Irma Bule was in the habit of performing with several cobras as on stage props. One of them, at least, was a King Cobra (Ophiophagus hannah), and clearly someone had blundered.
Indonesian pop singer Irma Bule died this week after being bitten by a snake used as an on-stage prop during a live performance on Sunday.
“The accident happened in the middle of the second song when Irma stepped on the snake’s tail,” audience member Ferlando Octavion Auzura told local website merdeka.com.
“The snake then bit Irma on the thigh.” …
It’s thought that Bule believed the cobra had been defanged. She was well known for using snakes during live performances – a relatively common practice in the region – and had previously appeared with pythons and boa constrictors.
45 minutes after the bite took place, the performance was abandoned as Bule started vomiting and collapsed. She was subsequently taken to hospital, where she was later confirmed to have died.
A group of hipster gin makers came close to creating chaos after they accidentally made mustard gas while trying to concoct a new flavour.
Workers from Sipsmith distillery, in Chiswick, west London, were attempting to create a mustard-flavoured drink but instead made the dangerous chemical agent, famous for its devastating use in World War One.
The firm, founded by Fairfax Hall, Sam Galsworthy and Jared Brown in 2009, evacuated its plant as soon as the blunder had been detected.
Kit Clancy, assistant distiller at Sipsmith, said: ‘There was a near disaster. What the guys actually produced was in effect mustard gas. The distillery was evacuated. That one wasn’t made again.’
A suspected burglar jumped in a Florida lake apparently hiding from law enforcement before an 11-foot alligator killed him, investigators said Monday. His hand and foot reportedly turned up inside the animal’s stomach.
Brevard County Sheriff’s Maj. Tod Goodyear says 22-year-old Matthew Riggins told his girlfriend he would be in Barefoot Bay to commit burglaries with another suspect. Authorities received calls Nov. 13 about two suspicious men in black walking behind homes and investigated. Riggins was reported missing the next day.
Goodyear said sheriff’s divers recovered Riggins’ body 10 days later in a nearby lake, and that the injuries suggested the alligator had pulled him below the surface. “He hid in the wrong place,” resident Laura Farris told Bay News 9.
Authorities said Riggins drowned and the alligator, which behaved aggressively toward divers, was trapped and euthanized.
the late 11-foot (3.35 m.) alligator resident of Barefoot Bay who ate him.
[T]wo Dutch researchers, Marc Cornelissen, 46, and Philip de Roo, 30, are assumed to have died in the Arctic. “They wanted to collect data about the melting ice cover.â€
According to Cornelissen’s Twitter site, the pair began their expedition in late March. By early April they has set off on skis across Arctic sea ice accompanied by a husky. They had been posting daily reports at Twitter.
ResoluteAt times Cornelissen tweeted of unusually warm temperatures and even posted audios claiming to be skiing in shorts.
On April 29 things took a turn for the worse and the pair sent out an SOS while traveling near Bathurst Island, approximately 200 kilometers north of Resolute Bay.
On April 30 Cornelissen’s Twitter site posted that the two were missing.
Spiegel writes that it is suspected that one of the pair fell through “thin ice†and that their situation went unknown for a week. A Canadian search party found one body but the other member of the party remains missing. It is assumed that he has perished. Only the husky dog survived.
The site Cold Facts here posted a report stating that the ice conditions there were “very poorâ€. The two researchers are said to have been experts in their fields. Question: Why were the two trekking on ice conditions described as “very poorâ€? Shouldn’t experts know better?
Bob Owens argues, perfectly correctly, that policemen should not be carrying Glocks.
In terms of mechanical design, there are few flaws with Glock pistols. If a law enforcement officer, soldier or citizen does exactly what they are supposed to do all of the time with cyborg certainty, there will be no problems with the Glock or other popular pistols mimicking its basic design. Unfortunately, “RoboCop†is only a movie, and humans are liable to make similar mistakes over and over again.
The underlying problem with these pistols is a short trigger pull and the lack of an external safety. In real-world encounters, a short trigger pull can be lethal, in part because a significant percentage of law enforcement officers — some experts say as high as 20% — put their finger on the trigger of their weapons when under stress. According to firearms trainers, most officers are completely unaware of their tendency to do this and have a hard time believing it, even when they’re shown video evidence from training exercises.
For more than 35 years, officer-involved accidental discharges with Glocks and Glock-like weapons have been blamed on a lack of training or negligence on the part of the individual cops. What critics should be addressing instead is the brutal reality that short trigger pulls and natural human reflexes are a deadly combination.
Though short trigger-pull guns dominate the law enforcement market, they aren’t the only game in town. A number of major and minor agencies use guns with much longer double-action triggers that are just as easy to fire deliberately but that are much harder to fire accidentally. The half-inch difference of trigger travel may not sound like much, but it can be the difference between life and death.
Among the many very bad ideas that proliferated in Western society since the 1960s is the pernicious notion that one should have a trigger-safety and go around treating a semi-automatic pistol as if it was a revolver.
This has even led to people going around asserting that you don’t want a pistol with a real safety, because it’s so hard to move a safety lever to the off position.
Glocks are cheap, reliable, and easy to shoot accurately… but they are a very bad choice for careless people and non-experts. Really, the Glock design is best carried, the way the Israelis do, with an empty chamber.
Gaston Glock should have put a regulation safety on his design.
For the morbid, those yearning to be horrified, or the merely curious, the New York Post reviews, Working Stiff, the memoir of New York Medical Examiner Judy Melinek (written with T.J. Mitchell).
Some of the deaths described are Darwin Award winners, others (like the chap tossed down an open manhole who landed in a pool of boiling water) are absolutely bloodcurdling to contemplate, while others are merely anecdotally intriguing.
There was the subway jumper at Union Square, for example, whose body was recovered on the tracks of the uptown 4 train with no blood — none at the scene, none in the body itself. She’d never seen anything like it, and only CME Hirsch could explain: The massive trauma to the entire body caused the bone marrow to absorb all the blood.
“Everyone in the room agreed,†Melinek writes, “that I had the coolest case of the day.â€
Finding a bullet for a gunshot wound, meanwhile, can be particularly baffling. Melinek says her favorite is “bullet embolusâ€: “A slug enters the beating heart at just the right spot and with precisely enough momentum to get flushed into the circulatory system, then surfs through smaller and smaller vessels until it gets stuck somewhere far removed from its point of entry.â€
In one case, a man was shot in the chest, but the bullet was found in his liver.
During her tenure, the most popular suicide spot in New York City was the atrium in Times Square’s Marriott Marquis hotel. Melinek autopsied two jumpers: One, a 26-year-old man, leapt from the 43rd floor.
His right arm and left leg were recovered on the 11th floor, his other two limbs on the seventh floor, and part of his skull wound up in the elevator shaft.
Her other jumper, also a man, jumped from the 23rd floor. One leg was found on the 10th floor, his torso on the ninth.
“I suspect these people imagine they are going to plummet gracefully down and land with a melodramatic thump in the lobby,†Melinek writes, “but I never saw that result. The ones I saw had pinballed off a variety of jutting structures on the way, each impact causing damage to a different plane of the body. Not graceful at all.â€
IJReview alerts us to an upcoming television first.
Discovery Channel’s Eaten Alive is airing an episode in which wildlife enthusiast and filmmaker Paul Rosolie is consumed by one of the largest anacondas in the world. Rosolie wore a snake-proof suit that helped him live through the horrifying stunt.
Rosolie and his team searched through the depths of the Amazon to capture the monstrous snake so that he could performer the daredevil act. After Rosolie is inside the suit, he will be covered in pig’s blood in order to make himself more appealing to the snake, then will proceed to go head first into the mouth of the beast. …
During the stunt, Rosolie is connected to a cord, which his team used to pull him safely out after he was swallowed whole.
While the Discovery Channel is keeping most of the details quiet for obvious reasons, they have said the snake lived through the stunt and was not harmed.
