I’ve read one of the books. I expected it be amusing – a News of the Weird sort of thing. Instead it was smarmy and smart-alexy and somewhat sophomoronic. It was the sort of thing that might have been assembled by an ex-son in law that you don’t much care for. Not amusing. Mostly off-putting and desperate. I’d like to get my time and my money back.
No. People doing very stupid things that directly cause their own deaths is their own fault and shouldn’t be dressed up as tragedy wrapped in pathos. Some examples:
Man hooks up a high voltage powerline into the ground of his backyard in an effort to electrocute moles subsequently kills himself. Moron.
Man sentenced to execution (by electric chair) dies by accidentally electrocuting himself while sitting on a metal toilet and trying to fix a TV. Part moron, part hilarious because of the irony.
Priest attempts to beat Lawn Chair Larry’s record but doesn’t plan very well, neglects to learn how to use a GPS and doesn’t parachute to safety while over land, is blown out to sea and dies. Moron.
These people don’t deserve a deep and abiding respect. Their deaths were all avoidable, nay their deaths were highly improbable if not for their extreme stupidity. The guy who died during demolition was an odd choice given the sparse details, perhaps if he was sitting underneath the wall while bashing out the supports. In that case, then it would count as extremely stupid and not just foolish (i.e. demolition by himself).
Real stunt men don’t use the Maid of the Mist as their primary source of recovery. The newspaper write-up says he was a graduate of a stunt school and had spent 7 years working on the stunt. This site says he didn’t pack the parachute and it was not attached to him when it deployed. From the description it sounded like a ballistic parachute.
Darwin material.
So my WAG was right-- he was a professional stuntman who spent 7 years preparing for a well-intentioned stunt to help homeless people, and because his equipment failed, he’s “stupid wrapped in a bow.” Whatever, dude :rolleyes:. I bet his wife and family just loooove reading stuff from keyboard warriors like you.
No, he was someone who went to “stuntman school”. If he were a professional stuntman he wouldn’t have done the stunt the way he did it. He should have had a support team on the water plus one that could go in the water with diving tanks. All this tethered to a boat big enough to handle a winching operation. He would have had a backup parachute like any skydiver does and a flotation device to keep him from being pulled under.
There isn’t anything about this that smacks of a professional stunt. For that matter, there isn’t anything that suggests 2 hrs of real thought like what would happen if a jet ski flew off the edge of the falls and hit the Maid of the Mist. He relied on a single parachute and the rescue skills of a tour boat to be able to pull him from the Niagara basin which is nothing but a giant whirlpool.
Darwin Awards poster child.
People who do stupid things deserve to be mocked. If they die in the process, they deserve to be mocked posthumously. I expect the same treatment if I should depart this plane of existence in a monumentally stupid manner.
Like I said-- keyboard warrior.
Unless you’re a stuntman. Are you?
Surely there must be a better way of dealing with homeless people than running them off Niagara Falls. A union, perhaps.
I’ll bet they’d all be begging to get in. 
If I died by doing something that was shortsighted or poorly thought out or just outright dumb, I would expect people to laugh at me.
The two idiots who snorted fire ants as a homage to Ozzy Osbourne…even their mothers, in private, wondered how they could be sooooo stupid, I believe.
The female deep-diver who died because the janitor/cleaning person opened up the decompression tank I can’t laugh at. I shudder in repulsion. She didn’t do anything to deserve laughter.
Offensive as hell. Still funny.
I’ve done stupid sh*t that’s almost gotten me killed. Offencive only to living. If I ever end up on the site, I’ll probably be too dead to care.
In order to make a point you have to challenge what I’ve said with some form of logic.
-Parachutists use 2 chutes in case one fails - not doing so is stupid
-Not checking your only parachute to see if it’s properly folded and ATTACHED is stupid
-Deliberately parachuting into a whirlpool with no support team is stupid
-Hoping a tour boat rescues you from a whirlpool is blind faith stupid
-Driving a jet sky over the falls endangered the people on the tour boat which is criminally stupid.
The only support group involved with this was his family waving goodbye as they filmed his suicide.
- Forget about parachutes.
(a) The water at the base of Horseshoe Falls is very aerated, so no parachute is necessary.
(b) A parachute and its lines would entrap the swimmer at the base of the falls. - The Niagara whirlpool is far downstream from the falls, and is not relevant to the matter.
- There is a deep recycle at the base of the falls. The pile at the base of Horseshoe is such that swimmers do not surface and get recycled. The recycling takes place well below the surface, so a support team on the surface would be ineffective. Also note that the pile is too rough to station rescue boats via downriver lines to further rescue boats. Also note that although divers swim the rapids downstream of the whirlpool, they do not go near the falls, so forget about using divers for rescue.
- The Maid of the Mist does not go anywhere near the base of the falls, or anywhere near the furthest extent of the recycle. Yes, it could pick up a swimmer if that swimmer were to make it out of the recycle and happen to wash by at the right place at the right time (it performed such a rescue once), but the odds of surviving the recycle are almost nil, and the odds of then being in the right place at the right time are low.
- Since the Maid of the Mist goes nowhere near the base of the falls, running a jet ski off the falls would not endanger the people on the tour boat.
- Is there a runnable route? Yes – fairly far over on river left. The risk, however, is extremely high, and would be best mitigated by being enclosed and by having an air supply, rather than being unprotected and without air.
(a) There are boulders at the base that create severe impact and entrapment problems.
(b) The very high volume of flow greatly increases these impact and entrapment problems.
(c) The shape of the recycle is fairly vertical, and its size is very large, so objects entering into this deep recycle tend to go around underwater for a fair while and get pummelled and entrapped on the boulders, rather than being bottom flushed immediately.
In short, the Darwin Award Winner was an unprepared fool with no understanding of how to run waterfalls or of the particular characteristics of Horseshoe Falls. I entirely agree with MacGiver: it was no more than a suicide with his family waving goodbye.
And Cisco, when you develop some experience at running Class V, waterfalls and high dams, drop me a line so that we can share our experiences.
I think it would be hilarious if the person who runs the Darwin Awards website gets killed by a pissed off family member.
:rolleyes: Ok, toughguy. You’ll be hearing from me. Hold your breath.
Have you any replies other than rolls-eyes and despair for the children of dumbasses?
I’ve read all five Darwin Awards books and this point pretty much hits the nail on the head. For the first two-three books, they were culling stories from all over the world using funny deaths as far back as they could go. So there were plenty of “man electrofies his backyard and electrocutes himself” type stories to go around. And they were hilarious.
However, the more recent books have only been able to pull stories from the time period from when the last book was printed. So you get a lot more stories of “Jim Bob was drunk and then he wrapped his car around a telephone pole… oh, and he’s a telephone pole repairman… hyuk!”
So offensive? No. But they’ve clearly run their course.
What do you think about the Honorable Mentions? The guys narrowly survived to tell the tale, but clearly were playing chicken with the Grim Reaper. Do you feel more or less offended by these?
I must admit, I was one of the (probably many) people to submit this story.
Was that a Darwin entry? I remember seeing it dramatized on 1,000 Ways to Die. It didn’t strike me as funny or offensive and the presentation on the show was fairly respectful, and such dramatizations go.