No child should touch a gun or pistol, or on any account present one at another person. We behold a little boy shooting his sister dead!

And:

Here we see the danger of playing with lighted candles. One little girl has set the bed-curtains on fire, and the other her hair; and both are in great danger of being burnt to death, unless someone grants them speedy assistance.

From The Book of Accidents (1831), with excellent woodcut illustrations.

(via Ectoplasmosis)

Not that they ever seemed on par with the safety of something like, say, bonsai gardening.

(via BoingBoing)

Interesting enough for the subject matter — the mysterious skyjacker who disappeared from a plane¹ with some gracious amount of money, never to be found again (the skyjacker that is; some of the money was found, maybe) — this article from the AP is probably best for the very last sentence:

“Maybe a hydrologist can use the latest technology to trace the $5,800 in ransom money found in 1980 to where Cooper landed upstream,” Carr said. “Or maybe someone just remembers that odd uncle.”

The FBI’s presenting, as they say, “for the first time” to the public, new & exciting information.

In case you do remember that odd uncle.

¹ Which is to say, jumped.

When police asked the man what caused the accident, his one-word answer was “pterodactyl,” Smith said.

…

The man was treated and released at Central Washington Hospital, hospital officials said.

No word on the pterodactyl’s injuries.

(HeraldNet: “Man blames car wreck on prehistoric winged reptile,” by Rachel Schleif [29 Dec 07]; via BoingBoing)

Dropping something may have saved Joy Horton’s life. The 73-year-old woman was preparing some food in her western New York home on Monday morning when she dropped a spoon on the floor of her kitchen. When she bent down, her house exploded.

…

Fire officials said that because Horton was bending down when the explosion occurred, the kitchen sink and counter top helped keep debris from hitting her.

(via BoGlo/AP: “Spoon drop saves woman’s life” [Aug 21, 2007])

Three-year-old Robert Moore went fishing for a stuffed replica of Sponge Bob and ended up trapped in a vending machine.

…

A stuffed Sponge Bob in a vending machine’s bin caught Robert’s eye. He tried without success to fish it out with a plastic crane.  “I told him I could get it for him,” his grandmother said. “He’s a character. He said, ‘Oh no, I can get it.’” When she turned her back to get another dollar for a second try, Robert took off his coat and squeezed through an opening in the machine. He landed in the stuffed animal cube.  “I turned around and looked for him, and he said, ‘Oma, I’m in here,” Bierdemann said. “I thought I would have a heart attack.”

And in the end… he didn’t even get the stuffed Sponge Bob.

(AP/Mercury News: “Toddler gets stuck in vending machine.” [Oct 24, 2006])

Seattle police launched an investigation on Friday to determine how a patient undergoing emergency heart surgery caught on fire at a local hospital in 2003.

The male patient, who was not identified, went up in flames after alcohol poured on his skin was ignited by a surgical instrument.

(Reuters: “Man Catches Fire During Surgery.” [April 18, 2005]; the original Reuters link is no longer available, though you can find postings of the article by searching for it.)

BERLIN (Reuters) – A pack of wild boar wandered onto a German motorway, causing a five-car pileup and leaving one motorist injured and eight of the animals dead, police said on Saturday.

The cars on the Dresden-Berlin motorway hit the boar at high speed. One car flipped, injuring the 33-year-old woman driver.

(Reuters: “Pack of Wild Boar Causes Motorway Pileup” [November 1, 2004])

The second “could have” is a little gimmicky, since it refers to the fact that the woman fell while step outside to check the weather. Whoever wrote the article’s headline presumably thought that, had the woman been watching the Weather Channel, she never would have stepped out onto the faulty balcony. And hence not fallen. Go figure. (I was initially conned by the headline, thinking that a woman was in fact saved by the Weather Channel.)

The first is less gimmicky, more genuine, and not a little startling: a journalist was captured in Iraq and released in part thanks to Google. His captors thought he was a CIA operative. He said he was an Australian journalist. They Googled his name and found out he was telling the truth. Let him go, they did. Which all makes an interesting story, though presumably there was more to it than that. I’m no expert in spycraft, and the CIA may have its problems, but I’m guessing [see above, "no expert"] that the Agency could with relative ease make an informant seem like a reporter, particularly if all that was required was adjusting a few web pages.