Remember those old sit-coms...

...from the 1960s, like "F Troop" or "McHale's Navy?" Every once in a while they would have an episode about someone who was a jinx. You know, someone who would bring bad luck wherever he went. Well here's the story of a real-live jinx. Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived not one but two atomic blasts! According to his obit in the Times:

Mr. Yamaguchi, as a 29-year-old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was in Hiroshima on a business trip when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. He was getting off a streetcar when the so-called Little Boy device detonated above the city.

Mr. Yamaguchi said he was less than two miles away from ground zero that day. His eardrums were ruptured, and his upper torso was burned by the blast, which destroyed most of the city’s buildings and killed 80,000 people.

Mr. Yamaguchi spent the night in a Hiroshima bomb shelter and returned to Nagasaki, his hometown, the following day, according to interviews he gave over the years. The second bomb, known as Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, killing 70,000 people.

Mr. Yamaguchi was in his Nagasaki office, telling his boss about the Hiroshima blast, when “suddenly the same white light filled the room,” he said in an interview last March with the British newspaper The Independent.

“I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima,” he said.

This is a guy to whom you wouldn't want to stand too close! He had to be the unluckiest man in history. Or maybe he was the luckiest:

“I could have died on either of those days. Everything that follows is a bonus.”