Category: You have to be kidding, right!?!
This is Walter Summerford. This poor schmuck got struck by lightning four times, once after he was already dead.
It’s an old wives’ tale that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. Lightning is completely random. In the US alone, there are an average of 40 million lightning strikes per year. The odds of being hit by lightning in America are about one in a million in a given year. However, those numbers are, curiously, not consistent around the globe.
In the UK, there are only around 300,000 lightning strikes per annum. The United Kingdom is markedly smaller than the US, but its weather is way crappier. As a result, the odds of getting struck over there are closer to 1-in-15,300.
Lightning is some seriously nasty stuff. It’s basically just a big honking spark. Electrostatic energy builds up in the atmosphere and can discharge either from cloud to cloud or from a cloud into the ground. A typical lightning bolt runs about 50,000 degrees F, or five times the temperature of the surface of the sun. They pack millions of joules of energy. That stuff is undeniably pretty to look upon. However, you really don’t want to get any of it on you.
Around the globe, there are roughly 6,000 lightning strikes each and every minute. Nearly a quarter million people are struck by lightning every year. Roughly ten percent of those are killed.
On a certain level, those seem like pretty decent odds. If only one in every million Americans gets struck by lightning every year and, of those, nine out of ten live to tell the tale, that doesn’t sound so bad.
Those are indeed reassuring numbers, unless you happen to be Walter Summerford. Walter Summerford has been described as the unluckiest man in the universe. He was struck by lightning four times. One of those strikes was actually after he was already dead.
Background
Walter Summerford served as a British officer in World War I. In 1918, Major Summerford was riding a horse through a Belgian field when he caught a bolt of lightning. This massive electrical shock rendered the poor man paralyzed from the waist down. However, he gradually recovered. With the war over and his recovery nearly complete, Summerford was demobilized and sent to Vancouver for further rehabilitation.
Six years later, in 1924, Summerford was enjoying a little quiet time out fishing by a river. A storm came up, so the man took refuge underneath a nearby tree. A bolt of lightning struck the tree and tracked down his body and into the ground. The strike left Summerford almost completely paralyzed on his right side.
After two long years, Summerford finally regained the use of his legs. The man was an inveterate outdoorsman and loved wandering about the wilderness hiking, hunting, and fishing. However, in 1930, whilst taking a stroll in a public park, he was struck by lightning a third time. This bolt rendered him completely paralyzed. It was also markedly worse than the previous two. Summerford was destined to spend the rest of his natural life in a hospital bed.
Summerford’s physicians were amazed the man had survived this third blow. He fought valiantly for another two years before finally succumbing to the cumulative effects of these three lightning strikes in 1932. As to whether he enjoyed some kind of unique body chemistry or had somehow offended his Maker, no one will ever know. Regardless, it was undoubtedly the cumulative effect of these three lightning strikes that ultimately did Walter Summerford in.
Four years after he was buried in a public cemetery in Vancouver, Canada, Walther Summerford’s gravestone was itself struck by lightning and split into pieces. I’m not much into conspiracy theories myself. However, it is tough not to believe that there was something supernatural and spooky going on with that unfortunate guy.
The truly curious bit was that Walther Summerford was struck every six years starting in 1918, just like clockwork. Even after he died, when his six years were up, that’s when lightning struck his tombstone. The cyclical nature of the thing strains credulity, but his tale is well-documented.
The brother of one of the soldiers with whom I served was actually struck three times. Once the poor guy was in the shower. I can only imagine what that might do to somebody’s emotional well-being, not to mention your perspective on general hygiene. My colleague was from rural Texas. He said that every time it got a little bit stormy out, his brother would retreat to the living room away from the television and read a book. Who can blame him?
Walter Summerford got struck by lightning once after he was already dead.
This is his shattered tombstone. Image: Public domain.
Ruminations
As kind of an amateur science guy myself, I always gravitated toward basic physics. I can get my head around the way things move. However, chemistry and electricity always kind of made me itch. I struggled to visualize these disciplines, so they held little fascination for me. However, I have long appreciated that electricity is best appreciated at a distance. If Walter Summerford has taught me anything, it is that I’d really sooner not get struck by lightning.
By JONATHAN MILLER
As I stood in the queue at the fishmonger on the town square close to my home in the South of France yesterday, he was cutting the head off a sea bream with deft strokes of his razor-sharp knife.
‘You French have always been rather good at decapitation,’ I said, gesturing towards a spot outside the post office, where the town guillotine had stood in an earlier era. Nobody laughed. ‘They should bring the guillotine back,’ said the fishmonger. ‘We need it more than ever.’ He wasn’t joking and other customers nodded vigorously.
Like me, they’d spent much of the weekend watching news of the violence that broke out in Paris on Saturday night before spreading pretty much the length and breadth of the country.
The riots began after Paris Saint-Germain crushed Inter Milan 5-0 in the Champions League final. Before the game had ended, mobs were attacking police and setting fires on the Champs Elysees, with 264 cars torched.
One young man who was hit by a car died shortly afterwards. Rioters, including some waving Algerian and Palestinian flags, attacked the flagship Chanel boutique. Police made no fewer than 600 arrests.
The unrest quickly spread beyond Paris. In Normandy, a police officer gravely injured by fireworks was put into a medically-induced coma. A 17-year-old was stabbed to death in Dax in southwestern France.
The US State Department is now warning of terrorist attacks targeting tourist locations, transportation hubs and public areas.
France’s Vigipirate national security alert system is currently at its highest level, Urgence Attentat.
Translated, that means attacks are considered imminent and the estimated 10 million British tourists expected to holiday here this summer should be on their guard.
The riots began after Paris Saint-Germain crushed Inter Milan 5-0 in the Champions League final. Even before the game had ended, mobs were attacking police and starting fires on the Champs Elysees, writes Miller
Rioters,including some waving Algerian and Palestinian flags, attacked the flagship Chanel boutique during the chaos in Paris on Saturday. Police made no fewer than 600 arrests.
In the rural village where I live, our local policemen, normally unarmed, have been ordered to carry pistols. But the sense of anxiety runs much deeper than that.
At least 80 per cent of adults in my region have permits for guns, mostly used for hunting. In France as a whole, there are an estimated 12.7 million firearms in private hands, both legal and illegal.
Many joining the local gun clubs admit privately that they do this in case the worst happens and their weapons are needed for self-defence.
What is going on in Britain? Petty crime is rampant. Payment on the Underground seems to have become voluntary. There are occasional eruptions of civil unrest. But this bears little resemblance to what is happening in France.
The truth is France is a two-tier country. There is the charming, civilised nation that has been my home for more than 25 years, a land of magnificent countryside and chilled rosé. But another France has festered inside it and now threatens to consume it – a dystopia of grim tower blocks, from which unemployed, nihilistic youths emerge to loot and terrorise at any excuse.
A decade ago, I wrote a book called France: A Nation On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown.
It was criticised at the time for being alarmist. But the breakdown has happened.
Now I fear that a civil war is brewing and that, if police and politicians cannot control the problem, we will see prolonged violence on a scale that makes this week’s horrors appear trivial.
It’s an exaggeration to say that a full-scale civil war has already started, but there’s no doubt that a smouldering insurrection is being encouraged by an unholy alliance of hard-Left militants and extremist Islamists.
The social profile of those responsible for the violence is consistent, a reporter for upmarket daily Le Figaro observed on Monday as the first perpetrators appeared in court. He didn’t specify it but, then, he didn’t have to. Everyone knows the rioters are predominantly young males of North African origin.
But they are not the migrants in transit to the Channel coast on their way to Britain. They are the grandchildren of immigrants from Algeria and Morocco who arrived in France more than 60 years ago.
Their families came to France in search of opportunities. Their offspring are destroying it.
The Right-wing politician Eric Zemmour summed up the crisis in words that should give pause: ‘The violence on Saturday has nothing to do with football. It wasn’t comparable to English football hooliganism.
‘It is the first symptom of a civilisational guerrilla war. We need a major re-migration policy to restore peace in France.’
It’s unconstitutional in France to collect racial data on criminals but my police friends here are in no doubt who they are confronting and you only need to watch the video clips to see for yourself.
‘These incidents are very serious, unacceptable. We will pursue, we will punish, we will be relentless,’ President Emmanuel Macron said sternly on Sunday.
This was nonsense, of course. The first defendants were handed pitiful 500 euro fines – a stark contrast to the heavy prison sentences meted out to British rioters and those who helped to incite them on social media last summer.
The Israeli minister Amichai Chikli, infuriated by Macron’s promise to recognise a Palestinian state, posted a message on X (formerly Twitter): ‘@EmmanuelMacron, it seems that you’ve already established a Palestinian state in the middle of Paris. Bravo.’ That slap in the face must have stung even more than the one Macron received from his wife Brigitte on the presidential plane last month.
‘Why do the French love anarchy?’ asked a friend in London, as he watched the unrest on television.
My answer? They don’t. They hate it. Which is why law and order is going to be the decisive issue in the 2027 presidential election, now 22 months away, although the campaign has already started.
French voters are sick of the constant violent disturbances. In 2023, more than 5,000 cars were burned in a single week. Even when it’s ‘quiet’, more than 100 cars a day are set on fire. It’s no wonder that the foremost candidate for 2027 is the leader of the National Rally party, Marine Le Pen, who promises to crack down hard.
She is currently disqualified from seeking office after being convicted of diverting European Parliament funds to pay her party’s staff. If her appeal fails, her deputy, Jordan Bardella, will replace her.
The headlines are relentless: gang warfare in Marseilles, synagogues and holocaust memorials attacked in Paris, two prison officers murdered in an ambush at a motorway pay station.
A sinister development that makes this worse is the proselytising of the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to undermine the French Republic and impose sharia law.
According to a classified report from the Ministry Of The Interior, leaked to Le Figaro, the Brotherhood has built an extensive ideological infrastructure in France through schools, charities and mosques – infiltrating civil society under the guise of religious and educational activities.
Ultra-Left activists are openly exploiting the alienation.
Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of France Unbowed, who is building a coalition of the extreme Left and Islamism, portrays the rioters as victims of police brutality and government policies. This is classic Melenchon, a master of the tactic of inversion accusatoire (accusatory reversal), redirecting blame from the rioters to the state.
But figures show 74 per cent of French people believe there is a link between immigrants and crime, and 82 per cent want illegal residents deported.
Last month, a poll found 80 per cent of women want to see soldiers patrolling the streets.
A poll in March indicated that 69 per cent of people lack confidence in the government’s ability to protect the country, 42 per cent believe France is on the verge of a civil war and 39 per cent fear terrorist attacks are imminent on major government buildings, such as the Elysee Palace and National Assembly.
Nobody is more disgusted than the police, who risk their lives and soak up endless abuse for 2,000 euros a month. ‘The criminals have more rights than we do,’ one told me, reacting to news that rioters arrested at the weekend were already being released with little more than a telling-off.
Another gendarme was back after secondment to the beaches of Northern France, where she was supposedly on duty to stop people-smugglers launching their overcrowded dinghies to transport migrants across the channel. She said that, after some of her colleagues had disabled the inflatables with a box cutter, they were disciplined – for destruction of private property.
‘We used to arrest the migrants,’ she sighed, ‘but all we did was drop them off in downtown Calais. They were on the beach the next day. So, what was the point?’
The disorder in the cities is directly connected to the shambles on the Channel. Both signify a state that is losing control. But, as I have said, it is not new arrivals who burn the cars and stoke the riots.
That is done by the second and third generation immigrants, the ones whose parents arrived to work but failed to integrate. A couple of decades later, their children are completely disaffected and disconnected from education.
One friend of mine, a woman from Ireland, was hired as a temporary teacher in nearby Beziers to coach English, even though she’s not qualified.
The head explained they were desperate: their actual English teacher had been off work, suffering from stress, for two years. Of the 40 children in her class, she told me, perhaps three showed any interest in learning. The rest spent their days on their mobile phones playing video games.
‘I asked the principal what I should do about it,’ she said. ‘She replied: “Do nothing. It will just cause trouble.”’
These young people grow up in homes dependent on welfare, never expecting to find work. Their favourite expression is nique ta mere, a version of the American ‘mother****er’.
You might say they are merely young idiots – but they are being manipulated by people who are not idiots, to undermine French society. It is impossible to overstate how much the ultra-Left and their Islamist confreres detest everything about this country.
This was apparent ten years ago, when at least 1,200 French Muslim extremists travelled to Iraq and Syria to fight for Islamic State. France’s ghettos were a fertile recruiting ground and not just those in Paris.
For example, 17 men from the small southern town of Lunel, population 27,500, were reported to have joined the IS terrorist army, with at least six of them killed.
A jihadist told Paris Match in 2015 that there were so many French recruits in Islamic State, ‘I couldn’t even count them all.’
It took The New York Times to sum up what was happening: ‘Alienation, thanks partly to joblessness and discrimination in blighted neighbourhoods; a turn to petty crime, which leads to prison, and then more crime and more prison; religious awakening and radicalisation; and an initiatory journey to a Muslim country like Syria, Afghanistan or Yemen to train for jihad.’
The president at the time, Francois Hollande, made a belated and inadequate attempt to monitor the surge in Islamism, following the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices in Paris, and mass killings at a school in Toulouse and a Jewish supermarket in Paris.
He ordered more money for schools to teach lessons on ‘Republican values’ and secularism. This might have been France’s last hope of averting social disintegration – and it was squandered.
We are experiencing a new kind of hybrid chaos, in which the state loses control of portions of the ‘indivisible France’, a term enshrined in the constitution of the Fifth Republic.
In this new world, hordes of youths descend on the cities in eruptions of arson and looting. Meanwhile, thousands of migrants arrive from southern Europe and nobody even knows how many there are in France or who and where they are.
All this is in today’s headlines. What’s next will likely be worse.
Jonathan Miller lives in the south of France and is the author of France: A Nation On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown (published by Gibson Square).