it was approached. Soon the sound
turned into a murmur, then into
voices. A search party!
Speaking little English, four rescu-
ers carefully cradled Lythcott’s back
and neck as they carried him up toa flatbed truck. Sometime later they
placed Eno beside him in the cargo
area. Her hair was soaked and matted
with blood and grime. More blood
covered her torso and legs. Lythcott
barely recognized her.
At 8:14 a.m.—nearly four hours
after Mikey Lythcott posted his plea
for help on Facebook—Caitlin from
Prague, who had been in constant
touch with the hospital in Ubud,
posted: “UPDATE—HE IS OKAY AND IN
THE HOSPITAL!”Friends from Portland to Pretoria,
Seattle to Sydney, breathed a collec-
tive sigh of relief. Their sentiments
could be summed up by a post from
Jay Holmes: “Thank you, that’s what
we all needed to hear.”
Eno spent eight days at a hospital
in Bali before returning to her teach-
ing job in South Korea. She had suf-
fered a fractured wrist, shattered
cheekbones, severe injuries to her
mouth and tongue, and a badly bro-
ken nose. Lythcott’s condition was
worse: internal bleeding, collapsed
lungs, a broken wrist, broken ribs,
a fractured back and skull, a perfo-
rated colon, a bruised liver. But three
weeks after the crash, he was out of
the hospital and recuperating at his
sister’s house in Atlanta.
A miracle? Maybe. But there’s a les-
son here too. As Georgia Chapman
Costa, one of Lythcott’s Facebook
friends, put it on the feed: “When peo-
ple come together, wonderful things
happen.” Even when they are coming
together somewhere way out there in
cyberspace.“EVERYONE STOP POSTING!
Unless you have
an update we need this
thread to STOP NOW!”The Hardest Word to Guess in Hangman Is ...
... jazz. According to mathematician Jon McLoone, who built a computer program
to simulate nearly 15 million games of hangman, players are far more likely to
guess vowels than uncommon letters such as j, q, x, and z. Because jazz has three
uncommon letters—and shorter words give guessers fewer chances at being
correct—it’s a statistically perfect word for annoying your friends.
wolfram.comReader’s Digest Drama in Real Life
86 july/august 2019