Those who have been visiting here for a while know of my fascination with the "Darwin Awards," a sort of formal recognition of people who have been dispatched from this life through their own acts of sheer stupidity. It seems there is never a shortage of such subjects as indicated by the following two extracts from newspapers here in the United States. Just so our overseas readers don't begin feeling too smug about "those crazed Yanks" you need to be aware that the annual award to the most idiotic methods of self destruction have gone to Europeans, Asians, Russians, Polish, Arabs, Israelis, Australians, Brits, New Zealanders and others from around the globe in past years. Obviously, these chowder heads take seriously the admonition that "we are all in this together."

 

A 20-year-old man was killed in Denver during afternoon rush hour on Sept. 1 when he jumped from a car going about 40 mph; according to friends, he had been planning a nonfatal jump for a while because he wanted to endure some trauma in order to muster the courage to get a tattoo.

[Denver Post, 9-2-03]

One is forced to wonder if he ever considered that most such jumps would possibly be fatal rather than non-fatal.

And a 15-year-old boy in Maryland Heights, Mo., who had been demonstrating his pain tolerance by clobbering himself on the head with his skateboard, invited a pal to take a shot, too; the first blow knocked him out, and he died four days later.

[St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 9-10-03]

When one watches otherwise seemingly sane youths pushing the envelope of common sense and the well established laws of gravity on skateboards, usually in a place designed for public use, not for their pursuit of slaphappiness, one can only expect leading candidates for the award to be among their herd.

One can only wonder what damage to the human gene pool would have resulted had these two brainiacs been permitted to reproduce. Perhaps the answer to the age old question, "Why can't Johnny (Jane) read?" has been right in front of us all along.

They can't read because 27%+/- of them are totally STUPID PEOPLE! See the bell curve of human intelligence distribution among the general world population for proof of this.

Previous Darwin Award winners include a New Yorker who became enraged when a soft drink machine failed to deliver the soft drink he was trying to purchase. He began kicking, cursing and punching the machine, then started shaking it back and forth more and more forcefully until, predictably for rational beings, it toppled over on him, killing him outright.

Yet other past winners of the award include three former members of the military of the former Soviet Union in Georgia (Soviet) who died when a rocket they were trying to dismantle exploded. They were trying to open it with a hammer in order to recover the gold components inside the rocket.

Then there was the Los Angeles native who wished to fly. He purchased and attached four fully inflated surplus weather ballons to a common lawn chair, took a loaded .22 semiautomatic rifle with him (to let air out of the balloons for altitude control he told his onlooking friends, of course), strapped himself in and let go the tie-down straps. He immediately rose to and altitude of several thousand feet while drifting aimlessly into the densely used Los Angeles western approach for commercial airliners landing at LAX airport as they approached that busy airport over the Pacific Ocean. If he ditched at sea through use of his unique altitude control system or was mowed down by an approaching jumbo jet is still conjecture. It probably didn't matter. He was last observed by a commercial airline pilot at an altitude where he most likely died of oxygen deprivation.

A snowbird who migrated to Florida bled to death in his own yard after he received numerous serious, life-threatening lacerations when he picked up his running gas-powered lawn mower and tried to use it to trim his hedges. Not surprisingly, he was one of the lead complainants from Palm Beach County, Florida in the 2000 Presidential election who claimed he got confused by the ballot. He was also a retired union auto worker, but that's a whole different set of circumstantial evidence of his qualification for the award. We have been unable to verify this tidbit, but we have been told that his fellow unionized auto workers gave him the nickname "Recall Ron" for the quality of his work prior to his retirement.

It appears to me that Darwin was even more correct than he could ever have imagined.

When asked for a comment concerning the fate of the Award winners after learning of their deaths, most of their friends replied predictably, "Oh, wow! Bummer."