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  IT’S THE COMPUTER’S FAULT

  In 2012 Microsoft debuted the Surface, a tablet computer designed to compete with Apple’s iPad. The company spent $400 million to promote it, some of which went to secure a spot on Oprah Winfrey’s annual “Favorite Things” list. (When she had a talk show, Winfrey held an annual “Favorite Things” episode in which she showered her studio audience with luxurious products, almost all of which were provided by their manufacturers for a fee. Winfrey does a special called Oprah’s Favorite Things on the Oprah Winfrey Network now.) In November 2012, Winfrey wrote to her 14 million Twitter followers, “Gotta say love that SURFACE! Have bought 12 already for Christmas gifts.” However, programs that deliver tweets also display how tweets are sent, such as a desktop computer, mobile phone, or, as in the case with Winfrey’s tweet, an iPad.

  •Shortly after the death of Apple’s Steve Jobs in 2011, Margie Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church announced plans to picket Jobs’s funeral to protest America’s tolerance toward homosexuality: “He had a huge platform; gave God no glory and taught sin.” Phelps announced the picket via Twitter, from her Apple iPhone.

  CRUSH CRASH

  In the 1890s, the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad was having trouble attracting customers in Texas, large parts of it dusty expanses, so the company tasked executive William Crush with boosting M-K-T business there. Crush’s idea: a massive publicity stunt in which the railroad would build a small, temporary city where it would stage a train crash. Back then, as now, people loved to watch things crash into each other.

  The railroad approved the plan. In 1896 it funded the building of the town of Crush, Texas, 15 miles north of Waco. The new little town consisted mostly of tents and a large grandstand. In the weeks leading up to the big event, two trains were decorated and sent around Texas to lure people to Crush—via the M-K-T Railroad at special reduced rates, of course. By the date of the planned crash, September 15, 1896, more than 40,000 people had come to Crush, making it the second-largest city in Texas (at least for the day).

  A special track had been built 50 feet back from the throngs, and police were on hand to hold back the crowd. At 5:00 p.m., two trains were set to full speed and aimed at each other. Then the crew abandoned the 35-ton trains in preparation for impact. And, indeed, the trains did smash into each other in spectacular fashion at 45 mph.

  What Crush, M-K-T, and the crowd didn’t expect, however, was the collateral damage. The force of the impact erupted the boilers on both trains, triggering massive explosions and hurtling debris into the crowd at high speeds. Photos of the event were taken by a man who was hit in the eye by a flying bolt, for example. Three spectators were instantly killed.

  “WHAT CRUSH, M-K-T, AND THE CROWD DIDN’T EXPECT, HOWEVER, WAS THE COLLATERAL DAMAGE.”

  The town of Crush was dismantled within a day; families of victims were given free tickets on the M-K-T Railroad. Crush himself was fired, then rehired by the railway when he convinced his bosses that he could spin the event into a public relations piece about proper railroad safety.

  LAMBO, FIELD

  In 2008 David Dopp won a brand-new $300,000 Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 in a Utah convenience-store sweepstakes. The first night he had the car, Dopp rounded a curve at 45 mph, hit a patch of black ice, then spun out. The car jumped a curb and crashed through a fence before stopping in a field about 75 feet from the road. The car was nearly totaled. Amount of time Dopp owned the intact Lamborghini: six hours.

  UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

  GOBBLED

  In 1959 a program was started to aggressively introduce wild turkey populations to California. Officials hoped that having the game birds would mean big revenue from local and out-of-state hunters. It worked: By 1969 there were enough turkeys for a regular hunting season. By the 1980s, there were tens of thousands of them. And so, by 2003 California officials began introducing programs to get rid of wild turkeys, which now numbered in the 250,000 range. Biologists said they were invading habitats of native birds, consuming endangered plants and animals, damaging crops, ruining gardens, fouling backyards—and sometimes even attacking children.

  SLIP, SLOP, SLAP, FLOP

  After a hole was discovered in the ozone layer above Australia in the early 1980s, the Australian government launched aggressive ad campaigns to warn people about the risks of getting too much sun. (The ozone layer acts as a filter against the dangerous ultraviolet rays in sunlight, and the country already had the highest skin cancer rates in the world.) One of the most popular campaigns was “Slip, Slop, Slap”: “Slip on a shirt, Slop on sunscreen, and Slap on a hat!” National health associations credited the campaign with making sunscreen use a normal part of life for many Australians, saving countless lives. Then, in 2000, officials announced that nearly 25 percent of Australian adults were deficient in vitamin D. How do you get vitamin D? Primarily by exposure to sunlight—the skin produces it in reaction to the sun’s rays. Lack of the vitamin can cause a host of health risks, including osteoporosis, and is believed to be linked to breast, colon, and prostate cancer.

  ORGAN FAILURE

  Robin Cook’s novel Coma was a pop-culture sensation in the late 1970s. It reached the New York Times bestseller list and was among 1977’s top-selling thriller and fiction titles. In 1978 it was adapted into a hit movie (directed by another novelist, Michael Crichton). The plot: a major hospital deliberately puts surgery patients into comas so it can sell their organs for huge sums on a very active black market. The book’s success was felt not only on the book and movie charts, but in real life as well: in the years after Coma, organ donation in the United States dropped by 60 percent.

  “IN THE YEARS AFTER COMA, ORGAN DONATION IN THE UNITED STATES DROPPED BY 60 PERCENT.”

  PIANO, MAN

  For more than two years, John and Penny Adie, organizers of an annual classical-music festival in England, had been working tirelessly to raise enough money to buy a Bösendorfer grand piano for the festival. Valued at £45,000 ($89,000) and made exclusively in Austria, Bösendorfers are the preferred piano of many of the world’s greatest players. “They’re the Stradivarius of the piano world,” said John.

  By April 2007, they had finally raised all the money they needed, and they purchased the piano at a London auction. The only thing left to make their dream a reality was to deliver the Bösendorfer to the concert hall. As the delivery workers were hauling “the Stradivarius of the piano world” up the walkway, 20 feet from their destination, they lost control of the dolly…and John and Penny watched in horror as their prized piano fell eight feet off of a ledge and smashed discordantly onto the ground below. “It was a total loss,” said John, noting that insurance would probably cover only half of what the piano was worth. “It’s more than money that is the issue here,” John said. “It was like seeing a priceless painting torn to shreds,” Penny added.

  PARLOR TRICKS GONE WRONG

  Go diamondbacks! To show off to his friends in September 2007, a man in Portland, Oregon, put his pet eastern diamondback rattlesnake’s head into his mouth… and it bit him. He barely survived. “It’s actually kind of my own stupid fault,” he said.

  Just keep swimming. During a summer 2009 flood in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a 46-year-old man was standing near a raging culvert of water. Wearing only a pair of shorts, he bet his friends $5 that he could swim across the culvert. No one took the bet. He jumped in anyway. His body was found five days later, a mile and a half away.

  Hand, gun. In 2009 a Falmouth, Massachusetts, man bragged to a friend that if the friend shot a BB gun at him from across the room he’d catch the pellet with his hand. The friend obliged. Good news: The man actually did snatch the BB out of the air with his hand. Bad news: The BB ended up lodged in his hand. He later explained to police at the hospital that the whole incident was just an “accident gone wrong.”

  THE $320,000 GOLF CLUB

  It’s never fun to give your boss bad news. And it’s worse when the bad news is your own fault. Just ask
Miles Byrne, who was caddy for golfer Ian Woosnam during the 2001 British Open. After three days of play, Woosnam was tied for the lead. On the final day, his first tee shot was just inches from being a hole-in-one. Standing on the second tee, Woosnam knew the biggest win of his career was in reach. Then Byrne gave him the news.

  “There’s too may clubs in the bag.”

  PGA rules are strict and clear: A golfer is allowed to have only 14 clubs, and Woosnam had an extra driver. The error cost Woosnam two strokes, raising his score on the first hole from a two to a four. Woosnam, an ex-boxer, yelled at Byrne, reportedly saying, “I gave you one job to do, and this is what happens,” but then composed himself and finished the tournament tied for third place, winning around $300,000. Without the two-stroke penalty, he would have won $320,000 more and the title. Right after learning of the penalty, Woosnam threw the club, probably the most expensive in history, into the woods. Woosnam fired Byrne two weeks later.

  TERRIBLE-BODY-ART-DECISION.COM

  Statistics are unavailable for just how many people took part, but “skinvertising” was a widely reported element of dot-com boom in the 2000s. What was it? In those days of brash marketing and wild campaigns for name recognition by new web companies, startups would pay people anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000 to tattoo the company’s name on their bodies. It was stunt marketing, the provenance of aggressive new companies at the frontier of the new web economy. And what happened to so many of those web companies? Many of them went out of business. But many of the tattoos live on.

  •In 2003 Jim Nelson got a tattoo on the back of his head for CI Host.

  •Mark Greenlaw still has a tattoo on his neck advertising web hosting company Glob@t (which is still around).

  •Joe Tamargo is a walking billboard for 15 web companies, most of them now defunct, including PillDaddy.com (a Viagra marketer) and SaveMartha.com (a site aiming to get Martha Stewart out of prison, during her brief residency in the slammer).

  •Karolyne Smith still has an ad on her forehead for GoldenPalace.com, an online casino. The site is still around, but most online gambling was outlawed in the U.S. in 2011, meaning the mother of four carries a facial ad for an illegal service.

  •A man named Billy Gibby sold the rights to rename him to web hosting company Hostgator—his legal name is still Hostgator Dotcom. He has 37 tattoos, many on this face. He sold flesh ad space to GoldenPalace.com to pay for medical bills incurred after he gave his kidney to a friend in need.

  MOVIE MISTAKES THAT WORKED OUT

  The Usual Suspects (1995) is about five criminals who commit a robbery together after meeting at a police lineup. Near the beginning of the movie, in the lineup scene, each is supposed to step forward and repeat a line allegedly heard by a witness at a crime scene. For some reason, all five (played by Kevin Pollak, Stephen Baldwin, Gabriel Byrne, Kevin Spacey, and Benicio Del Toro) laugh to varying degrees as they say the line. The script called for the scene to be serious, so why the laughter? Del Toro was repeatedly farting during the scene, and his silent but powerfully stinky gassy bouts were making his co-stars crack up.

  “HIS SILENT BUT POWERFULLY STINKY GASSY BOUTS WERE MAKING HIS CO-STARS CRACK UP.”

  In Zoolander (2001), former hand model and conspiracy theorist J.P. Prewitt (David Duchovny) explains to incredibly dumb male model Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) that all major historical assassinations have been planned by the fashion industry. Derek then asks, “But why male models?” and Prewitt explains in a lengthy monologue. Then Derek responds, “Why male models?” again. He’d forgotten his original line and just repeated the other one instead. Stiller, the film’s writer and director, kept the mistake in because it added to the characterization of Derek Zoolander as incredibly stupid.

  A scene in Being John Malkovich (1999) has John Malkovich (played by John Malkovich, of course) angrily walking down the road. As scripted, a car full of extras was supposed to drive by. Instead, one of those extras leans out the window and shouts, “Hey Malkovich! Think fast!” and throws a can at Malkovich and hits him in the head. The actor gets noticeably mad. Director Spike Jonze thought it fit the scene—angry Malkovich—perfectly. The extra even got bonus pay.

  One of the biggest themes of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) is that his character, Alvy Singer, is a neurotic nerd, hopelessly outclassed by the cool, cosmopolitan Annie (Diane Keaton). In one scene, the couple go to a party and are handed a small container filled with cocaine. As Alvy takes the tin, he lets out an enormous sneeze, sending white powder everywhere. All the actors burst out laughing. As it made Alvy look about as nerdy as possible, Allen kept the sight gag in the movie.

  BAD TRACTOR

  Merle Watson was a folk singer and the son of folk-singing legend Doc Watson. Late one night in 1985, the younger Watson, 36, couldn’t sleep, so he went to the basement of his Lenoir, North Carolina, farmhouse and started cutting some wood. But his saw got caught up in a knot, and a huge splinter shot up and pierced the muscle of his left arm.

  No one else was there, and Watson couldn’t remove the splinter. And he was bleeding. So he went outside and jumped on his tractor, hoping that one of his neighbors would still be awake. He saw a house on top of a nearby hill with the lights on, so he raced the tractor up there as fast as he could before he passed out. The nice couple brought Watson inside and removed the splinter. Then they bandaged up his arm.

  He thanked them and set off for home. But he was tired and had lost a lot of blood. While trying to steer the tractor down the couple’s steep driveway, Watson hit the brakes and they locked up. The tractor skidded over an embankment, flipped over, and landed on top of Watson, crushing and killing him.

  COWBOY UP!

  The NFL’s Dallas Cowboys are one of the most famous sports franchises in the world and, according to Forbes, the most valuable team in the NFL, worth $2.1 billion. The team’s online home: dallascowboys.com. But in 2007, the even more streamlined “cowboys.com,” purchased and locked down years before and left unused by a “squatter,” became available. Website names of common words, such as “cowboys,” do not come cheap, and yet it didn’t seem odd to Dallas Cowboys management when they secured the rights to cowboys.com from a domain name agency for a measly $275.

  “IT DIDN’T SEEM ODD TO DALLAS COWBOYS MANAGEMENT WHEN THEY SECURED THE RIGHTS TO COWBOYS.COM FROM A DOMAIN NAME AGENCY FOR A MEASLY $275.”

  They actually hadn’t secured it at all. Because the price was actually $275,000, not $275. A front-office representative thought that the “275” mentioned in a phone conversation with the domain seller meant “275,” while the seller meant “275,000.” When the NFL team elected not to pay the very high fee (which it could easily afford), cowboys.com went up for sale at auction, where the Dallas Cowboys acquired it…for $375,000.

  The Cowboys’ communications team set up cowboys.com to redirect traffic to DallasCowboys. com, since that address was well established. But website owners must occasionally renew their domain name registrations. Cowboys.com was up for renewal in 2012, and the Dallas Cowboys let it expire. Result: cowboys.com became available for purchase again. Millionaire Match, which runs an array of dating and matchmaking websites, purchased cowboys.com…which is now a cowboy-themed gay dating website.

  The Cowboys aren’t the only NFL team without the rights to their own name online. The Chicago Bears, for example, can’t get bears.com, because that’s a place to buy teddy bear T-shirts.

  BOXING DAY

  In August 2012, Hu Seng of Chongqing, China, had a friend tape him shut inside a cardboard box, and then call a delivery service to be shipped to his girlfriend as a romantic surprise. The delivery was supposed to take 30 minutes, but the company went to the wrong address—and it took three hours to get to the girlfriend. When the girlfriend opened the box, she found her unconscious boyfriend inside. Seng and his friend had not thought to put any airholes in the box. (Surprise!) He was briefly hospitalized but made a full recovery.

  MISSING THE (DECIMAL)
POINT

  In 1986 shipping company U.S. Lines was having trouble paying its debts. Especially worrisome was the $93 million it owed to Prudential Insurance. Held as collateral on the loan: U.S. Lines’ fleet of cargo ships, which included some of the largest ships on earth. Prudential agreed to restructure the loan, but it wasn’t until after U.S. Lines went bankrupt that anyone noticed a problem with the paperwork. The loan should have been $92,885,000, but someone had written it as only $92,885. Prudential lost over $90 million, including $11 million they had to give to U.S. Lines after selling off five of the cargo ships.

  •In 2010 JP Morgan Chase offered currency trader Kai Herbert a job in South Africa. The job paid 2.4 million rand (about $320,000) per year, but things got even better for Herbert when someone flubbed his contract and wrote his salary as 24 million rand. Herbert signed the contract and hoped no one would notice. Chase caught the mistake before his first day. Herbert sued them for $1 million, a number that included compensation for “lost earnings.” The judge disagreed, saying that Herbert’s claim was “a gross exaggeration,” and in the end, Herbert got nothing.

  WEIRD WAYS TO DIE

  Blowin’ in the wind. A Nebraska woman was killed by Taco Bell. Not the food, but the sign. She parked her pickup truck in the restaurant’s lot after arranging to meet someone who was going to buy her two dogs (which were in the back seat of the pickup). She said she’d be parked “under the Taco Bell sign.” While she was waiting for the buyer, a strong gust of wind blew the sign over; it landed directly on the cab of the pickup, killing the woman. Her dogs were unharmed.