Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents by Uncle John’s Page B
Authors: Uncle John’s
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robbed of a perfect game. Footage of the incident—which was replayed thousands of times on sports shows all over the country in the following days—showed clearly that Donald was out. Galarraga got the next batter out, and the game ended—just another game. Umpire Joyce, a 23-year veteran and considered one of the best umps in the game, met with Galarraga and the press after the game and admitted that he’d gotten the call wrong. “I just cost the kid a perfect game,” he said, tearfully apologizing to the Tigers pitcher. Galarraga quipped to reporters, “Nobody’s perfect.”
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PLEASE HANG UP AND TRY AGAIN
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A T&T used to invite customers to “reach out and touch someone,” but for much of January 15, 1990, the only thing AT&T users could reach out to was a dial tone. At the time, AT&T handled 115 million calls a day, routing them through a nationwide network of switching stations. Around 2:00 p.m,. a station in New York went offline for a routine four-second diagnostic. Back online, an engineer informed the other stations it would start delivering calls again, which it did, 10 milliseconds later.
The close timing of the two messages confused a second switching station, causing it to reset. During the reset, a backup switch received two more closely timed messages, which caused it to reroute its calls. Which caused a third switching station to go offline, which shut down a fourth, and so on, until all 114 switching stations were down in less than three seconds.
At first AT&T thought they’d been hacked. The real problem: The switches had done exactly what they were programmed to do. When the company updated the computer system a year earlier, a programmer flubbed a line of code that would have kept the switches from resetting. It took AT&T nine hours to get the network back online. Between 50 and 70 million calls had been were lost.
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STAGED DEATHS
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F loored. In 1870 the James Robinson & Co. Circus and Animal Show wanted to drum up some publicity for its touring cavalcade prior to a performance in Middletown, Missouri. As the clowns, circus performers, and animals paraded through town, the circus band was ordered to play while standing on the roof of a cage that held two lions. Despite concerns that the roof wasn’t strong enough, circus managers forced the band to play on, and they did, up until the moment the roof caved in, plunging the musicians into the den of hungry lions, who tore them limb from limb and ate most of their bodies. Ten band members started the parade; only three survived the mauling.
No Tell-ing. Annie von Behren starred in an 1882 production of the play Si Slocum . One scene called for the actor playing opposite her, her real-life fiancé, Frank Frayne, to shoot an apple off of her head with a rifle—with his back to her. More than 2,300 people watched one night as Frayne pulled the trigger, releasing a bullet that missed the apple entirely in favor of von Behren’s forehead.
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PRESIDENT LANDON
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T he Literary Digest was among America’s most popular and credible news and opinion magazines in the 1920s and ‘30s. More than a million Americans got their news, news analysis, and editorial opinions from TLD by 1927.
One of the magazine’s most popular features was an exhaustive presidential straw poll in which it asked around 10 million Americans who they planned to vote for. It accurately predicted the winner of every presidential election from 1920 to 1932. TLD conducted the poll once more in 1936, declaring that the Republican challenger, Kansas governor Alf Landon, would defeat incumbent Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt, 57 to 42 percent, and with 370 electoral votes, a massive landslide for Landon.
Actual result of the 1936 presidential election: Roosevelt beat Landon 60.8 percent to 36.5 percent, and carried 46 of 48 states for an electoral college total of 523–8, the biggest landslide in history to that point.
How did TLD get it so very
----
PLEASE HANG UP AND TRY AGAIN
----
A T&T used to invite customers to “reach out and touch someone,” but for much of January 15, 1990, the only thing AT&T users could reach out to was a dial tone. At the time, AT&T handled 115 million calls a day, routing them through a nationwide network of switching stations. Around 2:00 p.m,. a station in New York went offline for a routine four-second diagnostic. Back online, an engineer informed the other stations it would start delivering calls again, which it did, 10 milliseconds later.
The close timing of the two messages confused a second switching station, causing it to reset. During the reset, a backup switch received two more closely timed messages, which caused it to reroute its calls. Which caused a third switching station to go offline, which shut down a fourth, and so on, until all 114 switching stations were down in less than three seconds.
At first AT&T thought they’d been hacked. The real problem: The switches had done exactly what they were programmed to do. When the company updated the computer system a year earlier, a programmer flubbed a line of code that would have kept the switches from resetting. It took AT&T nine hours to get the network back online. Between 50 and 70 million calls had been were lost.
----
STAGED DEATHS
----
F loored. In 1870 the James Robinson & Co. Circus and Animal Show wanted to drum up some publicity for its touring cavalcade prior to a performance in Middletown, Missouri. As the clowns, circus performers, and animals paraded through town, the circus band was ordered to play while standing on the roof of a cage that held two lions. Despite concerns that the roof wasn’t strong enough, circus managers forced the band to play on, and they did, up until the moment the roof caved in, plunging the musicians into the den of hungry lions, who tore them limb from limb and ate most of their bodies. Ten band members started the parade; only three survived the mauling.
No Tell-ing. Annie von Behren starred in an 1882 production of the play Si Slocum . One scene called for the actor playing opposite her, her real-life fiancé, Frank Frayne, to shoot an apple off of her head with a rifle—with his back to her. More than 2,300 people watched one night as Frayne pulled the trigger, releasing a bullet that missed the apple entirely in favor of von Behren’s forehead.
----
PRESIDENT LANDON
----
T he Literary Digest was among America’s most popular and credible news and opinion magazines in the 1920s and ‘30s. More than a million Americans got their news, news analysis, and editorial opinions from TLD by 1927.
One of the magazine’s most popular features was an exhaustive presidential straw poll in which it asked around 10 million Americans who they planned to vote for. It accurately predicted the winner of every presidential election from 1920 to 1932. TLD conducted the poll once more in 1936, declaring that the Republican challenger, Kansas governor Alf Landon, would defeat incumbent Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt, 57 to 42 percent, and with 370 electoral votes, a massive landslide for Landon.
Actual result of the 1936 presidential election: Roosevelt beat Landon 60.8 percent to 36.5 percent, and carried 46 of 48 states for an electoral college total of 523–8, the biggest landslide in history to that point.
How did TLD get it so very
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