The Darwin Awards


The Latest Darwin Awards Darwin Awards are (by definition) granted posthumously. This citation is bestowed upon (the remains of) that individual, who through single-minded self-sacrifice, has done the most to remove undesirable elements from the human gene pool. Who does the Darwinian award go to this time?

1. Trying to keep warm in freezing weather, a 50 year old Cypriot huddledover his paraffin heater. Accidentally overturning it, he set himself onfire, screaming in pain as his clothes were engulfed he ran out of his abode and jumped into a nearby reservoir, where he sunk like a stone and drowned.

2. The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez oilspill in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony, two of the mostexpensively saved animals were released back into the wild amid cheers andapplause from onlookers. A minute later they were both eaten by a killerwhale.

3. A psychology student rented out her spare room to a carpenter in order to nag him constantly and study his reactions. After weeks of needling, he snapped and beat her repeatedly with an axe leaving her mentally retarded.

4. In 1992, Frank Perkins of Los Angeles made an attempt on the worldflagpole- sitting record. By the time he had come down, eight hours short of the 400 day record, his sponsor had gone bust, his girlfriend had left him and his phone and electricity had been cut off.

5. A woman came home to find her husband in the kitchen, shaking frantically with what looked like a wire running from his waist towards the electric kettle. Intending to jolt him away from the deadly current she whacked him with a handy plank of wood by the back door, breaking his arm in two places.A shame as he has merely been listening to his walkman.

6. Two animal rights protesters were protesting at the cruelty of sendingpigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn. Suddenly the pigs, all two thousand ofthem, escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two hapless protesters to death.

And the last & best.......

7. Iraqi terrorist, Khay Rahnajet, didnt pay enough postage on a letterbomb. It came back with return to sender stamped on it. You guessed it, he opened it and said a fond farewell to his face.

1995 "Darwin Award" Winner

Last year's winner was the fellow who was killed by a Coke machine, which toppled over on top of him as he was attempting to tip a free soda out of it.

And this year's winner is:

The Arizona Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smoldering metal imbedded into the side of a cliff rising above the road, at the apex of a curve.
The wreckage resembled the site of an airplane crash, but it was a car. The type of car was unidentifiable at the scene.
The folks in the lab finally figured out what it was, and what had happened.
It seems that a guy had somehow got hold of a JATO unit, (Jet-Assisted Take Off unit, actually a solid-fuel rocket) that is used to give heavy military transport planes an extra `push' for taking off from short airfields. He had driven his Chevy Impala out into the desert, and found a long, straight stretch of road. Then he attached the JATO unit to his car, jumped in, got up some speed, and fired off the JATO!!
Best as they could determine, he was doing somewhere between 250 and 300 mph (350-420kph) when he came to that curve.... The brakes were completely burned away, apparently from trying to slow the car.
NOTE: Solid-fuel rockets don't have an 'off'... once started, they burn at full thrust 'till the fuel is all gone.