These folks prove that perseverance doesn’t always end in success.
• Cha Sa-soon, a South Korean woman, took a written driving test nearly every day for more than four years…and failed each time. Finally, in November 2009, after 950 tries and $4,200 in fees, the 68-year-old woman achieved the minimum passing score of 60 percent. Everyone at the motor-vehicles office cheered. But unfortunately for Cha, she still needs to pass the driving part of the exam.
• Vincent J. Howard, a former parking-meter attendant in the Detroit suburb of Mount Clemens, pleaded guilty in May 2005 to stealing $120,000 from meters—one coin at a time, over the course of 23 years. Police raided Howard’s home and found several thousand dollars’ worth of coins, another $500 in his car, and $2,000 in the city-owned car he drove on his rounds. In addition to losing his job, Howard was ordered to repay all of the stolen money within two years.
• For 30 years, British college professor Norman Sherry worked tirelessly on a three-volume biography, The Life of Graham Greene, about the globe-trotting English writer who died in 1991. Over the years, Sherry subjected himself to dangers and tropical diseases like dysentery and gangrene while tracking Greene’s footsteps. But by the time he finally released the last volume of the 906-page book in 2004, he’d already been upstaged by the writer’s longtime mistress, Yvonne Cloetta, who had just published her biography of Greene. To make matters worse, Sherry’s final volume was panned by critics (the Guardian said it was “badly written, full of lazy assumptions and statements of the crashingly obvious”). Sherry lamented, “I almost destroyed myself writing this book. Now that I’m finished, my life has been taken from me.”
• In 2010 the Society for Research of Paranormal Science forced a German fortune-tellers’ society to admit that nearly all of the 140 predictions its members had made for 2009 turned out to be wrong, including the assassination of Barack Obama and terrorist attacks in Frankfurt and Berlin. The one prediction they got right: the death of Michael Jackson. (That one had been on the “permanent prediction” list for years, so, in this case, persistence did pay off.)
Five most common GM (genetically modified) foods: corn, soy, milk, wheat, and Canola oil.