When I was in grade school, one of our second grade teachers — a very old woman named Young — slipped on a raisin and exploded her pelvis, or somesuch. One of her students was eating them for break, and apparently hadn’t mastered the art of successfully moving food from a box to his mouth, and she slipped on his run-off.
It was a bad injury, as I recall, causing her to be out for the rest of the year. As a result, raisins were BANNED at Dunbar Elementary — probably still are. Nobody was allowed to bring those li’l widow-makers across the threshold anymore, which was no skin off my scrote. Raisins are disgusting globs of stuck-together weirdness.
An old man I used to work with at one of my previous jobs got tangled up in a vacuum cleaner cord at home, and fell down his basement steps. Dead. I liked the guy, and was shocked at this news when I first heard it, but couldn’t stop laughing about how it happened. Is that wrong?
I’ve said, many times, that I don’t want to go out as a FARK link. But I wouldn’t mind providing one final laugh, before exiting stage left. Ya know? I think that guy might’ve pulled off a nearly-perfect death. Or am I way off on it? What are your thoughts?
At the Dunbar Bowling Alley, a hundred years ago, one of the workers reportedly stepped on a package of frozen wieners, and went fully-inverted. I guess she broke her skeleton in several places, and once again… I couldn’t stop laughing. That’s some funny shit: stepping on a pack of frozen wieners.
And one time I fell on the ice outside the Junior High. A million kids were out there, and they all started in with the laughter and mockery, as required by the Middle School Prick code. It infuriated me, and I bounced back to my feet and gave everyone the finger, in a full 180-degree slow-sweep.
Everything went silent, and it’s a wonder I didn’t get my ass kicked. There was a lot of ass-kicking at that school. But it worked out great. Everybody remembered my giant bird-flipping gesture, instead of me falling on my butt. It was perfect.
This is a quickie, my friends. But hopefully you can salvage it for me. In the comments section, please tell us about people you know who fell down in a spectacular or remarkable fashion.
And tomorrow I’ll get back into the swing of things.
Have yourselves a great day!
Now playing in the bunker
Try Dropbox! It’s free and fantastic.
I did a full face plant one winter at recess in the 6th grade trying to shoe skate on ice with my hands in my pockets… thats when the migranes and voices started.
It’s great to be “number 2”.
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Argh! I wanted to be first fuckdammit!
(first!) I slipped on a banana peel in front of my high school. Very embarrassing.
The Qweezy Mark once lifted a friend of mine after a night of drinking (my friend was mouthing off). Then because he was drinking the Qweezy Mark dropped my friend on the concrete landing and broke his pelvis. Because we were drinking, we all laughed. I guess you had to be there….and drinking.
Good times! Good times…………………………..
“people you know who fell down in a spectacular or remarkable fashion.”
I didn’t “know them” but do John Denver and Roberto Clemente count?
Years ago, I saw an elderly lady walking across a street after a heavy rainstorm. She underestimated the depth of a mud puddle and damn-near snapped off both leg bones at the shin. All I can remember from the incident was a couple of good citizens picking her up and the muddy water draining out of her hosiery. Hey, they were closer in proximity to her than I was, but I also rushed to her aid, too late to really help.
This is famous in the hockey world.
http://vansunsportsblogs.com/2012/04/18/the-six-best-ryan-kesler-tumbleweed-gifs/
St. Patrick’s Day a few years back… I stopped at the Papermart to get decorations and stupid shit to wear. It was snowing a slushy mess outside. Like the fooI am, I was wearing my FMP’s. Walked out of the store, stepped onto the curb…or so I thought. My foot got caught in the slush covered hole in the sidewalk. I did a full-on superman right out into the parking lot. My shoe still stuck in the hole; my purse and shopping bag slid about 5 foot in front of me. When I got up, I noticed two dipshit zitsters sitting in a parked car laughing their asses off. I deserved it. I would have been doubled over had I seen someone else do it.
My friend and I were in the cafeteria at the salad bar and saw a woman go ass over tea kettle when she turned, tray in hand and tripped over someone’s rolling laptop bag. I had to drop my tray and walk out becuase I was a wheezing purple mess trying to suppress the laughter. My friend Megan couldn’t even look at me because we knew we’d never recover.
Another time, one of my all time favorite uncles fell down our basement stairs. He confused it for the bathroom, and stepped in to pitch blackness before tumbling, Those fuckers were linoleum covered cement. My mother thought it was a garbage truck rattling around outside. After about 20 minutes when he didn’t come back to the living room we searched for him and heard him moaning. We truend on the light to see him at the bottom of te stairs on al fours. MY sister and I started laughing and my brother punched us both in the back. Hard. The man could have been killed but to just see a grown up on all fours made me crack up.
It creeps me out that there is a skeleton living inside me. I’m like a mobile haunted house.
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I’ve seen four complete falls, from prior to incident to post incident, they are as follows:
The first one I remember was when I saw Uncle Eddie’s porch swing break. He lived in a trailer home, so the porch was probably five feet off the ground, and add another two feet to account for the height of the swing. I was sitting in a chair across from him when his downswing didn’t start back up, and instead continued downward and out of sight.
After a moment that now seems like days, I heard a big boom followed by “OHHHHHHHHHH! Call a hospital!”. He broke his old man leg.
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Then I saw Sammy off his truck. I was cutting his grass when he got home from killing small furry creatures. He was climbing out of the back of the truck and his foot missed the bumper. I don’t know what exactly happened next, but he EXPLODED off the back of the truck and landed something like 15 feet away. I remember hitting the brakes on my sweet Snapper riding mower (oh yeah, I was running a grass cutting racket in high school) to look and try to figure out what happened.
Sammy got up and there was much swearing. He started pushing and shoving on the tail gate of his truck like he was trying to flip it over. I think he started crying at it as some point. I gunned the mower and got the hell out of sight. I didn’t care for him too much, so I am happy he had such problems.
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When I was in training at Fort Huachuca I saw a guy fall from a place that should have probably crippled him, but luckily enough we slipped into cartoon land for a little while.
We were on the rappel tower. Everybody had to go at least once, then people could do it as much as they wanted. Since I was deathly afraid of having to trust any of the retards I was in school with to be on belay I only did it once, when the drill segeant was on belay, and went to sit on the bleachers. (Belay is the person that is supposed to not let you fall off the fucking 40 foot tall tower.)
One of the guys wanted to be all cool and went a few more times. On his last go he went “Aussie” style; that’s where you essentially run down the wall while facing the ground, instead of the normal jump & slide rappel you see on Blues Brothers. His belay person wasn’t paying attention and the guy rappelling sprinted at the speed of gravity from the top of the tower to the bottom of the pit, landing face first into the ground creating a giant Wile E. Coyote mushroom cloud of dust.
Many “oh-fuck’s” were shouted as everybody ran up to the still billowing dirt cloud. (I’m telling you this was just like a cartoon.) People were asking and shouting if Anderson (Anderson was his name!) was okay. Once the dust sort of settled and we could see him, Anderson was standing in the middle of the pit. He undid his rope harness and walked to the bleachers without a word. No injuries, not even rattled a little bit. Only perfectly covered in dust from head to toe, except for his eyes…his eyes were completely clear of dirt.
Like a fucking cartoon.
The drill sergeants gave him a weekend pass that weekend even though he was still a few weeks out from being able to request one. A reward for his pure badassitude about falling from 40 feet up and being hilarious about int.
I laughed rather hard at this Ice, thank you!
I’ve got three for you:
1) In grade 7 the school VP, Mr. Wilson, was also our gym teacher. One sunny day in May or June 1981 we were doing soccer drills. He stepped on a soccer ball while jogging backwards and his legs kicked up so high he was completely horizontal at waist level before crashing to the ground. I’d spent a lot of time in Mr. Wilson’s office over the years for various reasons I won’t burden you with, but as a result I found his little mishap quite amusing. Sadly my classmates did not. Mr. Wilson survived with nothing but a bruised ego. (yeah, I was a bit of a dick)
2) In high school my friends and I arrived early by bus and would often spend the half hour before homeroom standing in the foyer of the school watching everyone arrive. One icy winter day Ms. Francois, one of the business teachers, slipped on her way up from the staff parking lot. We stood there laughing and cracking jokes as she rolled around on the icy sidewalk. After a few minutes it was apparent she was not getting up and a circle of concerned students and teachers formed around her. After the ambulance arrived we found the whole thing a little less funny. Later we found out she broke her leg in several places. (also a bit of a dick)
3) In university my girlfriend (now wife), her sister Cathy, and I shared a townhome for a few years. One winter day I when I was in the shower someone called for me. When I got out of the shower Cathy, who was in the rec room in the basement, yelled upstairs to let me know about the call. I couldn’t hear what she was saying and thinking it was an emergency I ran downstairs with nothing on but a towel wrapped around my waist. As I descended the basement stairs I slipped and heel-skidded halfway down , lost my balance (and towel), smashed my back into the stairs, and tumbled the rest of the way to the bottom. I was in so much pain I couldn’t move for a couple of minutes: I just lay there on my back with my wiener flapping in the breeze. (karma’s payback for stories 1 and 2 above)
My office mate came tripping into my office a few years back with an armload of shit and caught her fancy-dancy f&*k-me open-toed shoe under the edge of my chair pad and immediately came crashing full speed face first into my desk.
I couldn’t laugh much at the time or at least I didn’t until the results of the x-rays were in, but I never fail to give her hell and laugh now every time she wears some totally inappropriate shoe, which she does at least once a week. Never letting her forget. I’m like that.
This goes back about 20 years. I had gone to the airport to pick up my family. I was running late, and was hustling into the terminal. The parking lot was separated from the roadway by a waist-high guardrail. Instead of heading for the crosswalk, I decided to hop the guardrail. I put my hand on the guardrail and threw my legs over it. Just as I reached equipoise, my legs and torso parallel to the ground, my hand slipped off the guardrail, and I fell to the pavement. My head, shoulder, elbow, hip, knee and ankle all hit the ground at the same time. I popped up quickly in case anyone was watching. My bell was rung, and I was loopy as hell. I go into the terminal and head for the bathroom to check out my injuries. Except for a smudge of dirt on my head, I was uninjured, although I was developing a nasty headache. As I was walking out of the bathroom, I heard my name over the loudspeaker, telling me to pick up the white courtesy phone. I thought I had blown a gasket and was hearing things. Apparently my wife was trying to let me know that they had arrived at a different gate. A few days later, I had the most beautiful set of bruises all down the right side of my body.
I shouldn’t read these stories at work. I cannot stop laughing. Your misery is my amusement! And I’m not ashamed to admit it.
I fall. A lot.
I hit the ground hard on a slick spot at moes once.
And this year and two yrs ago I slipped on ice drunk and blew out my shoulder.
I once tried to get fancy in my bike and show off going down a fairly steep hill and lost it. That one should have killed me. Guess I have a hard head.
Jeff on jay Mohr’s podcast he interviews Phil hendrie.
Fell once in HS skating and showing off. Didn’t come up from my fancy move like I intended and went back down with a blown-out knee. Sat on the ice KNOWING I shouldn’t get back up and ass-scooted to the rink edge. Dislocated the kneecap but good and was in a brace for 6 weeks.
Then there was the time I lost a ski at Killington on the lift. I can’t get off a lift on one ski, apparently. Harder than it looks. Come to think of it, skiing has a lot of good falling-down stories. It’s amazing where the snow can go when you faceplant on even a slightly challenging hill.
No falling down lately. I’m old and might break something.
Skiing! I went end over end on Hell Gate at Hunter, the full Yard Sale. Smacked the back of my head on the ice and my bell was, as they say, rung. It was some time before I could continue. In the larger scheme of things, this was one of several similar incidents that motivated me to get better and not fall so much.
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After riding about 20 miles on my bike and then having dinner and a margarita with friends, I drove home. I took my bike off of the car rack and tried to ride it while carrying my purse, bag with cycle stuff, etc into my house, I already needed to get to the bathroom fast! While trying to throw one leg over the bike, I lost balance and fell backwards. I landed flat on my back with all of my things strewn across the parking lot. And, let’s just say that I didn’t make it to the bathroom. Eek! Now I’m afraid to ever fall again for that reason.
In college at a cookout the food was outside and everyone was coming in from the outside patio. This girl with a plate full of food failed to notice that the last person through decided to close the sliding door. Not a serious fall backwards but the food pasted to her chest and neck was hilarious.
Another one from the skiing series. One time I went with some friends for a weekend at Massanutten. We got “extended day” tickets, which are good from 9am to 10pm or some such. Around 4 in the afternoon we were hungry and tired and starting to flag, so we went in and got some food and a few Irish coffees, then went back out. Skiing at night on poorly-lit trails, while tired and after 4 or 5 Irish coffees, ended up with a very predictable crash for me.
The result: a) I no longer have Irish coffee at ski areas. 2) It was painful to work the clutch while driving home, what with the pulled muscle and all.
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I once fell completely OUT of a school bus while attempting to exit. It had been raining a LOT, and the ‘safety mat’ on one of the steps came loose…and unsafe. I stepped down, hit the mat just right, and was flung about 5-6 feet from the door. I burst out laughing (because I felt like an idiot) – and glanced up at the others still on the bus. I expected them to be laughing along with me. All I saw was a wall of horrified looks, and a panicked bus driver.
I wound up tearing all of the ligaments off my ankle and nearly breaking a few bones. Twenty plus years later, I STILL laugh over how funny (and awful) I must have looked.
Certain of our family are famous–among other family, that is–for falling down. My dad, like his dad before him, and so described by my grandmother, is “made out of rubber.” He falls frequently, and just kind of bounces back up. It’s truly amazing. The man is 91 years old and still does that. But then, he stopped sitting straight down in a full lotus and then standing right back up whenever he was ready at the tender age of 80 or thereabouts.
I, on the other hand, take after my mother. We both lack flexibility. Mom fell one time at the grocery store and got all kinda attention from the employees there. They put ice on her foot, patted her hand, really made over her. But then, she was one of those lil ol lady types that buys out the produce first, then continues her way thru the store, picking out name brands all the way–in bulk. They all knew her by name. Someone asked Dad where she fell, and he marveled quietly, as if to himself, “Somewhere in between the beans and corn.” Once when she fell in the flowerbed, he described her fall as, “She fell for 5 minutes!”
This is how she described my falls. I was, besides initially struggling to regain my balance of course, trying to distribute the weight of the fall to my greatest advantage, thus minimizing trauma to any specific area of my body. It’s all very scientific, in
a clumsy, split second sort of way. Once, I slipped on smooth, wet concrete, and my dad watched in helpless amazement as I did a combination horizontal pirouette/fish flop on the way down, trying to prevent a broken bone by distributing the point of impact. Almost made it, too. Did manage to take care of it myself by wearing my son’s air cast for six weeks. You see, I’m a retired nurse. I know what doctors are for…
Personally, I would prefer the gift of being made of rubber like my dad is, but then, all gifts come to an end, and here he is at the end of his life, acquiring a broken rib now and then, or at least breaking his glasses. All good things must come to an end, I suppose.
Just one word of advice. Just like it is bad luck to throw away the baby clothes and maternity clothes, it is also bad luck to loan out “the family crutches.” Once you have acquired these items, treat the crutches as you would any functional family heirloom. They don’t go to charity. They don’t go in a yard sale. And they only go out the door for family members to use until such time as they are returned to await their next season of employment. Much like giving away maternity clothes is certain to result in pregnancy–of twins at least–getting rid of the family crutches will result in prolonged suffering and disability in some hapless family member. As well as the additional expense of a new set of crutches.
Way back in the day, at my grade school there was a long gradual hill. In the winter, we’d ice it down (the school even supplied the hose) and then see who could slide the furthest with other kids trying to trip them and swing stuff (like coats) at them. So we were all falling down in awkward ways and if it looked painful, so much the better. Democracy in action. Good times, good times…
Then there was the time my best friend, all 6’7″ and 300+ pounds of him, and I went bowling with some other married friends. Of course it was Ladies League night so there were about 100 women in there who were pretty decent bowlers. My friend gets up for his first frame, makes the approach, and has both feet go flying out from underneath him. All 300+ pounds go horizontal before landing with an incredibly loud BOOM in the middle of his lane. I’m sure it didn’t actually happen this way, but it seems like the WHOLE place stops and goes dead silent for about 10 seconds before everyone collapses in laughter. That was almost 20 years ago and he still has people coming up to him in public and talking about it. He swears you haven’t lived until you’ve been laughed at by a building full of smoking, drinking, blue-collar women. I tend to believe him.
Don’t know if this technically qualifies as a “fall” but it’s the funniest thing that came to mind:
My mom went to sit down in one of those lawn chairs that has a single piece of tubing that forms the entire bottom, so it is very springy. Problem is–mom never “sat” on a piece of furniture, she “plopped” onto furniture. So when she plopped into the chair, the back of it nearly touched the ground and her feet went straight into the air, spread-eagle-style. She let out a, “WHOOOOOOOO” to the top of her lungs, like a police siren or something. Did I mention that she was wearing a dress? Did I mention that she also had no teeth at the time?
We were at a farm with an entire yardful of relatives when she hollered, so everybody turned around to see it in unison! My sisters and I were doubled-over in TEARS from laughing so hard! We still get tickled over it to this day!
My buddy’s distant aunt and uncle were driving on some back road somewhere in Canada when they hit a cow with their car going about 80.
A cow killed them.
I asked if they were going to serve steak at the wake, but I only got a scowl in response.
That is a fucking fast cow.