Twelve-Inch Richard
Home of the Impertinent

Most people live in abject fear of their impending death – at least once you’re over 40 and you realize that, unlike what you thought as a teenage boy or girl, you actually aren’t indestructible.  But, there are a few people in this world who seem to stand up, give death the middle finger, spit in his face, slap him up side his head and say ‘C’mon, do your worst!’ all while guzzling a bottle of Jack Daniels, dancing naked through a minefield while pulling the pins on hand grenades and lazily dropping them willy-nilly as if they were a flower girl at a wedding.  These are people that seem to scare the living shit out of death.
 

For instance, take Frane Selak.  By the look of his picture you’d think that old Frane would be a candidate for the undertaker due to a damn heart attack.  But… NOOO… ol’ Frane here is a music teacher who was born in 1929 – just surviving the 30’s and 40’s in Croatia put him one up on the Grim Reaper but Frane just doesn’t seem to be able to stop teasing death.  When he was around 33 years old Frane boarded a train and that’s when Death got serious about taking him out.  While he was sitting all comfy and warm traveling down the old ‘hobo highway’ the train suddenly, for now apparent reason jumped the tracks and plumetted into an ice cold river (literally, there was ice in the river)!  While 17 of his fellow passengers either died from the concussion of the train hitting the water or from the frigid temperatures they face when they suddenly found themselves ass deep in water cold enough to freeze a penguin in a polar bears belly, Frane screwed the death pooch once again.  Sure, he had a broken arm but other than that the man came out of the water, dusted himself off, flipped Death the bird and went on his merry way!
 

Not one to be dissuaded so easily, Death regrouped and set about planning Frane’s ultimate demise… and this one was going to be a doozy!

Around twelve months after being in a train wreck, Frane was in a plane, near the cockpit, when the damn door suddenly came unlocked and ripped away.  Travelling at a modest 200+ miles an hour the suction from the decompression caught everyone by surprise – not the least of whom was, you guessed it, Mr. Piss on Death himself, Frane.  Frane, who had been minding his own business a second before was abruptly ripped out of the plane and into mid-air.  Mind you, because this was a regular airline and not a military mission, no one on the plane was equipped with parachutes.

Now, one might think that being sucked out of a plane might not be too healthy… damn straight.  In fact, according to medical physicians and aviation experts the result would be flat out catastrophic.  For starters, you’d suddenly go from a nice warm temperature of say around 70 degrees into a frigid -50+ degrees Fahrenheit – made even colder by the few hundred miles an hour the plan was travelling --  talk about freezing your ass off.  This would be the equivalent of having ran a marathon in Phoenix Arizona  in the middle of summer at 115 degree and to cool off you jump straight into a swimming pool that’s been filled with alcohol and chilled to a nice, balmy 28 degrees!  Or, if transporters were real, imagine being in your shower and suddenly being transported, buck-ass naked onto an ice glacier in the Antarctic.

If you happened to  be able to withstand the sudden drop of temperature then you’re next obstacle would be to, somehow, miss any part of the plane that would rapidly be approaching your ass.  Now, if you remember what Frane looks like, he’s not what people would normally call ‘limber.’  In fact, he’s probably got all the mobility of an elephant turd being slung willy-nilly through the air – in other words, not much.  But, someway… somehow… this human blob managed to miss both the wing of the airplane and its engine!

 

So, while the plane was spiraling out of control Frane was taking a leisurely drop through the air at around 124 miles an hour.  So, which one fared better: the people on the plane who had their seatbelts on or the little fat guy plummeting towards the ground twenty miles an hour faster than the fastest baseball ever pitched?

Of course, it was Frane!  19 people in the plane were killed when the plane hit the ground.  How did Frane survive?  He landed on a haystack… of course!!!  What are the chances of someone Frane’s size, going 124 miles an hour, in the middle of freaking nowhere, happening to find a haystack large enough to slow him down so that he didn’t explode against the ground like a pumpkin being thrown off the Empire State Building?  About the same odds of a Mockingbird in Texas landing on a specific branch on October 3^rd at 5 pm during a thunderstorm!

 

When he woke up in a hospital a couple of days later – how the hell anyone thought of looking for him in the haystack is anyone’s guess – he again gave Death the ol’ double middle finger salute, signed himself out and went home.

 

So, what did Death do?  He got out his playbook and decided to end this little human nuisance once and for all.  Unfortunately, Death must have forgotten his first attempt at killing Frane because when the bus he was in crashed it plunged into a river killing four people but not Frane.  Nope, he swam to shore unharmed.

As you might imagine, Death was getting pretty pissed off at Frane by this time and he knew that, some day soon someone might come out with a movie called ‘Final Destination’ based on all the quote, unquote LUCK the man had at defying Death’s icy grip.

Having already tried freezing the man’s ass via water and air and having already used a plane and a train to kill him, Death readied a totally different type of scenario.  He was going to burn Frane alive in his own car.  So, four years later, when Frane least expected it, his car caught on fire while he was driving it.  He managed to stop the car and get out before the fuel tank exploded.

To Death’s credit he knew when luck was simply luck so he decided to wait another three years and really give Frane a toasty surprise by setting ANOTHER car he was in on fire and this time he made certain the flames came through the air vents just to teach him a lesson. Unfortunately for Death, Frane simply stepped out of the car, patted his hair out (which had burst into flames) and gave Death a big raspberry!

Having tried a ‘planes, trains and automobile’ scenario that would make Steve Martin and John Candy proud, Death came up with a fool-proof plan.  He’d have Frane squashed by a friggin’ bus.  While casually walking across the street, a 20 year older and much more brittle boned Frane Salek, was hit by a bus, bounced along the pavement and… you guessed it… got up and walked away!

In one final, desperate play to get his reputation back, Death decided to have Frane meet an oncoming truck, on a narrow mountain road, so that his life would be finished and Death could get on his merry way having chalked up another victim to his icy grip.  The plan was perfect… either the truck and Frane would collide – thus ending the man’s life – or Frane would drive through the guardrails and plummet to his death because the side of the mountain was a sheer 300 foot drop to a hard, rocky bottom. 

So, what happened you might wonder?  Did Death finally get Frane?  Of course not.  Death had apparently forgotten that this is a man whose ass had just happened to find a soft haystack to land on after falling out of a plane.  This time, Frane had the presence of mind to actually JUMP from his car while it fell through the air – something I’m certain ALL of us would think about doing – and landed in a tree that jutted out from the side of the mountain.  His car continued to fall and ended up in a James Bond type of exploding ball of fire.  But, good ol’ Frane was safe and sound sitting 30 stories above among tree branches.

Death, apparently after losing some type of bet in the ‘luck of the gods’ category seems to have finally given up on taking out Frane ‘before his time.’  So, what’s happened to Frane in the meantime?  He won the frigging lottery netting himself around $600,000 and GAVE IT AWAY!  Damn, talk about a man’s man!

 

Two more quick examples of people who screwed up Death’s average killing spree are Isidro Mejia and Vesna Vulovic.

Around 20 million construction workers go to work each day in America.  While many of these fine men and women often end up with work injuries (from back problems to broken or hacked off fingers, arms and other appendages) I’d be willing to bet you don’t know anyone like Isidro Mejia.

You see, Isidro went to work in 2004 not thinking anything more exciting than a skimpily dressed woman might walk past he and his fellow workers.  Boy, was he wrong.  Isidro was on top of a house when he slipped and fell onto an unsuspecting coworker below.  Being a good guy (or at least a guy who was surprised at having another man tackle him from above) his coworker tried to catch Isidro.  Unfortunately the guy Isidro fell on top of was welding a nail gun – you know the type of gun that’s designed to shoot nails through ¾ inch blocks of wood like a machine gun? 

The nail gun played an important part in what should have been Isidro’s last few moments on this Earth.  You see, as the two fell to the ground the nail gun went of and… pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop…  FIVE 3 ½ inch nails were driven into his head and one in his spinal cord with the force of a .38 calibur gun.  

Hell, usually it only takes a couple of nails in the head to kill most guys – especially if it’s at close range – but not Isidro.  He was in an out of the hospital in a couple of weeks.  By the way, he weenie out with some excuse like “Oh, no!  I can’t go back to construction…. I’m SOOO scared of nail guns!!!  Nope, he went right back to his old job!

 

Okay, think you’re tougher than a woman?  What about a flight attendant and a petite blonde one at that?  Vesna Vulovic was on a plane as a stewardess when a bomb exploded and basically disgorged everyone in it like the ass of someone suffering from Montezuma’s revenge after drinking water strained from a sewage line in Mexico city.  Terrorists decided to blow the plane up to make some type of stupid idiotic statement that terrorists always think they’re going to make by killing innocent people.  They didn’t count on their activities being upstaged by a 22 year old woman surviving a the plane crash.  Seriously this is either a bad ass woman!  Not only did she survive a 6 mile fall amidst all the wreckage but she did so AFTER slamming into a frozen mountain.  For those who are wondering that’s the equivalent of laying your head on the pavement and having your worst enemy pound your body with a 10-pound sledgehammer.
 

Sure, she had a couple of broken bones and she was unconscious for almost a month but when she came out of her coma do know what the first thing she asked for was?  A cigarette!  Talk about spitting in the face of death!