Isn’t it Ironic?

Uncategorized 9 Minutes

Yup, American Freedom, made in China IS ironic.  So are the following stories concerning ironic deaths.

‘GRIZZLY MAN’ EATEN BY BEAR

Timothy Treadwell loved bears. The problem is, bears didn’t love him nearly so much.  Blonde-haired and a trifle feminine, young Timmy loved animals as a boy, then overdosed on heroin as a young man, and subsequently devoted his adult life to living among bears. Every summer for 13 years he’d have a bush pilot drop him off amid the savage wilderness of Alaska’s Katmai National Park to live among the giant grizzlies. He never got too close to them, but he made up names for them and sang songs for them and filmed them and claimed he loved them far more than he loved filthy humans and their stupid so-called “civilization.” But of course, it was the end of the 13th year that would prove unlucky for the rabid bear enthusiast.

Timothy thought he understood bears. What he clearly failed to understand is that bears are highly capable of killing him, not to mention frequently more than willing to do so.  He stayed a week later than normal as the summer of 2003 started crashing into the Alaskan fall. During his final days, while he was camping out with his reputed girlfriend Amie Huguenard, he mentioned seeing a new bear that for some reason he didn’t quite trust. Perhaps it was this new interloping brown bear that devoured Timothy and Amie on that fateful autumn morning as they screamed in vain. Treadwell’s camera recorded the sound but not the video because the lens cap was still attached.  German director Werner Herzog turned Timothy’s tragically ironic story into the brilliant 2006 documentary Grizzly Man. In the film, Herzog listens to the death audio on headphones and decides that not only shouldn’t it be included in the film, the tape should be destroyed.

MAN DROWNS AT POOL PARTY OF 100+ LIFEGUARDS

As the summer of 1985 drew to an end, the New Orleans Recreation Department was so proud that there were no drownings that season at the city’s swimming pools, they threw a huge poolside party for about 100 lifeguards, 100 more guests, and even four active lifeguards who were assigned to guard the pool and prevent something embarrassing from happening—like, you know, someone drowning to death. But the revelry continued for hours while 31-year-old Jerome Moody, a party guest but not himself a lifeguard, was lying lifeless at the pool’s bottom. His body wasn’t discovered until the party started winding down.

OWNER OF SEGWAY COMPANY DRIVES SEGWAY OFF A CLIFF

Segways, those annoying and inscrutable electronic sideways skateboard/pogo-stick self-propulsion “Human Transporter” devices that I must confess scare the shit out of me for reasons I cannot quite articulate, have never been more ironically tragic than on that day in 2010 when British investor Jimi Heselden, who’d purchased the company earlier that year, careened a Segway test model off the road and down an 80-foot cliff to his death. A coroner ruled that Heselden had died of “multiple blunt force injuries of the chest and spine consistent with a fall whilst riding a gyrobike.”

PRISONER ESCAPES ELECTRIC CHAIR, ACCIDENTALLY ELECTROCUTES HIMSELF
After being convicted of sexual assault and murder, Michael Anderson Godwin was sentenced to death in 1983, which in South Carolina during the 1980s was administered via the electric chair. He successfully appealed his sentence and had it changed to life imprisonment. One night while sitting naked on a wet metal toilet and wearing headphones that were connected to his TV, he bit into a wire and accidentally zapped himself to death on his own makeshift prison-cell electric chair.

WOMAN AWAKES IN COFFIN, PANICS AND DIES OF HEART ATTACK

Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov—no, I don’t know how to pronounce it, either, and probably like you, my eyes just sort of skip over names that complicated—was a Russian woman whom doctors had declared dead in June of 2012. But during an open-casket wake, she awoke screaming in panic. She was rushed to a local hospital, where physicians declared she’d died of a heart attack.

SLEEP RESEARCHER FALLS ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL

Eugene Aserinsky is considered one of the pioneers of modern sleep research and is most famous for discovering REM (rapid-eye movement) sleep in 1953. Forty-five years later he slammed his car into a tree north of San Diego. It is suspected that he had fallen asleep while driving.

JOGGING GURU DIES WHILE JOGGING

With his cereal commercials and best-selling books such as The Complete Book of Running, Jim Fixx was the inescapable face of the 1970s’ jogging revolution. But in 1984 he fell down dead of a heart attack while performing the act that made him famous. An autopsy revealed one of Fixx’s coronary arteries was 95% blocked, while another was 80% clogged and still another was crammed with 70% fatty plaque.

ANTI-SEATBELT ADVOCATE KILLED IN CAR ACCIDENT
A Nebraska man named Derek Kieper was so passionate about the idea that seat-belt laws violated his sacred individual liberties, he wrote an opinion column about it. Less than four months later, he died in a car accident. Two of his friends in the car survived. They were wearing seatbelts.

ANTI-HELMET-LAW ADVOCATE DIES FROM MOTORCYCLE ACCIDENT HEAD INJURY

While proudly riding his roaring Harley down the road with his un-helmeted head exposed to the whistling winds of freedom during a 2011 protest ride against helmet laws, New York biker Philip Contos was flung over his handlebars and onto the sidewalk, where he died of a fatal head injury. A State Trooper claimed that a medical examiner told him Contos would have lived if only he’d been wearing a helmet.

DEATH ROW INMATE ESCAPES, IS BEATEN TO DEATH THAT NIGHT IN A BAR FIGHT

Troy Leon Gregg was a plucky and wily and crafty convicted murderer who along with three other Death Row inmates managed to escape the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville in 1980 one day before Gregg was to be put to death. Unfortunately, that night Greg was beaten to death during a bar fight in North Carolina.

BEACH BOY DROWNS

Of the five Beach Boys, only drummer Dennis Wilson could legitimately claim the name, for he was the only surfer in the bunch. Late one afternoon in 1983 he drunkenly went diving in Marina Del Rey to fetch some items he’d tossed overboard his yacht a few years earlier. He drowned to death, and the US Coast Guard buried his body at sea.

TV HOST KILLED IN THE OCEAN WHILE FILMING ‘OCEAN’S DEADLIEST’

Steve “The Crocodile Hunter” Irwin was a charismatic, khaki-wearing, danger-seeking Aussie who gained infamy by pressing his luck with all manner of ungodly beasts. His luck ran out in September 2006 while filming an episode of Ocean’s Deadliest in the Great Barrier Reef. An eight-foot-wide stingray struck him several hundred times with its tail spine. It pierced his heart and he bled to death.

LAWYER ACQUITS HIS DEFENDANT BY SHOOTING HIMSELF TO DEATH IN COURT

Clement Vallandigham was a valiant and noble Ohio lawyer who in 1871 defended a man named Thomas McGehan on murder charges. Vallandigham’s theory was that the victim had actually shot himself while in a kneeling position. To demonstrate that this was physically possible, Vallandigham recreated the event in the courtroom using a pistol he thought was unloaded. To his extremely brief dismay, it was loaded, and he accidentally shot himself to death, proving his legal theory and leading to his client’s acquittal.

MAN ‘PROVES’ GLASS WINDOW IS UNBREAKABLE BY FALLING THROUGH IT TO HIS DEATH

From most accounts, Garry Hoy was a brash, confident Toronto lawyer—perhaps too brash. One day in July 1993, as he had allegedly demonstrated so many times before, he showed a group of visitors that the glass window in his 24th-floor office was unbreakable by running headlong into it. Unfortunately, this time the window popped out of its frame and Hoy fell to his death in an act of autodefenestration. The glass, however, did not break, so technically he proved his point. But at what cost?

SHIP CAPTAIN KILLED BY A CANNON THAT WAS FIRING IN HIS HONOR

In the salty old year of 1794 somewhere off the Hawaiian islands, Captain John Kendrick‘s ship the Washington fired a thirteen-gun salute at another ship called the Jackal, which saluted back. Unfortunately, one of their cannons was actually loaded with grapeshot, killing Kendrick as he sat at his table on deck.

RADIATION PIONEER DIES OF RADIATION

Madame Curie is the first woman to ever win a Nobel Prize and is still the only woman to ever win it twice. She discovered polonium and radium but unfortunately spent so much time dabbling in radioactive materials that she fatally succumbed to aplastic anemia.

SNAKE HANDLER DIES OF SNAKEBITE

The Gospel of Mark clearly states that believers in Christ will be able to “pick up serpents” without being harmed, and the almost entirely Caucasian Pentecostal phenomenon of snake-handling is perhaps most vibrant in the tiny, beautiful state of West Virginia. Even though Mack Wolford‘s father had died from picking up serpents, Mack forged ahead to prove his faith in the Lord. After surviving three bites on three separate occasions, he fell dead from a fatal rattlesnake bite in May of 2012.

OVEN REPAIRMAN ROASTS TO DEATH IN OVEN

Two days before Christmas in 2010, a 54-year-old Liverpudlian named Alan Cattarall entered a giant industrial oven that baked plastic at 280 degrees to make kayaks. He sought only to make a minor repair, but the oven’s operator—his future son-in-law, Mark Francis—accidentally locked him in and flipped on the switch. While burning to death, Cattarall screamed for help but the sounds were muffled by the factory’s industrial noises.

GRANDSON OF GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE SUICIDE-BARRIER ADVOCATE JUMPS TO HIS DEATH FROM GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE

As a longtime member of the board of directors for San Francisco’s Golden Gate district, John Moylan had agitated tirelessly to erect suicide barriers on the Golden Gate Bridge, which to date has been the site of at least 1,600 suicides. In 2014—six years after the barriers were erected—Moylan’s grandson Sean successfully evaded the barriers and jumped to his death from the bridge.

WOMAN DIES DURING ‘DYING IN CONSCIOUSNESS’ SEMINAR

In 2011, a 35-year-old Canadian woman named Chantal Lavigne participated in a “detoxification” seminar called “Dying in Consciousness” that involved her being daubed in mud, wrapped up in plastic, swaddled in blankets, and having her head placed in a cardboard box for nine hours. She wound up being “cooked to death” after her body temperature raised to 105 degrees Fahrenheit.

HIS FATHER SHOT HIM WITH THE GUN HE BOUGHT TO PROTECT HIS FATHER

Soul singer Marvin Gaye possessed a rare talent, but he also hailed from a family that was unusually dysfunctional. Having developed extreme paranoia due to insufflating an estimated one million dollars’ worth of cocaine, Gaye took to wearing a bulletproof vest onstage and surrounding himself with armed bodyguards. For Christmas 1983 he gave his father a .38 pistol, ostensibly to protect himself from those who sought to prey upon the Gaye family fortune. Four months later after a violent domestic scuffle, his father used that pistol to fatally shoot his son.

 HEALTH-FOOD PIONEER DIES ON LIVE TV

Jerome Irving Rodale earned a fortune as the publisher of numerous health-food books and Prevention magazine. During a taping of The Dick Cavett Show that never aired, the 72-year-old Rodale allegedly told the host that “I never felt better in my life” and that he intended to live to 100. But he died of a heart attack while the show was taping.

PRO-DRUNK-DRIVING COMEDIAN KILLED BY DRUNK DRIVER

Ex-preacher Sam Kinison built a huge following in the late 1980s as the “screaming comedian.” One of his routines involved a comic defense of drunk driving:

We don’t WANT to drink and drive.…But there’s no other way to get the fucking CAR back to the HOUSE!! How are we supposed to get fucking home?

In April 1992—less than a week after marrying his third wife and while driving to Nevada for a show—Kinison was killed by a 17-year-old drunk driver.

Psycho Body Double Killed in Shower

Myra Davis, whose professional acting name was Myra Jones, was involved in the production of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. She served as a stand-in for Janet Leigh, the woman who (spoiler alert for anyone who was born less than five years ago) was killed in the famous shower scene to the horrific, screechy strings.

In 1988, she was raped and killed by a man who was so obsessed with Psycho’s famous shower scene that he wanted to re-enact it upon Janet Leigh’s body double. Unfortunately for Myra Davis, the producers of the film had kept such a tight lip on how they shot the scene and which actresses they used that the information the killer gleaned over the years was skewed.

Davis never appeared in the shower scene. It was another actress, Marli Renfro, who served as Leigh’s body double and subsequently the body that audiences and the killer saw stab over and over again on the big screen. Not only was she killed in the same way someone was in the movie she was most famous for, but she wasn’t even IN the scene the killer was trying to recreate.

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Published by pat frederick

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165 thoughts on “Isn’t it Ironic?”

        1. we took a brief stroll out our path thru the woods…crunching the leaves and marking diseased trees which can come down in spring…if they don’t fall before that.
          a slight chill in the air, but with walking it felt good!

          Liked by 1 person

      1. sorry…i forgot to add that.
        Luke Bryan called desantis up on stage and desantis got this great reception from the college crowd in FL i believe…

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Ah! I’ve heard of Bryan but I haven’t listened to his music. I don’t listen to any of the new country or other music, for that matter. Classic rock or older country, with some Josh Groban and Josh Wilson sprinkled in there.

          Liked by 1 person

  13. the Pittsburgh Post Gazette endorses OZ…but sugar coats fetterwoman
    FTA
    Despite deep ideological differences between Mehmet Oz, a right-leaning Republican, and John Fetterman, a left-leaning Democrat, the U.S. Senate campaign in Pennsylvania has mostly skirted the issues. It has been a slugfest, marked by relentless attacks and counter-attacks that generated more heat than light.

    Mr. Oz hammered on — and sometimes misrepresented — Mr. Fetterman’s criminal justice policies, even though a U.S. senator has nothing to do with state criminal justice and sentencing policies. Mr. Fetterman, in turn, characterized Mr. Oz’s legitimate calls for Mr. Fetterman to release his medical records as mean-spirited and insensitive. His campaign huffed and puffed over Mr. Oz’s use of “crudites” for raw vegetables on a platter. It was, admittedly, a tone-deaf blunder, but hardly a pivotal matter in the U.S. Senate race.

    During Tuesday’s debate, after hundreds of thousands of votes had already been cast, voters finally learned something about where the candidates stood. They learned, among other things, that Mr. Oz opposes federal intervention in abortion rights, and Mr. Fetterman supports the broader Constitutional guarantees provided by the overturned Roe v. Wade decision. They learned Mr. Fetterman supports a federally mandated $15-an-hour minimum wage, and Mr. Oz wants market forces to raise wages. They learned both candidates support fracking. They also learned both men are politicians, as they ducked and dodged questions about why they had changed their minds on fracking.

    Neither candidate has experience as a U.S. senator. Given the lack of substance during the campaign, many voters will have to make a leap of faith on Nov. 8.

    We believe Mr. Oz is the better bet for Pennsylvania.

    https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/editorials/2022/10/30/pennsylvania-senate-endorsement-mehmet-oz-john-fetterman/stories/202210210102

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  16. Entire Article @ FreeBeacon: “Three days out from an attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in their San Francisco home, we still know precious little about the attacker’s motivations—or, for that matter, about what precipitated the attack itself.

    That hasn’t stopped Democratic politicians and their allies in the mainstream media from fingering the culprits—their Republican adversaries—and concluding that, eight days out from an election in which they are bracing for a shellacking, the GOP should spend the final week of the campaign sitting on the bench, reflecting, atoning. How convenient. How cravenly and transparently political.

    Pelosi herself, meanwhile, is fundraising on the back of the attack. This is the message tacked to the bottom of an email blast from her office that landed in inboxes on Saturday evening:

    To hear the media tell it, Republicans are responsible for the attack and, while Pelosi raises money in this final week, they must cry uncle. Chuck Todd noted with surprise on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that ads against Pelosi “are still on the air.”

    Punchbowl News on Friday suggested there was something untoward about Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance urging voters to “fire Pelosi”—or, as they put it, employing “the ‘fire Pelosi’ rhetoric.”

    The media hive mind is real, and—lo and behold—the geniuses at the Washington Post also traced the attacks to “a ‘Fire Pelosi’ project—complete with a bus tour, a #FIREPELOSI hashtag and images of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) engulfed in Hades-style flames—devoted to retaking the House and demoting Pelosi from her perch as speaker.” The audacity!

    Enter former president Barack Obama with a warning that “demonizing” people and stirring up division is dangerous. When he came to this realization isn’t entirely clear—certainly many years after sitting in the pews listening to his friend Jeremiah Wright and cavorting with Louis Farrakhan, but not before arguing that Republicans are warmongers who have a lot in common with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

    We know Obama’s exhortation only swings one way. Democrats are of course still out there trying to discern the motive for the attacks on the novelist Salman Rushdie, New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin (R.), and Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.).

    It’s been just a few months since the New York Times got clear of defamation charges over the outrageous attempt to pin the shooting of Gabby Giffords on Sarah Palin. How about the Atlanta spa shooting that was pinned on the anti-Asian rhetoric of the Republican Party? Again, total nonsense. But the Democrats who write the news are in lockstep with the Democrats who make the news—and, of course, the Democrats who stand to benefit from Republicans sitting out the last week of the campaign.

    Enough already. We await the conclusions of investigators in the Paul Pelosi case with an open mind and the knowledge that these things are often not what they first appear. In the meantime, Republicans should campaign hard until the polls close. Nancy Pelosi sure will be.”

    Liked by 1 person

  17. Entire Article @ FB: “Republican Mehmet Oz has pulled ahead of John Fetterman in the first Pennsylvania Senate poll released after this week’s highly anticipated debate.

    According to a survey of 1,000 likely voters from Wick Insights, 47.6 percent of respondents said they would vote for Oz if the election were held today, versus 45.9 percent who said they would choose Fetterman. A small sample of voters who said they were undecided broke heavily for Oz over Fetterman—64.4 percent to 35.6 percent—when pressed to choose either the Democrat or Republican.

    The poll, conducted by text message and landline, is the first indicator that Fetterman’s shaky debate performance on Tuesday hurt his chances in November. Fetterman narrowly led most polls conducted before the debate, though his lead has closed dramatically since the summer amid a flurry of Republican attacks on his record on criminal justice reform.

    Fetterman, who suffered a stroke in May, fumbled repeatedly during Tuesday’s debate, the only one held in the Senate contest. He gave incoherent answers on the wealth tax and his position on fracking. He also repeatedly declined to release his medical records, saying he was being transparent by “showing up” for the debate.

    Some Democrats expressed alarm over Fetterman’s performance. Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.) said Fetterman’s performance was “hard to watch,” though he expressed confidence the Democrat will pull out a victory next month. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) was caught on a hot mic on Thursday telling President Joe Biden that Fetterman’s debate “didn’t hurt us too much.”

    Slightly more Biden voters than Trump voters took part in the Wick Insights survey, in line with the results from 2020. According to the poll, 42 percent of voters said that economic issues—the cost of living and jobs—were the most important factor in their vote. Roughly 32 percent listed “threats to democracy” as the issue motivating their decision. Just 10.2 percent said abortion was the most important issue, while 6.7 percent said the same of immigration.”

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  18. Yep – all of them are using the same playbook!!!

    Entire Article @ FB: “Last October, Democratic campaign staffers in Virginia shamelessly promoted an obvious hoax in an attempt to save their faltering boss, gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, from an upset loss. Almost a year to the day later, history is repeating itself in New York.

    On Thursday morning, a rogue New York Post employee used the outlet’s publishing system to share fake and crude stories, including one that said New York Republican gubernatorial hopeful Lee Zeldin planned to sexually assault his Democratic opponent, incumbent Kathy Hochul. The Post quickly declared it had “been hacked” and removed the fake content. For Hochul’s campaign, however, the case was not closed. Roughly an hour after the Post‘s explanation, Hochul spokeswoman Jen Goodman released a bizarre response that appeared to present the hacked posts as legitimate, accused the outlet of using “violent, sexist rhetoric,” and issued a “demand” for “answers.”

    By taking the Post‘s hacked content at face value in an apparent attempt to prompt outrage, the Hochul campaign took a page out of McAuliffe’s playbook. In October 2021, McAuliffe’s campaign promoted a fake white supremacist demonstration at a Glenn Youngkin event as if it were real, using the bogus incident to call the Republican’s supporters racist. If Hochul and McAuliffe’s attempts to weaponize political stunts in their favor seem similar, that could be because Goodman was behind both of them. One year before she issued Hochul’s Post statement, the liberal operative—who served as a McAuliffe communications aide at the time—called the sham neo-Nazi demonstration “disgusting” and “disqualifying” for Youngkin.

    But Goodman’s role in both ordeals is not the only similarity between Hochul and McAuliffe. In his 2021 race, McAuliffe entered October as the clear favorite to become Virginia’s next governor, holding a clear polling lead in a state President Joe Biden won by double digits in 2020. But those polls went on to tighten, prompting Democratic concern two weeks from Election Day that McAuliffe could lose a race he was expected to win easily. As a result, when McAuliffe’s staffers saw photos of the tiki torch-wielding attendees at Youngkin’s rally, they likely felt too desperate for a boost to ignore them.

    Almost exactly a year later, Hochul finds herself in an eerily similar situation. The Democrat consistently led Zeldin by double digits in the race’s early months, but that lead has since slipped—just days before the Post hack, for example, a Quinnipiac University poll showed Hochul with a mere 4-point advantage over her Republican counterpart. Even the New York Times has taken notice: The Empire State’s largest media outlet called the gubernatorial race a “rapidly tightening contest” in a Tuesday piece headlined, “New York’s Governor’s Race is Suddenly Too Close for Democrats’ Comfort.”

    In McAuliffe’s case, the decision to pounce on the fake white supremacist stunt backfired significantly. Democratic super PAC the Lincoln Project eventually admitted it staged the ordeal, prompting a wave of negative news coverage for the McAuliffe campaign just two weeks before Election Day. The Democrat went on to lose to Youngkin by 2 points.

    Hochul may very well avoid McAuliffe’s fate, particularly given that Biden won New York by 23 points, 13 points higher than his Virginia margin. Still, even as Hochul’s campaign publicly dismisses the “notion that Dems are lagging in enthusiasm in NY,” its eagerness to spin the Post hack in Hochul’s favor suggests the Democrat is feeling the heat in deep-blue New York.

    Hochul’s campaign did not return a request for comment.”

    Liked by 1 person

  24. I am adding a short daily prayer to the board. I would invite each of you, if you wish, to also add one or maybe two of your own liking. I do not want to stifle anyone but please limit yourself to one or two religious postings. here’s one I found that I liked.

    Liked by 1 person

  30. Home safe from Sally’s.

    Made a new pillow arrangement for her feet and legs to help relieve pressure on the sore spot on her feet.

    There’s a LOT of traffic on I-10 – Oh man – it got faster as I got closer to the city – lots of students hurrying back for class tomorrow.

    Always get to hear good preaching and teaching programs both ways – so I feel blessed.

    Hope y’all had a wonderful Sunday!

    Liked by 1 person

      1. I slept 9 hours last night – ! It was stressful for several reasons – all the loading and unloading, the disagreements with her Dad about several issues. Sally only bowed up and spewed out at me one time.

        I think her Dad is pretty stressed and worn out too…. maybe he resents my opinion of Sally, and my not being there all the time. I have thought about moving over there, but dealing with Sally and an unfaithful (not the only thing that was untrustworthy about him, he’s got other issues) overbearing ex-husband full-time isn’t something I can handle right now.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. I can see it being VERY stressful–one situation or the other, but BOTH? gees GA…that’s A LOT!
          you do a lot and you still have to take care of yourself!

          Liked by 1 person

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