One of the long awaited moments of each New Year is the awarding of the Darwin Award. This prestigious award recognises those people, who through stupid and inane actions kill themselves, thus improving society by removing their genes from the gene pool. So here are the runners-up for this year's award.
(15 July 1999, Alabama)
A 25-year-old soldier died of injuries sustained from a 3-story fall, precipitated by his attempt to spit farther than his buddy. His plan was to hurl himself towards a metal guardrail while expectorating, in order to add momentum to his saliva. In a tragic miscalculation, his momentum carried him right over the railing, which he caught hold of for a few moments before his grip slipped, sending him plummeting 24 feet to the cement below. The military specialist had a blood alcohol content of 0.14%, impairing his judgment and paving the way for his opportunity to win a Darwin Award.
(24 July 1999, New Hampshire)
A ten-year-old boy was experimenting with a weird way of drinking Pepsi. Thomas pushed a plastic push-pin into his can, put it to his mouth, and began to suck. He may have been trying to "shotgun" the Pepsi by getting it to squirt out so he could drink it quickly. The pressurised tack shot from the can and lodged in his windpipe. Police Officer Mike Cassidy, summoned by Thomas's older brother and sister, unsuccessfully attempted CPR with assistance from a neighbour. The boy died on Monday at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Centre in Lebanon.
(25 August 1999, Germany)
Police in Bodenwerder made a gruesome discovery on Wednesday afternoon. They found the emaciated and partly decomposed body of a 75-year-old woman in her apartment. She had been dead for several weeks. According to police, the old woman was a victim of her own collecting mania. The rooms of her apartment were full of appliances, food, clothing, and filed brochures. A stack of items in the hall had collapsed and partly buried the woman. Unable to free herself, she died of thirst. She lived alone in her flat and rarely contacted neighbours, so her death was not immediately noticed. The police found 50 tins of fish, piles of toothpaste tubes, 30 flashlights; ten big leather suitcases and rows of neatly filed advertisements. Of her three room flat, only a few square meters of hallway were still inhabitable.
(23 August 1999, Washington)
Rodney Gueris was jet skiing around Lake Washington, enjoying the sun and the power between his knees. Then he noticed that his battery was beginning to fail. He idled over to a dock near Juanita Beach Park and tied up his craft, then ran to the car for his battery charger. When he returned, he plugged the charger into a 110-volt outlet, and jumped onto his watercraft while holding the booster cable. Sizzle. He was found floating facedown beneath the dock later that evening.
(11 August 1999)
A 42-year-old man killed himself watching the eclipse while driving near Kaiserslautern, Germany. A witness driving behind him stated that the man was weaving back and forth as he concentrated on the partially occluded sun, when he suddenly accelerated and hit the bridge pier. He had apparently just donned his solar viewers, which are dark enough to totally obscure everything except the sun.
(15 July 1999, San Francisco)
A drunken 20-year old woman was standing next to the railroad tracks intending to flash her breasts at the engineer. As the train swept past, the draft swept her off her feet and under the train, breaking her elbows. She was charged with a misdemeanour, and died several days later in the hospital.
(25 May 1999, Ukraine)
A fisherman in Kiev electrocuted himself while fishing in the river Tereblya. The 43-year-old man connected cables to the main power supply of his home, and trailed the end into the river. The electric shock killed the fish, which floated belly-up to the top of the water. The man waded in to collect his catch, neglecting to remove the live wire, and tragically suffered the same fate as the fish. In an ironic twist, the man was fishing for a mourning meal to commemorate the first anniversary of his mother-in-law's death.
(16 August 1999, Germany)
A hunter from Bad Urach was shot dead by his own dog on Monday. The 51-year-old man was found sprawled next to his car in the Black Forest. A gun barrel was pointing out the window, and his bereaved dog was howling inside the car. The animal is presumed to have pressed the trigger with its paw. Police have ruled out foul play.
(1991, Nicosia, Cypress)
Under similar circumstances, an Iranian hunter was shot to death near Teheran by a snake that coiled around his shotgun as he pinned the reptile to the ground. Another hunter reported that that the victim, named Ali, tried to catch the snake alive by pressing the butt of his shotgun behind its head. The snake coiled around the butt and pulled the trigger, shooting Ali in the head.
(3 June 1999)
The setting is the Atlantic Ocean bordering Virginia. Chincoteague is a seaside town in Virginia, and Nathan and his family were vacationing there. One day he decided to copy the local boys, and ride his bicycle into the water. Apparently under the impression that his bike floated, he tied his wrist to the handlebar to make sure it wasn't stolen by the surging waves. And then he rode along the Chincoteague Pier directly into the ocean. His bicycle didn't float. Police and bystanders eventually recovered his body from 15 feet of water. He was airlifted to a Maryland hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
(13 August 1999, California)
On Friday the 13th, Scott and his sister Kimberley had an electrifying experience while attempting to view the annual Perseid meteor shower. Scott, an aspiring young astronomer, set up his telescope for a closer view of the sky. Alas, poor Scott did not reflect on the merits of using a telescope for watching the Perseids. A telescope is really a hindrance. The wide field of vision of a naked eye will catch far more shooting stars than a telescope, particularly if that eye is taken away from city lights into the desert or mountains.
Having already proven to be a poor astronomer, Scott proceeded to show that he was not much of an electrician, either. Bothered by the glare of a nearby streetlight, he broke into the base of the light pole and attempted to sever the 4000-volt power cord. He was pronounced dead at Hoag Memorial Hospital shortly after his spectacularly aborted sky-watching attempt.
(January 1999, England)
Some people with nervous habits have good reason to be anxious. In January, a British teenager was rushed to hospital complaining of severe stomach pains. Surgeons who operated in a desperate but unsuccessful attempt to save her life were amazed to find a tangled mass of human hair the size of a football lodged in her abdomen.
Rachel, a 17-year-old hairdresser trainee, had been in the habit of chewing the ends of her tresses since early childhood. Specialist registrar Dr Andrew Stearman, of Poole General Hospital, Dorset, said: "The biochemical composition of hair makes it impossible for digestive juices in the stomach to break it down. It therefore accumulates, much like it builds up in the plughole of a bath or shower, attracting more hair and other food."
Pathologist Nera Patel later measured the hairball - known as a trichobezoar - at 1ft long, 10ins wide and 4ins thick. She said: "It was closely compacted and intertwined in the shape of a football. No one in our medical team had seen anything like it."
(August 1999, Australia)
Drinking oneself to
death need not be a long lingering process. Allan, a 33-year-old computer
technician, showed his competitive spirit by dying of competitive spirits. A
Sydney, Australia, hotel bar held a drinking competition, known as Feral Friday,
with a 100-minute time limit and a sliding point scale ranging from 1 point for
beer to 8 points for hard liquor. Allan stood and cheered his winning total of
236; (winners never quit!) which had also netted him the literally staggering
blood alcohol level of 0.353, 7 times greater than Australia's
legal driving limit of 0.05%. After several trips to the usual temple of
overindulgence, the bathroom, Allan was helped back to his workplace to sleep it
off, a condition that became permanent. A forensic pharmacologist estimated that
after downing 34 beers, 4 bourbons, and 17 shots of tequila within 1 hour and 40
minutes, his blood alcohol level would have been 0.41 to 0.43, but Allan had
vomited several times after the drinking stopped.
The cost paid by Allan was much higher than that of the hotel, which was fined the equivalent of $13,100 US dollars for not intervening. It is not known whether Allan required any further embalming.
(28 January 1999, London)
A flock of sheep charged a well-meaning British farmer's wife and pushed her over a cliff to her death. Betty Stobbs, 67, was charged by dozens of sheep as she brought them a bale of hay on the back of a power bike. The sheep rushed forward and rammed the vehicle, knocking Betty and her bike over the edge of a vacant 100' quarry near Durham, in north eastern England. "I saw the sheep surround the bike. The next thing she was tumbling down the incline," neighbour Alan Renfry told reporters.
(22 March 1999, Phnom Penh)
Decades of armed strife has littered Cambodia with unexploded munitions and ordnance. Authorities warn citizens not to tamper with the devices. Three friends recently spent an evening sharing drinks and exchanging insults at a local cafe in the south eastern province of Svay Rieng. Their companionable arguing continued for hours, until one man pulled out a 25-year-old unexploded anti-tank mine found in his backyard. He tossed it under the table, and the three men began playing Russian roulette, each tossing down a drink and then stamping on the mine. The other villagers fled in terror.
Minutes later, the explosive detonated with a tremendous boom, killing the three men in the bar. "Their wives could not even find their flesh because the blast destroyed everything," the Rasmei Kampuchea newspaper reported.
(5 September 1999, Jerusalem)
The switch away from daylight savings time caused consternation among terrorist groups this year. At precisely 5:30 Israel time on Sunday, two coordinated car bombs exploded in different cities, killing three terrorists who were transporting the bombs. It was initially believed that the devices had been detonated prematurely by klutzy amateurs. A closer look revealed the truth behind the untimely explosions.
Three days before, Israel had made a premature switch from daylight savings time to standard time in order to accommodate a week of Slihot, involving pre-sunrise prayers. Palestinians refused to "live on Zionist time." Two weeks of scheduling havoc ensued. The bombs had been prepared in a Palestine-controlled area, and set on Daylight Savings time. The confused drivers had already switched to standard time. As a result, the cars were still en-route when the explosives detonated, delivering to the terrorists their well-deserved demise.