David Blaine

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Gelert by Charles Burton Barber (1884)

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A carpet beater

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David Blaine stood sealed inside a block of ice for 63 hours in Times Square in 2000. His legs swelled to the point of compartment syndrome; surgeons nearly amputated both. He called it a magic trick.

On August 19, 1951, Eddie Gaedel — 3 feet 7 inches tall — batted for the St. Louis Browns in a real AL game, wearing number 1/8. He drew a four-pitch walk and was pulled immediately.

KKR, Vornado, and Bain Capital bought Toys 'R' Us in 2005 for $6.6 billion, immediately saddled it with $5 billion in debt, and spent 13 years watching 33,000 employees lose jobs as the debt ate the stores.

Welsh prince Llywelyn killed his hound Gelert for apparently savaging his infant son — then found the baby unharmed, a dead wolf beneath the cradle. He never smiled again. The grave at Beddgelert still draws visitors.

Ed Boon hid the fatality system inside Mortal Kombat's code as an undocumented secret, only revealing it after the arcade build was certified — his bosses at Midway never approved it before it hit machines.

Abramović placed 72 objects on a table — razor, wine, loaded pistol — and let strangers use them on her body for six hours. By hour three, someone had pressed the gun to her temple.

Woven rattan, swung hard against hanging rugs in the yard every spring — the carpet beater was killed by one invention, the vacuum cleaner, within thirty years of its own peak production.

Albert Anastasia — boss of Murder Inc. — was shot dead in a Park Sheraton barbershop chair on October 25, 1957, cape still draped over him, his own bodyguard conveniently sent to park the car.

Oda Nobunaga lined 3,000 arquebusiers behind wooden palisades and rotated them in firing relays, shredding Takeda's cavalry in minutes. The samurai charge, centuries old, dissolved in a single afternoon in 1575.