The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdezoil
spill in Alaska was $80,000.  At a special ceremony, two of the most expensively saved animals were released back into the wild amid cheers and applause from onlookers. A minute later, in full view, they were both eaten by a killer whale. 

A psychology student in New York rented out her spare room to a carpenter in order to nag him constantly and study his reactions. After weeks of needling, he
snapped and beat her repeatedly with a an ax leaving her mentally retarded. 

In 1992, Frank Perkins of Los Angeles made an attempt on the world flagpole-sitting record.  Suffering from the flu he came down eight hours short of the 400 day record, his sponsor hadgone bust, his girlfriend had left him and his phone and electricity had been cut off. 

A woman came home to find her husband in the kitchen, shaking frantically with what looked like a wire running from his waist towards the electric kettle. Intending to jolt him away from the deadly current she whacked him with a handy plank of woodby the back door, breaking his arm in two places. Until that moment he had been happily listening to his walkman. 

Two animal rights protesters were protesting at the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn. Suddenly the pigs,all two thousand of them, escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two hapless protesters to death. 

Iraqi terrorist, Khay Rahnajet, didn't pay enough postage on a letter bomb. It came back with "return to sender" stamped on it. Forgetting it was the bomb, he
opened it and was blown to bits. 

Not all days go as anticipated, as in in this attempt to remove a beached whale.