He had lost his mind by the age of 46, a misfortune thought to have been triggered by the 1915 massacres of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey.
These two grim developments were capped by a third misfortune when, last spring, the department of transportation blocked United's merger with US Airways.
As the two boys pass through the standard Soviet childhood, going to camp, marching toward the Soviet "radiant horizon," they find themselves bound together by a shared misfortune, the deaths of their fathers within a few weeks.
If so, it's a misfortune shared by English-language poetry in general.
The Lady Vanishes owes its place in the Hitchcock canon to a misfortune suffered by a second unit director called Fred Gunn.
It's a misfortune shared by English-language poetry in general, as only five poets from the English-speaking world have pleased the Swedes.
Traditional healers are often approached by those who have suffered a misfortune, illness, or death in the family, to identify who in the community has been "bewitching" them.
"I rarely question their effort, but we were done by a bit of misfortune in conceding at the death," McDermott said.
This was a scratchy, scrappy performance that raised far more questions than it answered against a disciplined and technically adept Bosnia side who were undone first by a moment of misfortune three minutes in to their first World Cup and then, as they tired in the second half, by a moment of brilliance from Lionel Messi.
Nothing, it seemed, could go wrong for the Texan cancer survivor: his main rivals were eliminated by a variety of misfortunes, his build-up went perfectly and he could hardly have ridden better in the only two stages that counted this week, last Saturday's prologue time trial and Wednesday's team time trial.
