encounters with the criminal justice system. If your story ends in being dropped nine stories into fecal matter I’d suggest making up a new one. Just a suggestion.
The Roman Catholic church decreed that they survived due to the intervention of angels, who, we can only assume, were either very near sighted or just plain dicks because rather than just setting them nicely down on the pavement to bare their teeth into the wind in a fervor of righteous…whatever…they dumped them in a huge pile of feces.
You think you’re
funny but you’re not.
Well, at least it only happened once. Oh, except it totally happened again. And again. And again.
Although RejectedComedy.com doesn’t officially sanction throwing people out the windows (outside of office parties or Amway solicitors, per company policy) we would like to point out that this would totally increase the ratings on CSPAN.
Not pictured:
anything remotely interesting
Just sayin’.
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#5. 600 people killed to save a water buffalo (which probably died anyway) |
So
what happened?
On June 6, 1981 a passenger train in Bihar India was cruising along minding its own business. Because no moving thing in India can legally leave the station unless several hundred people are clinging vicariously to every conceivable surface, the train was packed.
In India this train is considered only half full.
The
horror!!
Suddenly the conductor saw a cow in the way. Because the conductor didn’t pay attention in physics class he decided that the millions of tons of train couldn’t possibly survive hitting 1500lbs of stupidly staring meat and decided to take drastic action. His first inclination was to swerve, but, well, it’s a train stupid. So instead he hit the brakes, causing the train to derail and dumping seven of the nine cars into the water, killing hundreds of people
You’re kidding,
right?
Happy cows live in California. Murderous cows live in India.
At least 250 people were confirmed dead while hundreds more
were never accounted for, which is the Indian Railway equivalent of saying “Well,
they may have made it safely to their destination because we didn’t find their
gory, mutilated remains among the twisted, burning wreckage.”
Plotting to kill
you.
This incident proves a long standing scientific view that cows are vicious, carnivorous monsters out to destroy us all if we don’t first rise up and destroy them [citation needed]. Scientists have long believed this ever since I made it up just now.
Revenge is tasty. So very tasty.
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#4: The Mongols Invade Japan. Again. |
Back in the 13th century China was still broken up into several states, the smallest of which was Mongolia. Mongolia being essentially the Germany of the Far East decided it would be fun to start invading everybody, which they did. Very well. In 1231, Ögedei Khan ordered the invasion of Korea. After stomping around Korea for a while they turned their attention towards Japan.
So
what happened?
In 1268 Kublai Khan sent a letter to Japan telling them they’re about to get stomped so they’d better pay him lots of money. The Japanese, being the empire equivalent of Chuck Norris told them to piss off. This technically worked because Khan did get pissed off and decided to invade Japan.
No sarcastic
caption here. I’m honestly afraid to
write one.
One thing history has taught the world is not to invade Japan (or piss off Chuck Norris). There has technically been only one successful invasion of Japan, ever, and the Mongols unfortunately weren’t going to be the ones to do it (hint on who it was: USA! USA!)
The Mongols, being entirely landlocked, knew next to nothing about boats and since Japan is on a series of islands wisely decided they needed some. So, being the invading bastards they were, they forced the Koreans to build them some.
Dude, what are you
talking about? That’ll totally work.
In 1274 the Mongols set out in their 900 Korean-made boats and nearly 40,000 warriors to kick Japan’s butt. However, they likely should have checked the weather report first because the Sea of Japan, not being content to have normal thunderstorms, has a little squall called Typhoons.
Action shot of
Japan not getting its butt kicked.
The
horror!!
The Koreans actually made it to Japan, fought a wee bit with the Samurai (the ancient equivalent of the Navy Seals, only with way cooler armor) and decided to retire to their boats for the evening. That night a typhoon struck which sank 200 boats and killed 12,000 Mongols.
Not a good start.
So, the surviving invaders decided to scamper back to Korea to think this over some more. Kublai Khan decided to try diplomacy again and sent envoys to threaten the Japanese into submission much like the drunken loudmouth at a bar still yelling insults at the muscle-bound weightlifter while lying on the ground spitting out bloody teeth. Japan gave their version of a diplomatic reply by beheading the emissaries. Seriously. Kublai Khan sent more emissaries, and the Japanese not being big on subtlety (or originality) beheaded them too.
You’re
kidding, right?
So in 1281 the Mongols decided to invade again and have the troops home by Christmas. Just like last time, it’s gonna be friggin’ awesome! What could possibly go wrong?
Um…
This time the Mongolians decided to take the 40,000 man invasion seriously by posting a whopping 127 Samurai to meet the threat. It was widely assumed that that was a few too many but this time Japan wasn’t screwing around (seriously, never piss of a Samurai).
Once again the Mongols sailed over. Once again a typhoon came up. Once again the Mongols drowned en masse.
Again.
These nation-saving typhoons were given a name that translates into “Divine Wind”. Kamikaze.
Now what did we learn?
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#3. THE KHODYNKA TRAGEDY: Death! (before paying for stuff) |
On May 14, 1896 Nicholas II was crowned Tsar of Russia. Four days later there was to be a banquet in his honor and lots of hungry people (the main export of Russia in the 19th century) showed up on Khondynka Field with forks in hand and, we assume, looks of expectant hope on their filth-encrusted, starving faces.
And they feared color.
So
what happened?
Things got even better for the unwashed masses when a rumor started up that the Tsar would be passing out gifts. Sounds like an awesome party but, as mentioned above this was the 19th century when you couldn’t throw a cat out the window (defenestrate the little bastard) without killing at least a hundred people.
The
horror!!
The rumor quickly changed that there wasn’t going to be enough presents for everyone. Instead of going back home to squat piteously in their sad existence of miserable squalor the people instead decided to rush to the front of the line. This would have been fine if there had been a line, which there wasn’t. In cattle terms this is called a Stampede. As mentioned above anything dealing with cows will probably cause mass human casualties and this was no exception. This particular human stampede killed 1,389 people and wounded thousands more (which weren’t recorded because injured peasants were a dime a dozen in the 19th century; seriously, it was just a sucky time to be alive).
You’re kidding,
right?
The good news was the presents were real and since large portions of the crowd were now dead less people went home disappointed. It consisted of a bread roll, a piece of gingerbread, a sausage and, best of all a nice mug.
We killed grandma over this?
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#2. Chernobyl: Uh…is grandpa supposed to be glowing? |
April 25, 1986 workers at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine decided to test the system to see how long the turbines would spin after shutting down electrical power. The problem was the workers were mechanical engineers and knew next to nothing about nuclear power.
So what happened?
Sounds like a great plan. People who have no idea what they’re doing shutting down the safeties on a major running nuclear power plant in one of the most populous areas of the world. What could possibly go wrong?
Oh yeah, that.
They decided the best way to make it ‘real’ would be to
disable automatic shutdown mechanisms.
This is the nuclear equivalent of saying ‘lets simulate grandpa
having a heart attack by shooting him in the head.” Only ‘grandpa’
is a functional nuclear power plant and ‘shooting him in the head’ is
shutting down all safeties before intentionally causing it to fail.
The good news was the perfect storm of stupidity they were trying to simulate worked just great. The bad news was…well…the perfect storm of stupidity they were trying to simulate worked just great. The really bad news was it was a bloody nuclear power plant and you can’t just start fiddling with the knobs to see what happens.
I always get these stupid prompts…
The
horror!!
By the time the aforementioned perfect storm of stupidity ran its logical course the plant had largely melted into radioactive slag, killing 56 people directly and exposing over 600,000 to nasty radioactive stuff.
Dude…my bad.
The casualties of cancer and other nasty radiation-based deaths are uncounted. The good news is the mushroom cloud didn’t happen, it just poisoned major swaths of two major continents while turning many of the inhabitants into skin-eating shambling zombie mutants [citation needed].
You’re kidding,
right?
Not pictured: what
actually happened.
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#1. THE BHOPAL DISASTER |
Ah, let’s return to
India, shall we? Nothing says a tragedy
waiting to happen like putting millions of people in a crowded area and opening
a chemical plant right in the middle of them.
But no one would ever do that.
Except Union Carbide totally did that.
So
what happened?
On the evening of December 2, 1984 a million residents of Bhopal were sleeping peacefully, dreaming dreams of not being poisoned en masse by a horrible cloud of noxious chemicals. A worker at the Union Carbide plant noticed a small leak of methyl isocyanate gas (or MIC if you can’t pronounce that, which we can’t) and a storage tank that was over pressurized. That’s ok, because there is a vent-gas scrubber that takes care of things like that. After a quick yawn it was back to playing Pac Man or whatever they did in India in the 80’s when they were bored.
Elephant basketball is the rage over there.
The
horror!!
Well, taking a page from Chernobyl someone had decided to turn off that particular safety device utilizing the ‘take the batteries out of the beeping smoke detector because look, the house isn’t even on fire’ logic. Only the ‘smoke detector’ was a critical piece of safety technology and the ‘house’ was a massive chemical plant in the middle of over a million people. Then they left it turned off.
For three weeks.
We assume they would have left it turned off longer if not for…well…just keep reading.
Engineer performing
routine maintenance.
An exothermic reaction started and pressure built higher in the tanks. For those of you (like us) who didn’t pay attention in chemistry that translates into “bad”. But that’s ok because there was entire separate gas flare safety system that would take care of that in case the first system failed. Oh, except they had flipped that off three months earlier. So what came of it?
An exothermic
reaction.
You’re kidding,
right?
At about 1:00 AM all hell broke loose as a safety valve failed, sending a massive cloud of MIC gas into the air that over a million people were currently breathing. 3,800 people died immediately and the hospitals were overwhelmed with casualties. This would have been bad enough had the doctors had any idea what they were dealing with, which they didn’t. When thousands of people show up at the ER complaining of the same horrific symptoms, and when you ask them what they were doing prior to getting sick and they uniformly respond they were “breathing” even Dr. House would probably curl up in the corner and suck his thumb. Within 72 hours between 8,000 and 10,000 people were dead. The total death count was around 25,000 people with incalculable birth defects and cancers showing up later.
Union Carbide denied any responsibility in the release of chemicals from their factory killing all those people. Seriously.
The moral to this story is don’t live in India.