Buddy, you got hit by a bale of hay. That bale of hay is rolling somewhere in Wales, which is where this was shot. I know that because I looked it up, something you do in 2017 because you have to know a few things about a viral internet video before finding it funny.
This wasn’t always true: On a dial-up line in 2001, you could watch Saudi drifters fly straight into telephone poles in big body Benzes, share it with all your friends, and no one found it problematic or bad. This is not because it was better. It is because you were a horrible person, laughing at poor Grape Lady choking when she fell out of her bucket and made terrible and not-at-all funny noises. We are all definitely not horrible people for laughing at people getting hurt, ever, and none of us ever visited Rotten dot com or Stileproject.
So to get this out of the way: This man, as far as I know, is not dead. He is Harry Connell, according to his Instagram bio. His interests appear to include posing shirtless on Instagram and getting obliterated by farm supplies. This is fine: If I had his body fat percentage, my interests would also include posing shirtless on the internet. I’d do it in front of various local Popeyes for added irony, and also as a tribute to Popeyes and the hardworking people who make them great every day.
Why Harry decided to jump a hay bale isn’t clear. A cursory bit of research reveals that hay bales are nothing to mess with at all, ever.
They’re huge. They are shaped like cylinders, meaning they can roll off things like trailers and barn racks, and onto things like farmers and children. The CDC has actually surveyed hay bale fatalities as a workplace risk, and they should have: From 1981 to 1990, 41 people in the United States died from hay bales crushing them. From 1992 to 1996, they killed another 46 people. (The first term of the Clinton administration made hay bales more homicidal than usual for some reason.)
In 2010, a hay bale killed cellist Mike Edwards, a member of the band Electric Light Orchestra, when it rolled down a hill and onto his van. Hay bales do not respect celebrities, or cellists, and obviously have no respect for human life.
The threat is not only real, but it’s vaguely defined: No one can agree how big they’re supposed to be, or how much they’re supposed to weigh above a vaguely defined limit of “really heavy.” So if we’re being curious—and we are being curious here, because JESUS look at the hit our boy Harry takes—we can all assume that hay bale weighs anywhere from 500 to 1200 pounds. That variance in weight is a sore spot for farmers and hay dealers looking to do business.
BEHOLD: MEN EXPERIENCING TRUST ISSUES AND HURT FEELINGS OVER HAY BALES:
Of course, it is rare that the seller will have a scale of sufficient size to the weigh the bales. In fact, many sellers will be offended if the buyer doesn’t take the sellers’ word for it and insists on weighing the bales prior to the purchase.
The real risk of death already hooked me, but now it’s the roiling passions and microdramas of mistrust and betrayal in the hay industry that have me ready to write a 10-episode Netflix series about this—that, and this photo from that University of Georgia report on hay bale weights where a farmer is clearly hurt you would ever say that about Andy, his favorite hay bale.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8845461/Screen_Shot_2017_07_11_at_5.33.51_PM.png)
Hay bales are such a scourge of the heartland that they earned the ultimate tribute: An entire legal sub-specialty devoted to hay bale-related accidents, which is not entirely a joke due to the other ways hay bales can kill people. They blow off trucks and into traffic, causing serious and even sometimes fatal accidents. Harry Connell isn’t the only one to document his brush with death: YouTube is filled with near-death experiences with hay bales, part of an entire genre of deeply undervalued content best described as “FARMING GONE WRONG.”
Related: The best type of YouTube content is officially now “FARMING GONE WRONG”. All other genres are a distant second.
The adorable pastoral roadside scene of hay bales rolled up in the field you pass and quietly appreciate on the way to an outlet mall? It’s secretly plotting to kill you and your loved ones, either by rolling over on you, bouncing on top of your car and crushing you, or possibly by thundering downhill towards your prone, terrified body. Hay bales aren’t cute.
They’re agriculture’s Tawny Hitman, and you should treat them with the fear and reverence they demand.
That Harry survived at all is a miracle. He’ll probably have to live out his days knowing that they’re out there, slowing rolling towards him, peeking their wheaten huge heads over the windowsill while he sleeps. Waiting. Hay bales can wait forever, Harry. They’re hay bales. The weight may vary. Their vengeance never does.