Here are ten of the luckiest people in the world according to an article by Hannah Javens at listverse.com. It has been heavily edited by yours truly: After a car crash, Australian Bill Morgan was declared dead for more than 14 minutes. He was revived and went into a coma for 12 days and removed life support. Somehow he survived. To celebrate, he bought a lottery ticket and won a car. A local news station did a piece on him. He was asked to reenact the scene by scratching off another card - and won $250,000!... Blind and deaf 62-year-old Edwin E. Robinson was wandering in a field near his home, swinging around his aluminum cane. When it began to rain he took shelter under a tree and was struck by lightning. He lay unconscious for 20 minutes before waking, stumbling back to his house and going to bed. When he woke in the evening, his hearing and sight had returned... Joan Ginther won the lottery four times. Her payouts were $5.4 million, $2 million a decade later, $3 million two years after that, and $10 million in 2008... Tsutomu Yamaguchi was on a business trip to Hiroshima when the first nuclear bomb was dropped. Injured, he survived. He returned home to Nagasaki the day the second nuclear attack occurred. He is the only person officially recognized as having survived two nuclear explosions. He lived to 93, dying in 2010 at his home in Nagasaki... Dutch cyclist Maarten de Jonge booked a seat but found a cheaper flight and changed his ticket while the doomed plane he originally intended to use crashed. He was also scheduled to be on another that went missing in 2014, which was never found. He'd rescheduled at the last moment... During the 12th century, a prominent Japanese monk, Nichiren, was sentenced to death by beheading for subversive writing. He escaped doom when the executioner was struck by lightning as he raised his sword. He was exiled and lived to an old age, becoming a prominent Buddhist figure... Terri Preece became rich after a 49-pence purchase of oysters. She beat the million-to-one odds of finding a pearl in one of them... Norwegian Anders Helstrup had an unusual skydiving experience - a meteorite hurtled down after him. The encounter was captured on camera. Uploaded to the Internet, it attracted the attention of the science community and it was later confirmed that a meteorite had exploded about 20 kilometers above him. It was the first ever video of a meteorite traveling after its flame has gone out... In 1995 Sweden's Lena Pahlsson set aside her wedding ring to do some Christmas baking. When she sought to return it her finger, it was gone. Nearly 16 years later, while working in her garden, she was shocked to find the long-lost ring around a carrot... Dubbed “The Luckiest Unluckiest Man in the World,” Croatian Frane Selak has cheated death seven times. In 1962 a train in which he was traveling derailed and fell into a freezing river. He suffered a broken arm and hypothermia. 17 passengers drowned. In 1963, during his first and last plane ride, the craft lost altitude and plummeted to the earth. Frane was blown out of a malfunctioning door and landed on a haystack, unharmed, while the plane crashed, killing 19. In 1966 a bus he was riding in skidded into a river, drowning four. He swam to shore, having sustained only a few cuts and bruises. In 1968, while trying to teach his son how to hold a gun, he shot off his testicles. In 1970 and 1973 he survived car wrecks. In 1995 he was hit by a bus but suffered only minor injuries. In 1996 he swerved off a mountain road to avoid a head-on collision with a United Nations truck. His car broke through the guardrail. Not wearing a seat belt, he was ejected when the door flew open, and watched as the car fell 300 feet into the ravine below. In 2003, two days after he turned 73, he won $1.1 million from the Croatian National Lottery...
Here's a still of the meteorite that followed Helstrup:
For the second straight day, all sales at the floating book shop were of works in Russian. Spasibo to the kind folks who bought them.
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