Latest Darwin Award Nominees

[Bluepony]

God, this is scary. Just proof that Mother Nature does, in fact, chlorinate the gene pool every now and then.

1. A young Canadian man, searching for a way to get drunk cheaply, having no money to buy liquor, mixed gasoline and milk. Not surprisingly this concoction made him ill and he vomited into a lit fireplace, killing himself in the resulting explosion.

2. A 34-year old white male was found dead in the basement of his home from suffocation. Police said he was wearing a pleated skirt, white bra, black and white saddle shoes, and a woman's wig. It appeared he was trying for the "schoolgirl's look". He was also wearing a military gas mask that had the filter canister removed and a rubber hose attached in its place. The other end of the hose was connected to a hollow wooden section of bedpost approx. 12" long and 3" in diameter. This bedpost was, in turn, inserted into his rear end, and was the cause for his suffocation. Police found the task of explaining the circumstances of his death to family members "very awkward"

3. Three Brazilian men were flying in a light aircraft at low altitude when another plane approached. It appears they decided to "moon" the occupants of the other plane, but lost control of the plane and crashed. They were all found dead in the wreckage with their pants around their ankles.

4. ('Course one of these has to come from Los Angeles) Police officials would not release the name of an LA man who was found dead after they responded to complaints from neighbors that a bad smell was coming from his apartment. Upon entering the apartment the police saw that every square inch of the place, including appliances, and even the inside of the toilet were covered with pornographic images cut from magazines.

The surprise did not end there, because the man was found wearing a makeshift wire frame around his head with various pornographic pictures attached to it. Apparantly he wanted to move about his apartment without having to lose his close-up view of nude bodies. It appeared that he had almost no peripheral vision while wearing this apparatus. He was found dead while trying to do some dusting, his wire cage was entangled with a hanging lamp. He apparently choked to death while trying to extricate himself from the lamp.

4. A 27-yr old French woman lost control of her car on a highway near Marseilles and crashed into a tree, killing her and injuring her passenger. As a commonplace road accident, this would not have qualified her for a Darwin Award nomination were it not for the fact that her attention had been distracted by her Tamagotchi key ring which had started urgently beeping for food as she drove alone. In attempting to press the correct buttons to save Tamagotchi's life, the woman lost her own.

5. A police officer in Ohio responded to a 911 call from a daughter who reported that her father was not breathing. Upon arrival, it was noticed that the man was face down on the couch, naked. When the police officer rolled the man over to check for pulse and start CPR, she noticed burn marks around the man's genitals. Upon closer inspection after the man was transported to the hospital (where he turned out DOA), police noted that the man had made a hole in the cushions so he could insert his penis between two electric sanders (with the sandpaper removed) installed in the sofa. It seemed that his discharge shorted out one of the sanders, resulting in his electrocution.

6. And finally, from Alabama. A man died from rattlesnake bites. The "twist" that makes him a Darwin candidate is that he was playing catch with a friend, using the rattlesnake. Any fan of the Looney Tunes cartoons can pretty much guess what happened. The friend (a future Darwin Awards candidate) was hospitalized and survived.

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"...send lawyers, guns, and money..."

Warren Zevon

[Persephone]

Yoinks! I'm a fan of "News of the Weird," but these stories surprised even me. Catch with a rattlesnake? Hello!

[AuraSeer]

Your item 2 has been floating around the net for years. It is an urban legend, and untrue.

Ok, after reading these, and shaking my head in utter disbelief, I have two questions:
1)What is the Darwin Award?
2) Are these events real? Some of them seem ALMOST too ridiculous to believe.

Adam

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"Life is hard...but God is good"

[Diane]

Actually, like #2, most Darwin Awards are urban legends or extreme stretches of semi-truths.


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>^,,^<
KITTEN

Coarse and violent nudity. Occasional language.

[Doug Bowe]

From Toymakr who passed the 1999 nominees along the following definition:

For those of you who are not fully aware of the Darwin Awards; these awards are given annually(and posthumously) to those individuals who did the most for the human gene pool by removing themselves from it.

[Strainger]

Most of them are probably UL's although #6 is true. I remember this being a news story back in late 1995.

[Lissa]

You can check out the Darwin Awards at two different sites:

http://<a href="http://www.officiald...awards.com</a>

or

http://<a href="http://www.darwinawa...awards.com</a>

My favorite story is of the six people who drowned in a well trying to save a chicken. The chicken survived. Can't remember if it was listed in the Urban Legends section or not.

[Greg Charles]

Let me point out that (the second) #4 mentions the woman's passenger was injured, but the next sentence say she was alone.

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I'm not an idiot, but I play one on TV.

[dougie_monty]

Granted some of these are Urban Legends (does anyone know Jan Harold Brunvand's website???) But the plam must be awarded to two real people, Homer and Langley Collyer.
They were wealthy brothers--lawyers who never practiced--living in a mansion in Harlem. Homer was so reclusive he set booby traps throughout the house--and, in 1947, accidentally tripped one, when bringing food to equally reclusive Homer. Langley was buried under mounds of old newspapers, violins, automobile and sewing-machine parts, and a suitcase filled with metal.
How anyone found out, so they could tell the police, I have not the merest idea. But when the rescue squad came in they had to search through the detritus just to find the dead Langley.
And they found Homer--starved to death in bed, holding a copy of the Jewish Morning Journal, dated in the 1920's. The neighbors said Homer couldn't have been reading the Journal because he was blind.

[dougie_monty]

That should be, "The palm must be awarded..."

[nayaran]

On that second site, www.darwinawards.com , this year's nominees include one (appropriately entitled "Firefighters Ignite!") that talks about the Sequoyah Volunteer Fire Department. Well, it just so happens that that particular FD is right down the road from where I live, at the vocational school.

Yes, I do want to move, thank you for asking .

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"Of course, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong."--Dennis Miller