After safely retrieving the bottle, the gentleman in question and another local man proceeded to drink the “wine.” Apparently, neither of them took a clue from the fact that the bottle had been thrown away in a dump, leading to the reasonable conclusion that its contents were undrinkable. This particular vintage was antifreeze. Both men were poisoned, and one died.
Ironically, if the men had actually been drinking wine along with their antifreeze, both might have lived. Ethanol is sometimes used in hospitals to counteract the deadly effects of antifreeze poisoning. Antifreeze is not toxic until the ethylene glycol is converted to oxalic acid, which crystallizes and damages the kidneys. Since the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme is the first step in forming oxalic acid, the reaction is inhibited by administering a dose of ethanol, which competes for the enzyme.
Reference: Radio news report
* * *
More about ethanol as a competitive inhibitor:
www.DarwinAwards.html/book/inhibitor.html
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DARWIN AWARD: FREEWAY DANGLER
Confirmed by Darwin
31 MAY 2005, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
Strength and endurance are two of the most important characteristics that can be passed on to improve the species, so physical challenges between males are frequent. In this case, two drinking buddies found themselves on an overpass forty feet above a busy freeway in downtown Seattle at 2:45 A.M. It turned out to be the perfect place to determine who had more strength and endurance. Whoever could dangle from the overpass the longest would win!
Unfortunately, the winner was too tired from his victory to climb back up, despite help from his thirty-one-year-old friend. The unidentified champion fell smack into the front of a semi barreling down the highway at sixty miles per hour and bounced onto the pavement, where he was hit by a car. The car did not stop. Authorities did not identify the winner of the competition.
Reference: KIRO-TV, Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, AP
DARWIN AWARD: SPY VS. SELF
Confirmed by Darwin
28 MAY 2004, CURSI, ITALY
“Hold my beer and watch this!”
Fabio, twenty-eight, left the family ostrich business for a new career as a truck driver. But his interests were more eclectic than the average ostrich-farming truck driver. Relaxing one evening with friends at a pub, Fabio shifted the conversation to his new interest in spy gadgets. He pulled an ordinary-looking pen out of his pocket and explained that it was actually a single-shot pistol. To demonstrate, he pointed it at his head and clicked the button. The cleverly disguised gadget worked perfectly, sending a fatefully fatal .22-caliber bullet into Fabio’s left occipital lobe.
Reference: La Repubblica, La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno
DARWIN AWARD: FAILED FRAME-UP
Confirmed by Darwin
19 MARCH 2005, MICHIGAN
“Unusual” and “complicated” is how the Missaukee County sheriff described the mysterious death of nineteen-year-old Christopher.
After an evening spent imbibing large quantities of alcohol, Christopher noticed a shortage in his liquor supply that could not be attributed to his own depredations. He concluded that his neighbor had stolen a bottle of booze! He menaced the neighbor with a knife, to no avail, whereupon he retired to his own apartment to brood about revenge.
Finally he figured out the perfect way to get back at that conniving bottle-thief: Christopher would stab himself and blame the neighbor!
A witness saw Christopher enter the bathroom as he called 911. He calmly informed the dispatcher that his neighbor had stabbed him. Witnesses said he looked fine when he emerged from the bathroom, but a moment later gouts of blood spewed from his chest. Suddenly he began screaming, begging for help. The dispatcher heard a woman shout, “Why did you do this?” He collapsed at the door of his apartment.
Deputies arrived quickly, but Christopher had already bled to death from self-inflicted stab wounds to his chest. An autopsy determined that he had stabbed himself twice.
The first wound apparently didn’t look dangerous enough, so he tried again. The second time, the knife plunged into his left ventricle. This wound was plenty dangerous: He had only two minutes to live.
Christopher died in vain. His deathbed accusation of his neighbor failed, as a witness confirmed that the neighbor was not in the apartment. All Christopher got for revenge was an accidental death sentence.
Reference: Cadillac News
DARWIN AWARD: AIM TO WIN
Confirmed by Darwin
21 FEBRUARY 2004, OTTAWA, CANADA
Ameer, a second-year engineering student at Carleton University, was celebrating his twentieth birthday with friends in his eleventh-floor apartment when they embarked on a spitting contest. His two friends had already made their marks. Ameer thought he could use his engineering skills to improve his performance. A quick mental calculation of trajectory, projectile velocity, and wind speed indicated that winning required more than a simple “stand and spit” technique. Ameer took a running start, flew over the balcony railing, and plunged to his death.
“It was purely accidental,” said Ottawa police. “Momentum carried him beyond.” The building’s security guard heard the thud. “He was one of the smartest guys I ever met in my life. He had a maturity beyond his age.”
Spitting contest deaths are becoming a trend. In 1999, a twenty-five-year-old soldier in Alabama won the first Darwin Award in this category, using the same technique and achieving the same result from a three-story vantage point. Twenty-three-year-old Bartosz of Illinois was nominated for falling twenty feet onto his head in December 2005. Bartosz is remarkable for having fallen over an apartment railing without a running start. But Ameer clearly trumps his competitors with his eleven-story fall.
Perhaps the three have reunited in the afterlife, arm in arm, sailing through the air, their projectiles suspended in front of them like bullets in the Matrix movies.
Reference: Ottawa Sun, La Presse
DARWIN AWARD: DAMNED IF YOU DO…
Confirmed by Darwin
6 SEPTEMBER 2004, ROMANIA
A Pitesti man with a metal ring stuck on his penis was being sought by doctors, after he fled the hospital consumed by panic.
The unidentified forty-two-year-old said he put the ring on his penis after losing a bet during a drinking game at a pub. He was subsequently unable to remove the ring. Embarrassment kept him from seeking immediate medical help, but after two days, unbearable pain overcame unbearable shame, and he took his smelly and discolored member in for treatment.
Doctors told him the bad news. Gangrene had set in, and his life was in danger. The blood supply had been cut off for too long, and there was nothing they could do but remove his penis, so that the necrosis did not spread to the rest of his body.
The manhunt was ongoing. “There is no way he can escape going under the knife,” said a doctor. “He must come back to the hospital and accept this.” The man’s only consolation is a guaranteed Darwin Award, one way or the other!
Reference: Daily Record (U.K.), Ananova
* * *
A reader says, “NOT TRUE! Some of us naturally ‘little guys’ have managed to have a kid or two, with a little creativity and medical intervention. Surgically cutting a tendon over the penis gives an extra inch or more.”
* * *
DARWIN AWARD: KILLER SHADES
Confirmed by Darwin
17 SEPTEMBER 2003, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
Barry Bonds had just made the last out at the bottom of the eighth. At that very moment, Todd had bummed one last beer from a new friend at the San Francisco Giants’ ballpark.
Todd was leaning on the railing of the Arcade port walk, getting to the “bottom eighth” of his beer, when his Maui Jim* designer sunglasses slipped off the top of his head. Down they fell, landing twenty-five feet below, where a helpful bum picked them up and tried to toss them back. But it was too far! Todd called out that he was coming down to get them.
<
br /> Todd had recently relocated to Santa Cruz for the gnarly waves at Mavericks. His wife described him as “a passionate surfer” talented enough to turn pro. Perhaps his sense of physical prowess was his downfall. The agile thirty-eight-year-old considered and rejected the long walk down, in favor of a quicker alternative. He would climb over the railing, jump to a perch on a light sconce five feet below, then drop like Tarzan to the ground, gratefully reclaiming his shades from the bum.
At least, that was the plan. And the first part, climbing the railing, went fine. The second part was more problematic. Todd missed the sconce and “came down like a pancake,” according to a startled observer a few feet from the point of impact. The crowd was shocked into silence. Why would anyone risk his life for a pair of shades?
Todd would have been chagrined to hear the observer’s next words. “They looked cheap,” he said, apologizing, “I don’t know sunglass brands.”
Reference: San Francisco Examiner, San Jose Mercury News, Santa Cruz Sentinal
HONORABLE MENTION: A MEDICAL FIRST AT OKTOBERFEST
Confirmed by Darwin
SEPTEMBER 2002, MUNICH, GERMANY
Three doctors published the following account in a highly respected medical journal. The man in question disqualified himself from a true Darwin Award by being smart enough to go to a hospital and admit what he’d done. The report is quoted directly from the journal, with the addition of bracketed “translations” that clarify the medical jargon.
“A thirty-one-year-old man was admitted to the emergency unit with severe abdominal pain and vomiting for two hours. [He’d been sober enough to notice a problem for the last two hours.] An abdominal radiograph disclosed an intestinal obstruction, and a small bowel follow-through study revealed a filling defect in the right-side jejunum. [His gut was backed up because something was stuck in it.] Persistent exploration of the patient’s history [he really didn’t want to talk about it] disclosed a visit to the Munich Oktoberfest the night before, during which the patient had ingested a condom filled with beer. [No, we don’t know why, either.]
“Upper endoscopy was unsuccessful in removing the condom. [We couldn’t budge it.] Because the condom was localized close to the abdominal wall, it was finally punctated with a long needle under CT control. [We stuck a really big needle in it, and it burst.] Forty milliliters of a yellow clear liquid [we can’t say in print that it was beer, because we were laughing so hard we didn’t think to send it to the lab] were drawn off when the condom slid forward spontaneously. The next morning, the condom was identified in the patient’s stool [a high-quality, leakage-resistant condom, showing that the man was at least attempting to nullify his influence on the gene pool], and the patient was discharged in good condition.”
The authors note, “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on intestinal obstruction caused by ingestion of a condom filled with an alcoholic beverage, and its successful transcutaneous treatment. [Hey, we always wanted to be the first doctors to do something!]”
Reference: American Journal of Gastroenterology, February 2003; 98:512, with “translations” by T. G. Shaw
* * *
Because dissolved CO2outgasses when a beer warms, a condom of cool beer swells after ingestion, and can stop up the plumbing. The swallower may have assumed he was beating a Breathalyzer by delivering the alcohol straight to his stomach. But that won’t work, because the Breathalyzer tests for alcohol that comes from blood gases that exude from the lungs.
* * *
PERSONAL ACCOUNT: POWER OVER PLATE GLASS
2001, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND
During a short spell as a police constable, I came to be involved in a reported “serious incident.” Police were called in to assist a severely injured lad of sixteen who was being rushed to the hospital with a nearly severed foot. The victim said he had been walking away from a nightclub when he and a friend became embroiled in an altercation with an unknown person or persons, resulting in his being thrown through a ten-foot plate-glass shop window. The area was sealed off, large amounts of blood on the footpath photographed and washed away for sanitary reasons, and the owner of the windowless store notified.
On reaching the hospital and sobering up, the victim explained the true story. The somewhat intoxicated young buck had bet his friend that he could smash the shop window. After all, he was a fit footballer with powerful legs. And did I say drunk? To make his point, he stood with his back to the glass and performed a “donkey kick” into the bottom of the window.
Our lad failed to take the following points into consideration: Glass is easier to break if you hit the edge, as the energy can dissipate effectively. And the plate glass in this case was 1.5 centimeters thick. Ten feet of thick plate glass falling straight down weighs a great deal.
Although he lost a lot of blood, the victim did not “kick the bucket” and hence this is only an Honorable Mention, but he did ruin any chance of a football career (though he kept his foot), and given the sexual antics of soccer stars he probably reduced the potential spread of his seed as a result.
I felt so sorry for him that I convinced my boss to authorize a police caution, even though the damage ran to more than £5000!
Heeoor, heeoor, heeoor to have known better!
Reference: Marc Buckingham, Personal Account; Surrey Police
PERSONAL ACCOUNT: THE MAN WITH THE IRON STOMACH
2002, BELGIUM
One night, I partied all night at a discotheque with friends. Afterward, we went to a “bar of the king” that was open day and night. Such bars are known for housing thugs and pirates.
We, two men and two women, were sitting at a table drinking vodka and beer when a big, mean-looking man approached the table and started talking shit. He was so intoxicated that the collection of syllables he pronounced could hardly be classified as a language. The girls were annoyed by his presence and—typically—tried to get rid of him by calling him names.
In response, the man seized an empty beer glass (in Belgium, a beer glass is as thick as a normal jar) and bit into it, breaking off a piece. This behavior is common in men who have unresolved frustration and need to show their courage, so we weren’t impressed. But then the man started chewing the glass, and quickly bit off another chunk, chewing and biting until only the very bottom of the glass remained, which he put back on the table.
We stared at the man as he chewed the pieces, and then heard the glass cracking. Some blood came out of his mouth. He then tried to swallow the glass, choked, and spat blood-soaked pieces onto the table. Then he started gargling blood and fell to his knees.
We were too paralyzed by the event to move, but the bartender ran up to help the man. He tried to remove the remaining glass from the man’s mouth, but the man bit the bartender’s finger. I called an ambulance from my cell phone. I don’t know if the man survived. And I really don’t know why he did it. But remember this: If you have an iron stomach, make sure that your throat is iron, too.
Reference: Personal Account
* * *
READER COMMENT:
“I think he had one jar too many.”
* * *
PERSONAL ACCOUNT: VOLUNTEER FIREMAN
CA. 1978, INDIANA
My friend’s father, Bob, was a volunteer fireman and a home mechanic. He was also a heavy drinker who never seemed to be without booze in his hand. One day I was helping him repair one of their cars. Bob, already well into a six-pack when I arrived, believed that the fuel line was blocked. His solution began with jacking the car up a few feet and draining the twelve gallons of gasoline from the tank.
In the process of disconnecting the fuel line from the tank, gasoline spilled all over Bob, soaking his polyester shirt and flooding the floor of the garage. Bob then used several five-gallon buckets to catch the remaining gasoline that was pouring out of the tank. Although the garage door was open to allow ventilation, the fumes were so thick that my friend and I had to step outside to breathe. Bob continued to lie on the ga
rage floor, in a pool of gasoline under the car.
* * *
The universal building code requires gas-fired hot-water tanks in garages to be at least eighteen inches off the floor, to prevent accidental combustion of gasoline fumes. Since gasoline fumes are heavy and stay near the floor, eighteen inches is considered a safe height. And it would be, under normal circumstances. But the circumstances in this case were not normal.
* * *
At about that time, the water heater, located about ten feet from gasoline-soaked Bob, kicked on. The entire floor went up in flames, and a large fireball came out the garage door toward us. My friend and I dove to the ground to avoid the flames.
The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design Page 11