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Stupid deaths that never happened

lerk

Well-known member
What are the stupidest deaths that never happened? Here are some I can think of:

  • Japan trying to assassinate Charlie Chaplin in 1932 in order to incite the US to declare war
  • Jimmy Carter nearly touching the newly-installed solar panels at the White House while it was raining, which would've electrocuted him had he not been stopped.
 
"President Bush Jnr chokes to death on a pretzel" is a pretty big one

Forgot about that one! One of the first TLs I read on AH.com was about that premise, it was a pretty good one and introduced me to the website. It was this one.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_15_Incident ctrl+f "Chaplin". Actually it wasn't Japan it was far-right nationalists, not in government at the time, trying to make a more militarized Japan and hoped that a war with the US would do that.
 
Incredible. What year was this?

Somewhere, there's a timeline where Carter touches the panels and is shocked but it rewires him to be this ruthless sociopath.

I forgot, must've been on 1979 since that was the year the first solar panels were installed and clearly he wasn't aware of how to deal with them so he must've been new to it. I learned of this after watching a documentary on solar panels (I forgot the name of it) and one of the people interviewed was someone who had worked on installing solar panels on the White House, and in fact he was the one who saved Carter's life.
 
Incredible. What year was this?
A quick search suggests that solar panels were first installed in June of 1979 so probably around then. If he didn't have enough troubles in the 1980 presidential election then this, assuming that he survived, would just cap things off.
 
Dunno, which of the 200 attempts on Castro were real and which were tall tales to make fun of the CIA’s cartoonish incompetence?

And speaking of exploding cigars:
Reportedly, Ernest Hemingway, urged on by a group of journalists with whom he was drinking at the Palace Hotel bar in Rapallo, Italy, presented an exploding cigar to one of four bodyguards of Turkish general İsmet İnönü. When the cigar "went off", all four guards drew their guns and aimed at Hemingway. He apparently escaped without any grievous bodily injury.
 
Churchill was nearly shot by the Boers and nearly run down by a taxi in 1931. Stalin narrowly escaped being killed in a car accident in 1931 or 2 and had the same operation as Frunze only Stalin survived. Mussolini survived three assassination attempts and Hitler narrowly escaped death during WW1, managed not to get shot in the Beer Hall Putsch and survived several assassination attempts to boot. We really live in a fairly low probability TL.
 
Churchill was nearly shot by the Boers and nearly run down by a taxi in 1931. Stalin narrowly escaped being killed in a car accident in 1931 or 2 and had the same operation as Frunze only Stalin survived. Mussolini survived three assassination attempts and Hitler narrowly escaped death during WW1, managed not to get shot in the Beer Hall Putsch and survived several assassination attempts to boot. We really live in a fairly low probability TL.

Interestingly, Churchill was nearly killed in the trenches in 1916 and Mussolini could have killed both Hitler and himself in 1941 had he been allowed to fly a plane they were both on without a co-pilot.
 
Churchill was nearly shot by the Boers and nearly run down by a taxi in 1931. Stalin narrowly escaped being killed in a car accident in 1931 or 2 and had the same operation as Frunze only Stalin survived. Mussolini survived three assassination attempts and Hitler narrowly escaped death during WW1, managed not to get shot in the Beer Hall Putsch and survived several assassination attempts to boot. We really live in a fairly low probability TL.
I've mentioned this before, but Dale Cozort took an interesting approach to this - in all his WW2 timelines, no matter the POD, Hitler usually gets assassinated within a couple of months of it, because he argued that OTL is the least probable case given the number of attempts.
 
I've mentioned this before, but Dale Cozort took an interesting approach to this - in all his WW2 timelines, no matter the POD, Hitler usually gets assassinated within a couple of months of it, because he argued that OTL is the least probable case given the number of attempts.
Karelian's TL in the other place is, inter alia, exploring what a Liberal government without either Winston Churchill (killed by the Boers) or DLG (killed in a riot between pro and anti war demonstrators) would look like. He asked me for a few thoughts while doing his research.
 
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