Matt of All Trades blog, like the title suggests, is by a Vermont author and offers offbeat musings on pop culture, media, journalism, humor, weirdness, stupid people, smart people, my life as a journalist, landscaper, photographer, married gay man, dog lover and weather geek and more. It's run by me, Matt Sutkoski, a native Vermonter living in St. Albans, Vt.
Toddler falling out of a van into heavy Chinese traffic. He was rescued and uninjured. A
A viral video making the rounds shows a toddler falling out of the back of a van into heavy traffic on a Chinese highway.
Happy spoiler alert: The kid was rescued and wasn't hurt.
The van had stopped at a red light amid heavy traffic. The two year old boy was in the van, getting restless and moving around and found himself in the back of the van.
When traffic cleared, the van began moving, the hatchback unlatched the the boy tumbled out onto the pavement.
The back door of the van had been malfunctioning because the vehicle had been rearended a couple days earlier, SkyNews reported.
The van was driven by the boy's grandfather. He at first was unaware the kid had fallen out. When the kid stood up, he tried to chase after the van in the middle of the road but it was too late. Luckily, another motorist scooped up the kid and brought him to safety.
Meanwhile, another motorist tailed the van and honked his horn, trying to alert the grandfather. Finally he noticed.
The grandfather later told reporters, "After passing the intersection, a car chased me and kept sounding the horn. The driver told me a kid fell out of my van. I looked back, parked my van aside and went back and searched for my grandson,"according to SkyNews.
Grandfather and grandson were reunited, and I'm sure the kid was strapped in a seat belt but good after that.
A pizza thief and accidental arsonist caught in the act.
Leftover pizza! Yum!!
Some was sitting atop a stove in a Connecticut kitchen recently. So one of the dogs in the house decided to have a slice because why not?
Of course, there's always a mistake made in a crime, in this case, stealing a pizza.
The dog accidentally turned the stove burner on, and it was all caught on a security camera.
Luckily, the dog's human companions were in the other room and were able to avoid catastrophe.
Oh, and the humans subsequently put child proofing on the stove knobs, relocated smoke detectors and never leave anything on the stove. You'll see why in this video:
In our continuing series showing people having worse days than you, we bring you this (non- professional) tree cutter whose latest victim is not happy being the latest victim.
Note: Reports are the guy was not seriously injured.
A guy skiing in Colorado this week picked the wrong hill to zoom down and triggered an avalanche.
Luckily for him, he managed to stay on top of the snow and didn't get hurt. Luckily for us, he had a GoPro camera attached to his helmet. So we get to see the cool result of skiing into an avalanche.
Skip the first 3o seconds or so, kind of boring. The rest is really cool:
YouTube is awash in videos of dashcam videos from Russia showing ridiculous crashes, bad drivers, stupid people and other assorted weird moments. (All, right, this is supposedly in Kazakhstan, but close enough)
But for some reason, the video in this post struck me as rising above the scrum of Russian dash cam videos. It was certainly enough to have me laughing out loud.
For some reason, somebody was hauling a giant statue of a deer in a dump truck along a busy highway.
Now, I of course hope the girls make a quick and full recovery, but the deep mystery in this case is: Why were they sunbathing on the road?
None of the news reports explain why they weren't on a beach, a lawn, a deck, by a pool, anything but a road, even if the road had very little traffic.
To me, that's the most important question in this story, once it was established that the girls will recover and the guy who hit them didn't do it intentionally and wasn't drunk.
There's a lot of stories on line about this incident, but nothing on why the girls were there. Readers, have you heard anything?
Meanwhile, if you want to sunbathe, which isn't a good idea in the first place given the risk of skin cancer, please try to avoid doing so on roads. Or the railroad tracks. Or an airport runway. Just to be safe.
There's plenty of videos showing dramatic crashes on YouTube. This new one is among the most dramatic. A tow truck is trying to pull a semi on a snowy mountain road in northern Norway. Things don't go well.
Before you worry, you can see in the video that the tow truck driver junped out at the last minute. There was someone in the semi, but he lived with a couple of broken bones. Which is amazing, considering what happens. Watch for yourself. Hope it doesn't make you scared to drive in the snow!
Right in front of my office building in downtown Burlington, Vermont yesterday, a truck driver finished a delivery at a nearby restaurant. He either didn't put the lift on the side of the truck back under the vehicle, or it slid back out once he started moving.
The truck driver didn't notice the problem until it was waaaayyyyytoo late. The lift crashed into an SUV, which was pushed into two other cars. The SUV is pretty much ruined, the other cars have minor damage.
You can see some of the damage in the photo I took in this post.
But the scary thing was a woman an little girl were at the back of one of the cars that got hit, and almost got smushed between the bumpers of two cars. The woman had a leg injury but looks like she'll be OK. The girl, maybe four or five years old, wasn't hurt.
I'm sure the truck driver had some 'splainin' to do to his boss. Hope he doesn't get fired. Though this is awful, we are all prone to bonehead moves.
Here's hoping none of us do anything particularly stupid today.
