Refuge in Audacity/Real Life: Difference between revisions

* Read Silvio Berlusconi's [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Silvio_Berlusconi Wikiquote page and marvel at how he stayed in office] as Italian Prime minister for 17 years. And the [[You Answered Your Own Question|probable ties with the Mafia]] and multiple scandals. One gets the feeling that if he hadn't been voted out, a good number of his countrymen wouldn't really have minded too much if someone invaded them on a mission of liberation from the <s>man</s> trope.

** Also, from [[wikipedia:Berlusconi#Right-to-die case|Wikipedia]]:

** You forgot [[Sarcasm Mode|this gem]], said during the Sme trial.

{{quote| "All citizens are equal (in front of the law) [[Animal Farm|but maybe the undersigned is a bit more equal than the others]], since the 50 % of Italians gave him the responsability for governing the Country”}}

* A German Prisoner had escaped from prison via... hiding in a [[Metal Gear|Cardboard Box]].

* ''Chutzpah'' has been defined as "clever audacity, for example a child killing both parents and then asking the courts for mercy because he's an orphan."

* In the late 1950s, the Navy was determined to launch the first US satellite with their Vanguard rocket. Which meant that even though Wernher von Braun had built better rockets for the Army, he couldn't launch anything into space, only launch tests. So, without getting permission from his supervising officer, von Braun moved one of his rockets out to the pad and decided he'd launch it into space and then go "Woops, it was an ACCIDENT!" The supervisor found out before he could actually do the launch, but man, that took GUTS!

* One entry on [http://www.fmylife.com FML] runs that the poster was eating lunch in a park in [[New York City]], when [[Steve Martin]] walks up to him, grabs his sandwich, takes a bite, then leaves, saying, "Nobody will ever believe you!"

* There's an old story of two strangers sitting at a table and eating their lunches. Alice looks up and notices Bob is eating a cookie from her bag. So Alice reaches out and takes another cookie, with a meaningful stare. Bob helps himself to another cookie. Alice takes another. They go all the way to the bottom of the bag, and there's one last cookie. Bob breaks it in half, gives Alice half, and leaves. That's when Alice {{spoiler|looks again in her lunchbox and sees her own, untouched, package of cookies. She was eating Bob's cookies all along.}}

** My friend is Bob. Alice is now his wife.

* Our very own [[Ad of Lose]] page is typically displaying at least one, and frequently two, ads for marketing services. What else could this be?

* T. E. Lawrence based his entire millitary career upon this principle.

* Napoleon Bonaparte, when he returned from his exile to Elba island. He essentially decided one day that he'd had enough of this 'exile' silliness and caught a boat back to France, where he gathered an army of volunteers while heading for Paris. When Louis XVIII sent his army to kill the renowned general, Napoleon left his own forces behind, walked up to the attacking army and asked if they were really thinking of trying to kill ''him''. He captured Paris two weeks later.

** On an earlier occasion, Napoleon's army needed to seize a vital bridge that the Austrian army was preparing to blow up. Two of Napoleon's marshals, Murat and Lannes, ride up and demand to know what the Austrians think they're doing. Didn't they know that this bridge had been ceded to the French under the terms of the armistice? One Austrian sergeant on the scenene did realize that they were bluffing, but Mut then demanded of the Austrian officer if he took orders from sergeants. Suffice it to say that the French were able to seize the bridge.

* When it was first proposed, Quantum Physics was this. Or, as Niels Bohr put it:

{{quote| "We are all agreed that yoyour theory is crazy. The question that divides is whether it is [[Crazy Enough to Work|crazy enough to have a chance of being correct]]."}}

* An unintentional example ensued when a minister at a local church recovered from an illness. It was the custom to post messages to the parish on the church bulletin board using stationery inscribed with the message "[[God Is Good]]." Underneath this was written [[A God Am I|"Dr. Hargreaves is better."]]

* Steven Jay Russell, the con man who inspired the movie ''[[I Love You Phillip Morris]]'', certainly counts. It takes some balls to ''fake your own death from AIDS'' in order to escape from prison.

* [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/booz/ This] attack by Anonymous, known as "Military Meltdown Monday." Not only did Anon break into the US military's database and make away with some ''90,000'' military email usernames and passwords, they also left an invoice for their "audit" of the security company's encryption, totaling to $310.

* In January 2011, a man in Russia managed to get off of being charged with armed robbery for stealing a truck containing a shipment of vodka by arguing that he was stealing the Vodka and that the truck just happened to be how he was transporting the Vodka.

* In his ''Dress to Kill'' show, [[Eddie Izzard]] points out that "[hitler] was a mass murdering fuckhead as many important historians have said. But there are other mass murderers who got away with it. Stalin killed many millions, died in his bed. Well done there. Pol Pot killed 1.7 million Cambodians, died under house arrest, age 72. Well done, indeed. And the reason we let them get away with it is because they killed their own people. And we're sort of fine with that. Oh, help yourself, you know we've been trying to kill you for ages, so you kill your own people... Seem to me Hitler killed people next door. Oh, stupid man. After a couple of years: well we won't stand for that, will we? Pol Pot killed 1.7 million people. We can't even deal with that. I think we think that if someone kills someone that's murder you go to prison. You kill ten people, you go to Texas they hit you with a brick, that's what they do. Twenty people, you go to a hospital and they look through a small window at you forever. And over that we can't deal with it. Y'know? Somebody's killed 100,000 people, we're almost going 'well done! You killed 100,000 people? You must get up very early in the morning.'"

* The BBC/Discovery documentary [[wikipedia:Human Planet|Human Planet]] is about the extremes of humans living in nature. Many of the examples in the episodes go this far.

** A tribe in Indonesia that builds tree houses over 100 feet high. Once built they carry their dogs and pigs all the way up and let their toddlers wander freely because they "know the limits of how far they can go". The tree house is considered finished when they light a fire in it. <ref>The words ''sturdy, child-safe and fire-resistant'' do not describe this tree house. The flooring material is thin bark. The local safety standard is “I only know of one guy who fell out of one and died.”</ref>

** A man in the Himalayas wants to give his children a good education. This involves a seven day hike through frozen mountain passes and thawing rivers. When they reach the town with the school, the children are properly dressed in their school uniforms.<ref>This involves a dangerous trip more associated with taking the long way around to reach the final boss’s back door, than how kids get to school.</ref>