Darwin awards are given to those people who did the gene pool a favor by dying during the year.
1999 DARWIN AWARD Nominations
GRAVITY KILLS... A 22-year-old Reston man was found dead yesterday after he tried to use octopus straps (the stretchy little ropes with hooks on each end) to bungee jump off a 70-foot railroad trestle, police said. Fairfax County (Virginia) police said Eric A. Barcia, a fast-food worker, taped a bunch of these straps together, wrapped an end around one foot, anchored the other end to the trestle at Lake Accotink Park, jumped... and hit the pavement. Warren Carmichael, a police spokesman, said investigators think Barcia was alone because his car was found nearby. "The length of the cord that he had assembled was greater than the distance between the trestle and the ground,"
Carmichael said. Police say the apparent cause of death was "major trauma." An autopsy is scheduled for later in the week.
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LAUNCHED ON THE FOURTH OF JULY ... Three young men in Oklahoma were enjoying the coming forth of July holiday and wanted to apparently test fire some fireworks. Their only real problem was that their launch pad and seating arrangements were atop a several-hundred-thousand-gallon fuel distillation storage tank. Oddly enough, some fumes were ignited, producing a fireball seen for miles and miles. They were launched, no doubt, countless thousands of feet into the air and were found dead 250 yards from their respective seats.
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DON'T ASK GOD TO PROVE HIMSELF, HE JUST MIGHT... A lawyer and two of his buddies were fishing on Caddo Lake in Texas. A lightning storm hit the lake and most of the fisherman immediately headed for the shore. But not our friend the lawyer. He was alone on the rear of his aluminum bass boat and his buddies were in the front. This gentleman stood up, spread his arms wide (crucifixion style) and shouted: "HERE I AM LORD, LET ME HAVE IT!" Needless to say, God delivered. (Well, wouldn't you?) The other two passengers on the boat survived.
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CATCH!... A man in Alabama died from rattlesnake bites. Big deal, you may say, but there's a twist here that makes him a Darwin Award candidate. It seems he and a friend were playing "catch" with a rattlesnake. You can guess what happened from here. The friend (a future Darwin Award candidate) was hospitalized.
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THEY SAY THOSE THINGS WILL KILL YOU . . . Not much was given to me on this unlucky fellow, but he qualifies nonetheless. You see, there was a gentleman from Korea who was killed by his cell phone, more or less. He was doing the usual "walking and talking" when he walked into a tree and managed somehow to break his neck. Keep that in mind the next time you decide to drive and dial at the same time.
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GIMME A LIGHT!... Several years ago, in a west Texas town, employees in a medium-sized warehouse noticed the smell of a gas leak. Sensibly, management evacuated the building, extinguishing all potential sources of ignition - lights, power, etc. After the building had been evacuated, two technicians from the gas company were dispatched. Upon entering the building, they found they had difficulty navigating in the dark. To their frustration, none of the lights worked. Witnesses later described the vision of one of the technicians reaching into his pocket, and retrieving an object that resembled a lighter. Upon operation of the lighter-like object, the gas in the warehouse exploded, sending pieces of it up to three miles away. Nothing was found of the technicians, but the lighter was virtually untouched by the explosion. The technician that was suspected of causing the explosion had never been thought of as "bright" by his peers.
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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.
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AP) LOS ANGELES - Police officials would not release the name of a Pacoima man who was found dead yesterday after responding to complaints from neighbors that a bad smell was coming from his apartment. Upon entering the apartment, officers were surprised to see that every square inch of the apartment, including appliances and even the inside of the toilet, were covered with pornographic images cut from magazines. "The visual effect was very unsettling," said Officer Hradj of the Pacoima Police. "Because everything looked the same, you could not tell where one wall ended and a doorway began." The surprises did not end there, however. Police described the man as having "concocted a wire frame around his head" upon which he had taped various pornographic images, apparently so he could freely move about his apartment without ever losing his close-up view of nude bodies. Small slits had been cut into the paper so he could find his way, but according to Hradj, "He had almost no peripheral vision. He could barely see a thing." The man was found nude with this wire frame entangled in a hanging lamp. "We think he had been dusting," said another police officer, "because a feather duster was lying nearby, and his head gear had somehow become caught in the lamp, which was chained to the ceiling." The man allegedly choked to death trying to extricate himself from his predicament. According to his apartment manager, the white male in his mid-30's never left his apartment, and had food delivered weekly. Funeral services are planned for next week. His next of kin requested that his name be withheld.
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A young Inuit man, searching for a way of getting drunk cheaply because he had no money to buy alcohol, mixed gasoline with milk. Not surprisingly, this concoction made him ill, and he vomited into the fireplace in his house. The resulting explosion and fire burned his house down, killing both him and his sister.
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A 27 year-old French woman lost control over her car on a highway near Marseilles and crashed into a tree, seriously injuring her passenger and killing her. As a commonplace road accident, this would not have qualified for a Darwin nomination were it not for the fact that the driver's attention had been distracted by her Tamagotchi keyring, which had started urgently beeping for food as she drove along. In attempting to press the correct buttons to save the Tamagotchi's life, the woman lost the control and hit the tree causing a severe head trauma.
