for the past few years, Wendy Northcut has comprised her annual "Darwin Awards." these typically highlight the the idiocy, and stupidity of... well, people. everyday people to be exact. people like you and me... though hopefully not you or me.
below are a few entries from 2008 - a la "
top 5 darwin awards":
5. EARLY RETIREMENT PLAN:(
24 August 2008, Indonesia) Charles had everything going for him when he flew to Jakarta to visit his family. He had just completed his International Baccalaureate at King William's College in the Isle of Man, and his dreams were ambitious. In the school yearbook, he said he planned retire by the age of 30. The principal of the college later described him as "a very bright boy with a very bright future."
Unfortunately for Charles, his elite education omitted an important lesson from the curriculum: Electricity, danger of.
He had one foot in the backyard swimming pool (really!) when he noticed a cement box near the edge of the pool. It was full of electrical wires supplying power to the jacuzzi. Curious, Charles started to fiddle with a fistful of wires. He was immediately rooted to the spot by 240 volts of electrical current surging through his body.
Early retirement, indeed!
A post-mortem examination determined that Charles' death was "due to electrocution as a consequence of external grounding of current through the body while partially immersed in water." The 18-year-old's body was repatriated to the Isle of Man.
4. INTO THE ABYSS:An enterprising lumberman had felled a large tree, and needed to haul it up a steep embankment. So he jacked up the rear end of his pickup and swapped one of the rear tires for a bare rim. He attached one end of a rope to the rim, and the other end of the rope to the felled tree. He put the pickup into gear, expecting the rim to act as a makeshift rope crank that would pull the tree up the embankment, saving him lots of sweat.
A great idea? Not if you're reading it here! You see, the tree vastly outweighed the truck. The man was standing with one foot on the ground and the other foot on the accelerator. When he gunned the engine, the tree acted like an anchor, and the truck yanked itself backwards. The open door rammed into him, and he was swept over the embankment along with the pickup.
When the dust settled, our lumberman had entered the great beyond. But his escapade served as a warning to others. The next lumberman cut up the tree where it lay, and carried it off.
3. PIERCED!:(
January 2008, Pennsylvania) A 23-year-old man with various body piercings wondered what it would feel like to connect his workplace test equipment to his chest piercings. Several co-workers tried to convince him that it was a bad idea to wire himself up to the electronic control tester, but he ignored their pleas.
He proceeded to connect two alligator clips to his piercings and hit the test button...
When the police and rescue personnel arrived, his co-workers were still trying to revive him with CPR and rescue breathing. They were not successful.
2. BONER!:(
2 February 2008, New York) A 50-year-old man was bird hunting in Upstate New York with his buddies and his faithful canine companion. They stopped for a smoke, and his dog found a deer leg bone!
The man tried to take the bone away, but like any right thinking dog, the animal would not relinquish its treasure. He stayed just out of reach. Frustrated with this blatant show of disobedience, the man grabbed his loaded shotgun by the muzzle and began wielding it like a club. Each time he swung it, the dog dodged.
Suddenly the "club" struck the ground and fired, shooting the man in the abdomen. He was airlifted to a nearby hospital, where he died from his injuries. He did remain conscious long enough to confirm this account to police; otherwise, his poor friends might now be under suspicion!
At least he didn't hit the dog.
1. NOT A SHRED OF SENCE:The ambulance responded to a frantic call concerning a neighbor's trip through an industrial tree shredder. It seems the individual had decided to prune his own trees, rather than hire a professional. Why not? After all, the local shop rented shredders that could make quick work of yard debris, including tree limbs up to 8 inches in diameter.
To save time (those fateful words) the neighbor had placed the shredder at the base of a great oak tree, where he could drop branches directly into the hopper. He intended to cut off the top third of the oak, since it had been killed by lightning.
With the shredder running wide open, the neighbor climbed his ladder to the first tree branch, stepped off the ladder, slipped, and fell. The paramedics found him very dead, half in and half out of the shredder's hopper, one leg shredded to the hip.
Not married, no kids, removed self from the gene pool.
if these stories weren't so unbelievably hilarious, they would be extremely depressing and the fact that any of them have taken place, let alone even originated as an initial thought, is completely mind boggling.
a little piece of advice i am definitely not qualified to give...:
"if for any reason at all something seems even remotely a bad idea... it probably is"
i will leave you now with a quote from the late-great George Carlin:
"Just think how stupid the average person is,
and then realize that half of them
are even stupider!"
