Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents by Uncle John’s Read Free Book Online

Also in Arizona in 2011, two 10-year-olds were seriously injured during a cultural festival when a freak dust storm blew a bouncy castle they were in 15 feet into the air, over a fence, and across a busy highway.
    •    A Pennsylvania man died in June of 2010 after sustaining injuries inside a bouncy house at a Cleveland Indians game. One of the inflatable sides collapsed, leaving him pinned underneath.
    •    In January 2011, winds carried another bouncy house away during a Florida birthday party. A five-year-old girl was caught inside. She was rescued by neighbors after the house landed in a pond.
    •    Inflatable houses and other attractions are still banned at many church festivals in southwest Ohio. The Archdiocese of Cincinnati issued a decree after an inflatable slide flipped over during a softball tournament in 2009. Wind threw the slide 70 yards and sent an 11-year-old boy along with it. Amazingly enough, he walked away from the accident with only a few bruises.

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REAL 911 CALLS
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    A woman in Kissimmee, Florida, called 911 in April 2009 and said she was stuck in her car. “I cannot open my door. I can’t get the windows down. Nothing electrical works,” she told the dispatcher, adding, “and it’s just getting very hot in here.” The dispatcher asked the woman if she had tried to pull up the manual locks on the doors. The woman unlocked her door, got out, and apologized.
    •    In October 2011, a man in Hertfordshire, England, called 999 (the British equivalent of 911), and said, “There’s something flying over our house. It’s coming towards me now. I don’t know what the hell it is!” The dispatcher spent several minutes taking the man’s information, then told him she was contacting air authorities. The man called back a few minutes later, having figured out what the object was. “It’s the moon,” he said.
    •    Also in October 2011, a woman in Danvers, Massachusetts, called 911 to say that she, her husband, and her two children were lost. “I’m really scared,” she said. “And we’ve got a baby with us,” she added tearfully. The dispatcher tried to keep the woman calm, and a police K-9 unit rushed to the family’s location—a Halloween maze cut into a cornfield. They were about 25 feet from the exit.

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BLOCKBUSTED
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    I n the early days of home video, up until the mid-1980s, video rental stores tended to be small operations, run locally, with a limited selection of titles. That changed with the arrival of Blockbuster Video, which opened its first four stores in the Dallas, Texas, area in 1985 and 1986. The difference: Blockbuster had a computerized checkout system and a whopping 8,000 titles in stock. The concept was clearly prime for success, and the small chain was sold to a group of investors with national chain experience. By the late 1990s, Blockbuster dominated the home video market, with more than 1,000 stores in the U.S.

    By 2000 the company was already starting to lose value, but company leaders were offered the chance to purchase a new player on the movie rental scene: Netflix, which rented out DVDs via mail at a flat, monthly cost—with no late fees like the ones Blockbuster made millions from. (It’s corporate legend, but Netflix founder Reed Hastings supposedly got the idea to start the company after returning Apollo 13 to a Blockbuster six weeks late and paying a $40 late fee.)
    Speculators saw great potential in Netflix. The young company was offered to Blockbuster for$50 million—a price many analysts at the time called a bargain. But Blockbuster’s corporate brass balked at the price and turned the deal down, instead spending millions in 2000 on a 20-year-deal to distribute movies digitally with a media subsidiary of the oil company Enron.
    Yes, that Enron. The oil giant that went down in flames in a well-publicized accounting scandal about a year later, bringing down hordes of investors, executives, and deals along with