And the Award Goes to...

We’d like to take this opportunity to begin looking at the Darwin Awards. A genius idea in our humble opinions. “The Darwin Awards commemorate the improvement of the human species by honoring those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it. (The Award is generally bestowed posthumously.) After fifteen years of fatal reports, Darwin Awards insiders no longer stand on rolling chairs near windows, disable safety features on common household tools, nor wire electricity in the rain. Read these stories--for safety's sake!" –Wendy Northcutt, www.darwinawards.com

The following story, Crushing Debt, is the winner of 2009:

Double Darwin!

(26 September 2009, Belgium) The city of Dinant is the backdrop for this rare Double Darwin Award. Two bank robbers attempting to make a sizeable withdrawal from an ATM died when they overestimated the quantity of dynamite needed for the explosion. The blast demolished the building the bank was housed in. Nobody else was in the building at the time of the attack.

Robber One was rushed to the hospital with severe head trauma; he died shortly after arrival. Investigators initially assumed that his accomplice had managed a getaway, but the second burglar's body was excavated from the debris twelve hours later. Would-be Robbers One and Two weren't exactly impoverished--their getaway car was a BMW. Comments from the readers:

"Dynamite: not for everything."
"Less is certainly more."
"Debit cards are safer."
"They really blew it..."
"Extreme Self Banking"

Here is the 2009 runner-up, Double Dip:

(3 June 2009, North Carolina) Greensboro was inundated with four inches of pouring rain in two hours, stranding several cars on flooded roads. Rosanne T., 50, was not deterred. She hopped on her moped and drove to a convenience store where she "possibly had a beer," according to her mother, before deciding to blunder home through the storm. She phoned home to say, "My moped has two rubber wheels, Mom, I'll be fine." North Carolina does not require a license to own a moped.
Ms. T. had acquired hers two years previously after a DUI conviction. The Highway Patrol had blocked off several roads that were inundated with water, including Rosanne's path home. But she rode right past the officer and the barriers, lost control of her vehicle, and fell into the swollen creek below. The officer retrieved rope from his vehicle and proceeded to haul her from the water.

He then interviewed the woman, probably inquiring about her motivation for speeding through a roadblock during a flash flood. When the officer returned to his patrol car to call for assistance, Rosanne took the opportunity to escape--by jumping back into the creek! The officer attempted to rescue her again, but alas, it was too late. The victim's mother speculated that her daughter's motivation for jumping into a flooded creek was to rescue her drowning moped. "She loved that thing."

And my personal favorite from 2009, Muffled Explosion:

(10 January 2009, Pennsylvania) An embarrassed and seriously injured 17-year-old initially claimed that an explosive had been planted in his backpack by persons unknown. However, police investigators soon extracted the truth from the feckless teen.

He found an M-80 explosive at his grandmother's house, took it to his room to examine it, and began to repeatedly light and extinguish the fuse. During one of these cycles the fuse would not go out, so he jammed the red cardboard tube between his thighs and covered it with his hand to muffle the explosion. This plan was less successful than he had hoped. Commonly thought to be a quarter stick of dynamite, M80's (according to pyrouniverse.com) actually contain flash powder rather than TNT, and only 1/50 the amount--just under 3 grams. Used by the U.S. Military to simulate grenade explosions, M80's were outlawed in 1966 under the Child Protection Act. They are not safe enough to be detonated by the average man on the average street, let alone by the average 17-year-old. One loud KABOOM! later, our junior pyrotechnics specialist had lost his right hand, right leg, and--very likely--his right to reproduce, earning him a living Darwin Award.

Wow, I'm practically speechless. The thought process of this guy was to put a stick of dynamite between his legs to muffle the sound? I suppose that sounds reasonable except for the fact that it's dynamite between your legs! I'd like to send him a thank you, as he has proved that he should NOT be having children, and now he can't. Unfortunately I can't say the same to his parents for producing a child and not teaching him that dynamite between your legs is a bad idea. Over the coming weeks we will continue to look at past Darwin Awards, in anticipation for the 2010 awards. Somehow with these people removed from the gene pool, the stories keep rolling in, thus proving that stupidity finds a way.

Until next time,

Zozo and Leggy J

"Just think how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are even stupider!" - George Carlin