Tempting Fate/Real Life


 * TransLink, the company in charge of transit in Vancouver, is quite fond of doing this via their Twitter page.
 * Hermann Goering reputedly said, "If bombs drop on Berlin, you may call me Meyer."
 * Meyer said what?
 * Captain William "Buckey" O'Neill of the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War was strolling up and down the lines in plain view. When one of his soldiers asked him to keep his head down, he responded with "Sergeant, the Spanish bullet isn't made that will kill me." A few minutes later, he caught a bullet that went in through his mouth and out the back of his head, killing him instantly.
 * As worded in Escape From Alcatraz, "No-one has ever escaped from Alcatraz, and no-one ever will." 34 people attempted to escape, but everyone was recaptured or killed, one when he reached shore. Five were unaccounted for and probably drowned, though there's evidence pointing to Frank Morris and his co-escapees boarding a nearby boat headed for Brazil, thus making them the only people to successfully escape from Alcatraz.
 * Although the Myth Busters tried it with the same resources, and made it.
 * It was widely boasted before the Titanic's ill-fated maiden voyage that not even God could sink her. As mentioned in another page, it turned out that God loves a challenge.
 * This quotation was included in the James Cameron movie (along with every other well-known anecdote about the Titanic).
 * Captain Smith said that he couldn't "imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that." Christ, there's Tempting Fate and then there's just begging it.
 * And now someone is working on creating the Titanic II. Commenters wasted no time asking What Could Possibly Go Wrong.
 * General William Slim's book Defeat into Victory; he said during the catastrophic retreat from Burma: "It could be worse, it could be raining." And sure enough, a few hours later, it was!
 * In a more recent example, former President of Taiwan Chen during his time in office ran a fierce anti-corruption platform. He even stated that if he was ever convicted of corruption that he should suffer most severe punishment the law could mete out. Now that he and his family have been indicted for, among other things, embezzling billions (in terms of US CURRENCY) from Taiwan's coffers, guess what prosecutors are asking for in terms of punishment?
 * Nazi field marshal Fedor Von Bock, who was nicknamed The Dier, was famous for lecturing his troops about dying for the glory of Nazi Germany. He was killed by a British plane, along with his wife and daughter, being the only one of Hitler's field marshals who was killed by enemy fire.
 * The September 11 attacks: A Discovery Channel documentary somewhere in 1999 about the 1993 WTC bombing in which the narrator spoke too soon and was tempting fate. The documentary ended with the narrator quoting the man who drove the van full of explosives into the garage saying something in the lines of "Next time, we'll bring them down!" to which the narrator concluded that for the WTC, there would never be a next time! Unfortunately, we all know who turned out to be right.
 * The 1998 edition of the documentary series Black Box called "Sky Crimes" ended with federal air marshals being trained and said that no American airliners had been hijacked since the 1980s and the marshals think "that's mostly down to them".
 * Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" spoken early in the Iraq War.
 * Supporters later asserted that in this instance, the President was referring to the narrower mission of removing Saddam Hussein from power, although at the time, the President stated that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended", and "in the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed". Ninety-six percent of American soldiers killed in Iraq were killed in guerrilla warfare after the speech.
 * Star Trek technical consultant Michael Okuda tempted fate by saying that NASA did not share Starfleet's concern about 25-year-old spaceships as the Columbia was nearly that old and still flying in his text commentary for the Star Trek 3 Special Edition DVD. Shortly after the release of the DVD, the Columbia burned up on re-entry.
 * The Swiss managed to get a subversion with their experimental nuclear reactor at Lucens. The head of the project assured the federal council that "everything is safe, and nothing can go wrong." On the same day there was a reactor meltdown. But since they feared something like that might happen, the reactor was built in a cave which was then simply sealed off for the next decade.
 * The UK military putting automated death machines under the control of a system called Skynet. Nothing bad yet, but I think we can all agree it is only a matter of time.
 * Field Marshall Rommel was once watching a propaganda film with his men when it showed a clip of him boasting that the Africa Corp would never again retreat. Everyone (including Rommel) immediately burst into laughter.
 * The RAF roundel is a big target painted onto the side of British military aircraft. Scuttlebutt has it that this was originally designed to be a deliberate taunt for anyone trying to shoot it down.
 * The same could be said of any Air Force roundel in the same style.
 * Except that the roundel used by the British is in the style of a bullseye. The New Zealanders upped the ante by centering a flightless bird in theirs, at which point they had to be doing it just to openly mock their opponents.
 * The Royal Flying Corps chose a roundel design because ground troops found it hard to tell a Union Flag from a Maltese Cross (the symbol the Imperial German Army and Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Air Services used) when painted on an aircraft's wing three thousand feet above and moving at 90 mph. The French selected a roundel design to match the British, because they were on the same side, and wanted to minimise mistakes.
 * Most of the military air services of the Allies used some variation of the roundel design during World War 1, thus Italian warplanes had the same red, white and green roundels used to this day, and Imperial Russian and American ones red, white and blue in sequences different from the French and British ones. Only late in the war did U.S. planes change to a blue circle with a white five-pointed star and a small red circle in the centre, while around that time Russia switched to red five-pointed stars.
 * The French design went back to the cockades worn on hats, caps and shakos ever since the Revolution of 1789. German soldiers wore a small metal cockade rather like the RAF roundel (only with black instead of blue) on the front of their forage caps (and officers' peaked caps), i. e. right in the centre of their foreheads since 1871.
 * One of Gerald Durrell's experiences, recounted in Fillets of Plaice, involved a visit to Mamfe from the District Commissioner. Within two seconds of the DC commenting that he wouldn't have thought you'd get very many animals so close to civilization, the palm leaf fan attached to the ceiling gave way and disgorged a variety of spiders, bats, and a young green mamba.
 * The Iroquois Theater advertised itself as "Absolutely Fireproof". It managed 37 days and the title of worst building fire in U.S. history.
 * The BBC tempted fate during the Moon landing to a horrifying degree that -- thankfully -- never went through. While the astronauts were on the moon, the BBC decided to play "Space Oddity" by David Bowie. It was a space-y song, which is understandable. However, the last few lines of the song have Major Tom ask Ground Control to tell his wife he loves her, before his circuit dies. This implies he never makes it back to Earth, which was pretty creepy when you realized that no one knew if the Apollo astronauts would make it back alive.
 * At the turn of the 20th century, a brilliant politician and the Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin said that given 20 years of peace he'd be able to turn Russia into a prosperous and advanced power. Before long the country was plunged into the bloodiest war so far, had two revolutions break out with the second of which the Russian Empire was gone. To be fair, he was not even around at the start of World War I, since he was assassinated in 1911. There is still a lot of speculation about what would have happened if he managed to keep Russia out of the war.
 * While en route to California in June 1846, Tamsen Donner wrote, "I never could have believed we could have traveled so far with so little difficulty. Indeed, if I do not experience something far worse than I have yet done, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started." A few months later, she did experience something far worse.
 * In a 1961 speech Khrushchev said that "the current generation of Soviet people will live under communism." Not only did the plan to complete the transition from socialism to communism by 1980 fail, the generation he was referring to now lives under liberal democracy capitalism  authoritarianism  fascism something that is definitely not communism (and the other 14 republics, where the results of The Great Politics Mess Up vary greatly).
 * Also, the first two words of the Soviet national anthem were "unbreakable union". Well, I wonder how that worked out....
 * The game(?) where one chants the mantra, Bloody Mary the required amount of times would qualify. Not sure how many times it actually requires, and it may vary.
 * Lee Harvey Oswald's last words were, "Aww, there ain't going to be anybody shooting at me, you're just being melodramatic."
 * The last thing the JFK heard was, "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you,"
 * In April 2010, in response to Iranian cleric Hajotoselam Kazem Swdighi's proclamation that women dressing immodestly causes earthquakes, Jen McCreight, a student at Purdue set up an event called "Boobquake", encouraging women to dress less modestly than usual, to prove that it wouldn't cause an earthquake. The day of the event there was an earthquake.
 * There is an earthquake somewhere in the world every 5 to 10 minutes or so.
 * Not of a magnitude 6.5, though.
 * Post-Boobquake analysis showed that the number of earthquakes that occurred that day was not a statistically significant amount above average, and pointed out that there's a 37% chance of a 6.5 quake happening on any given day.
 * Maurice Krafft famously said: "I am never afraid because I have seen so much eruptions in 23 years that even if I die tomorrow, I don't care". Guess what happened 45 minutes later at Mount Unzen.
 * Give up? He, his wife, and dozens of others get all kinds of dead from a pyroclastic flow (that is, a wave of super-hot gas. How bad? you don't get to try to Outrun the Fireball, or, thankfully, even spend much time on fire. Maybe somebody on that ledge lived long enough to get out the "oh" in Oh Crap.)
 * So, it's the sixteenth century, and you, the King of Spain, have decided to liberate England from the heresy of protestant rule by conquering the shit out of it. So, you build the biggest naval fleet in recent memory and merrily sail it up to England, whistling all the way. And what do you call it? The "Great and Most Fortunate Armada", also known as the "Invincible Armada". After being repulsed by the English the fleet gets caught in a storm that takes it all the way round the British Isles, sinking most of the ships along the way, and what's left gets destroyed by Sir Francis Drake. Frankly, you deserved it.
 * According to The Other Wiki, the Deepwater Horizon explosion occurred when BP executives were on board celebrating the project's safety record.
 * General John Sedgwick, during The American Civil War, claimed that his enemies "couldn't hit an elephant at this distance." These were his last words, as he was gunned down by a Confederate sniper just seconds later.
 * Those Wacky Nazis just had to go and call their state "The Millennial Reich" (Tausendjähriges Reich, "Thousand-Year Empire"), didn't they?
 * Similarly before them, the emperor Qin Shi Huang of the Qin dynasty, said that his dynasty would last for a thousand years. It then only lasted less than 15 years.
 * And also ca. two millennia before the Nazis, there was this whole "Eternal Rome" (Roma aeterna) business.
 * Rome made a pretty good run at it, going about 2200 years from the founding of the City to the fall of Constantinople.
 * According to The Other Wiki, leading up to the St. Nazaire Raid during World War 2, one of the German commanders, when asked what would they do if the base was subject to an attack by British Commandos, replied that "an attack on the base would be hazardous and highly improbable."
 * Before WWII the American military was warned that if the Japanese were to ever launch an attack on the United States that their most likely first target would be Pearl Harbor. Not only did they blow it off as nonsense they fired the guy as well. A couple years later....
 * German soccer side Vf L Bochum managed to barely keep their prestigious place in the national league for about twenty years. In 1992, fans began to wear shirts with the new-coined adjective "unabsteigbar" ("irrelegable"). Guess what happened the next year...
 * Possibly a reference to this occurred in 2011: regional rival BVB Dortmund had an almost insurmountable lead to win the national title, which hadn't happened for nearly a decade. Everyone from the team was so careful not to say the word "championship" that the fans started to carry mocking signs saying "Klassenerhalt!" ("non-relegation"). It worked - Dortmund won the 2011 Bundesliga.
 * Neville Chamberlain pronounced that "I believe it is peace in our time" after returning to England following the Munich Conference. The date? 1938. Feel free to congratulate him on his accomplishment.
 * The "War to end all Wars" created more wars.
 * During World War I, a British battlecruiser was named Invincible. During the Battle of Jutland, it was blown into fragments by an ammunition explosion (after being hit by one shell shot by a German battlecruiser) and sank with most of its thousand-man crew.
 * Jean Drapeau said that the Olympics could no more lose money than a man could have a baby. Although he was mayor of Montreal, he apparently didn't know his citizens very well, and the 1976 Montreal Olympics were nothing short of an economic disaster. He died in 1999--eight years before Montreal finally payed off the Olympics (around 2007). Much of the problem was the sheer profiteering by Quebec businesses and citizens.
 * The Great Leap Forward. Admittedly, we have the benefit of hindsight in our cynical day and age, but one can't help wonder whether such a name invited the subsequent catastrophe or not.
 * One advertisement for Northrup Grumman says, "How do cyberterrorists get past 75,000 of the industry's best? They don't." Oops.
 * The Ikarus ultralight plane. For when you really wanna die.
 * Union General John Sedgwick in the American Civil War. Last words "What? Men dodging this way for single bullets? What will you do when they open fire along the whole line? I am ashamed of you. They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance!" He was shot by a sniper minutes later while his men were ducking for cover. In some versions of the story, the soldier accompanying him lampshaded this, and Sedgwick replied, "All right, my man; go to your place."
 * An Australian billionaire is apparently commissioning a Chinese company to create "a 21st-century version of the Titanic" ready to set sail in 2016. Yeah, that's gonna end well...
 * Mark Wilkinson of Birmingham, England gave his 16-foot fishing boat the tongue-in-cheek name Titanic II and took it on its maiden voyage in Dorset in June 2011. No points for guessing what happened to it.
 * Various castles and fortresses that were declared to be "impregnable" at one point or another, although since any television documentary involving a successful siege operation invokes this trope one has to wonder how often that claim was actually made.