The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design

by Wendy Northcutt

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  HONORABLE MENTION: SERBIAN TSUNAMI

  Unconfirmed by Darwin

  26 DECEMBER 2004, SERBIA

  Lucas, thirty, is the only known Serbian victim of the giant tsunami that devastated countries around the Indian Ocean. And he was at home in Serbia at the time. He blames television for the tragedy.

  He was so shocked when he saw the tsunami footage on TV that he jumped out his apartment window. As he fell from the second floor, it occurred to him that the tsunami was not actually a threat to southern Serbia, which is separated by an entire continent from the Indian Ocean. But it was too late to avoid impact: He suffered two broken legs and a damaged spine.

  Recovering later from his tsunami injuries, Lucas threatened to sue the local television station for announcing that “the tsunami is coming our way,” and people should “immediately evacuate.” A spokesperson for the television station said Lucas must have misunderstood the reporter’s words.

  Reference: 24ur.com

  HONORABLE MENTION: HAMMER HEAD

  Confirmed by Darwin

  5 MARCH 2004, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA

  The construction trades have been revolutionized by new tools that are little short of miraculous. Take the nail gun. Operating on compressed air, it turns the tedious task of nailing into a simple point-and-click operation. It also makes possible a new way to injure yourself, one hitherto unknown: hammering a nail into your brain.

  Stud, a thirty-three-year-old bricklayer, had just finished using a nail gun to install wall paneling at home. After the safety-minded man had turned off the compressor and removed the nail cartridge, he downed a few beers with his mates while they joked “about construction site accidents, and taking your eye out with a nail gun.” For dramatic effect, Stud pointed his nail gun at his head and pulled the trigger. His mates noted a small red dot on his skin.

  Stud figured the firing pin had simply glanced off his skull, powered by a leftover charge of compressed air. In fact, he had fired a 3.2-centimeter nail into his brain. He started to feel lightheaded, but didn’t feel much pain—due, perhaps, to the anesthetic effect of beer. Nevertheless, his son insisted on calling an ambulance.

  When he arrived at the hospital the pain had become worse, so Stud asked the nurses for “a pair of pliers to pull it out myself.” Instead, a neurosurgeon and a team of specialists spent four hours sawing through part of his skull and carefully removing the nail. Stud was expected to make a full recovery. “Luckily it lodged in the motor area of the brain and not a more critical area,” said the doctor.

  “I did a very stupid thing,” said Stud. If the nail had been a centimeter deeper, he likely would have suffered permanent brain damage, or paralysis.

  Reference: news.com.au, ananova.com, Occupational Health & Safety Daily News, Reuters

  HONORABLE MENTION: OOPS, DID IT AGAIN

  Confirmed by Darwin

  31 JULY 2005, DARWIN, AUSTRALIA

  A thirty-year-old resident of this aptly named town of sixty thousand, nestled in the Northern Territories on the Sea of Timor, just wanted to go home. But he was thwarted by two circumstances. First, he lived in an upper-level unit in a high-rise apartment building, and second, he had locked his keys in the apartment.

  It was four A.M. Some people do their best thinking in the wee hours of the morning, but our protagonist was not one of them. He concluded that his best course of action was to scale the outside of the building. He managed to climb a short distance before he slipped.

  Luckily, a parked car was beneath him to cushion the fall. He pulled himself off the shattered windshield and, unwilling to give up after one small setback, set out again to scale the wall. This time he reached the third floor before he slipped.

  He was less fortunate than before, because he landed on his head, but also more fortunate, because this knocked him unconscious and saved him from a third attempt. He survived the fall, and was taken to Royal Darwin Hospital for treatment.

  Lest outsiders get the wrong idea of Darwin, Australia, we include a comment from a sergeant on the Darwin police force: “It doesn’t happen every day,” he said.

  Reference: The Australian, Gold Coast Bulletin

  HONORABLE MENTION: WHITE RUSSIANS

  Confirmed by Darwin

  11 JUNE 2004, SIBERIA, RUSSIA

  Khabarovsk is as far east as you can get in Siberia without falling into the Sea of Japan. It’s home to military installations that conducted top-secret operations during the Cold War.

  A few soldiers were poking around in the dump at their base and found a can full of a white powdery substance. At least twenty-five servicemen began using the handy substance, adding it to their tobacco when they rolled cigarettes, dusting it on their sweaty feet, and even snorting it. Within a short time, many of them became mysteriously ill and their hair began falling out.

  Tests showed that the alluring white powder was thallium, an element once used as rat poison, but found to be so toxic that it is banned in the United States and several other countries. Extensive thallium exposure can cause liver and kidney damage, and organ failure.

  Several soldiers were airlifted in serious condition to the St. Petersburg Academy of Military Medicine. They may not have earned a medal for their creative recycling efforts, but they did earn an Honorable Mention from the Darwin Awards.

  Reference: BBC News, Verdens Gang

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  More about Thallium:

  www.DarwinAwards.com/book/thallium.html

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  2003 PERSONAL ACCOUNT: ICARUS

  Confirmed by Darwin

  1911, FRANCE

  “For sale cheap: one parachute used once, never opened.”

  I have a picture of someone who may be my relative, called Franz Reichelt. He is dressed in what looks like a huge black overcoat, and the caption reads, “Monsieur Franz Reichelt with his early parachute—an outstanding example of the way in which early aviators were as spectacular in their failures as in their successes.

  “Reichelt was an Austrian tailor who sought to combine his interests by creating a garment to serve as both an overcoat and a parachute. In 1911, he decided to test his invention. Having told the authorities that he wanted to make a ‘dummy’ drop, at the last minute he strapped himself in, and with sublime confidence stepped from a platform off the Eiffel Tower, and fell to his death.”

  Reference: Personal Account; clipping of an unknown origin.

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  See a picture of Franz’s overcoat!

  www.DarwinAwards.com/book/icarus.html

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  PERSONAL ACCOUNT: HOT HOT CHOCOLATE

  1997, ENGLAND

  Unfortunately, I cannot confirm whether the following individual’s ability to procreate was permanently impaired after this incident, but it certainly was for a while….

  I was chatting with a tradesman’s apprentice whose boss was on a four-week leave of absence, claiming to have pulled a muscle in his leg. His customers complained mightily, as a backlog was piling up.

  My friend—who shall, like his boss, remain nameless to protect his privacy—informed me of the real reason his boss was off work, a truth that he would not admit to his customers.

  He had arranged a romantic weekend with his girlfriend, and had decided to spice up the evening with chocolate body paint. The instructions on the jar say to warm it in the microwave for a few seconds, but he misread the directions and microwaved it on high for two minutes.

  You know how a mother tests baby milk on the back of her hand, to make sure it’s not too hot? He didn’t. He proceeded to pour the very hot chocolate onto his privates without realizing, until it made contact, exactly how hot it was. He suffered nasty burns, which gave him a John Wayne walk for weeks, and almost certainly put him out of sexual action for longer than that!

  Reference: Personal Account

  PERSONAL ACCOUNT: THE BIGGER THE BETTER

  SEPTEMBER 2003, FLORIDA

  A young man came into
the emergency room complaining of scrotal pain. The triage nurse sent him to a waiting area, where his girlfriend held his hand lovingly and tried to comfort him. Two hours later he was called into an examination room. He insisted that his girlfriend wait outside. The male nurse who examined him saw that his scrotum had swollen to the size of a basketball, hanging down to his mid-thigh.

  The nurse asked the young man how this had happened. After much hesitation, he finally confided that he attempted to make his scrotum appear larger to impress his girlfriend, who had remarked that he did not have “big balls” like her last boyfriend. He bought a kit online, and injected 500 cc of normal saline into his scrotum with an IV needle.

  This self-improvement effort had caused a severe case of cellulitis, which required large doses of IV antibiotics and a three-day hospital stay. The doctor told him that the swelling had put tremendous pressure on his testes, and he might be sterile because of it.

  He tried to hide his affliction from his girlfriend as he was moved upstairs to his room. The male nurse wasn’t sure whether the young man had managed to impress her, but he had certainly proved to the ER staff that he had big balls.

  Reference: Personal Account

  PERSONAL ACCOUNT: CAPTAIN MAGNETO

  SUMMER 2003, CANADA

  During my days in the Canadian Air Force I worked at the gliding school instructing cadets. A magneto uses magnets to produce a powerful high-voltage electric current to fire the starters of an aircraft engine. One night we officers had a private competition to see who could hold onto the four leads of a magneto the longest. One by one we all dropped out, except for “Captain Magneto.”

  We pooled our money and came up with a bet, and the debonair Captain Magneto took the bet. He attached all four leads to his left testicle. Then we fired up the magneto. As you can imagine, Captain Magneto dropped like a sack of potatoes.

  Nobody was able to assist him because we were all laughing too damn hard to breathe, let alone move. To add insult to injury, Mrs. Magneto (his wife) chose this very moment to walk in. She took one look at her husband, and instead of comforting him, started bitching him out. “What’s wrong with you,” she yelled, “I want kids someday!”

  In time Captain Magneto was able to stand without screaming, but he probably won’t be playing with magnetos anytime soon.

  Reference: Personal Account

  PERSONAL ACCOUNT: HUMAN PAPER TOWEL

  APRIL 2003

  Our office has a paper-towel dispenser in the kitchen. It holds a roll of blue paper towels, and towels are pulled from the center of the roll through a hole in the bottom of the dispenser. It is also refilled from the bottom. Press a catch and the base swings open, then a roll is shoved in, and the base is closed again. To prevent the roll from falling out before the base is closed, the dispenser is fitted with a “non-return device”—a set of plastic flaps that hinge up but not down.

  Bill was bored. Computer programming wasn’t sufficient exercise for his vivid imagination. He wandered into the kitchen to make some tea, and as he waited for the kettle to boil, his eye fell upon the towel dispenser. The cleaners had failed to refill it and it was empty, with its base hanging open.

  Terminally bored, Bill felt a sudden urge to see what it looked like from the inside.

  To his delight, his head fitted into the dispenser fairly well. He was not a particularly tall man, and the unit was mounted high on the wall, so he stood high on his tiptoes for a better view. That was just the right height. The non-return device “non-returned” right under his chin!

  How long can one stand on one’s tiptoes? Not very long, according to Bill’s colleagues, who were attracted by the thrashing, choking noises coming from the kitchen. They found Bill dangling by the throat from a paper towel dispenser!

  Fortunately, they were able to release him without permanent damage. It was quite entertaining to watch. I do wonder, however, what an inquest would have made of the situation if he had strangled himself.

  And I wish I’d had a camera.

  Reference: Personal Account

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  The perpetrator says, “OK, it was a daft idea, but hey, at least I know what the interior looks like. It was worth it.”

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  READER COMMENT:

  “I’ll stick to photocopying my bum at work.”

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  PERSONAL ACCOUNT: JUICE ME UP!

  2005, FLORIDA

  My cousin is a paramedic who related the following story to me. “Sparky” is a twenty-eight-year-old brand-spanking-new paramedic student. Today was his first day in the medic lab, and he marked this occasion by taking the defibrillator paddles, placing them on his chest and shouting, “Juice me up!”

  Ding Dong Paramedic Student number two took him at his word, charging up the paddles and shocking Sparky at 360 joules. Sparky took all of six steps before collapsing and going into full cardiac arrest. His fellow classmates began CPR until the real paramedics arrived three minutes later. They defibrillated Sparky once again at 360 J, converting him into a normal sinus rhythm and saving his life. He was intubated, given one round of epi [epinephrin] and brought as a post-code to the emergency room where I work. With the hopes that Sparky did not sustain any brain damage from hypoxia, or ischemia to his heart, he should have a full recovery. I worked on Sparky for four hours tonight, eventually taking him to intensive care just before I left.

  Sparky currently is a volunteer firefighter with aspirations of being hired as a paramedic/firefighter. In true EMS spirit, he has been given the new nicknames AC/DC and Joules, although his career in EMS is uncertain. He broke two golden rules:

  1) If you don’t know what it is, don’t touch it.

  2) If you know what it is, don’t kill anyone with it.

  The student that charged the defibrillator stayed after class to write, “I will not electrocute my classmates” one hundred times on the board.

  Thank God for paramedics. And God, please protect children, fools, and paramedic students.

  Reference: Personal Account

  The End of the Universe

  There’s something seriously wrong with the universe!

  To end the book, let us turn from the demise of the individual to the demise of the entire universe. Will it be Heat Death, the Big Crunch, or the Big Rip?

  Stephen Darksyde, Science Writer

  Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, a young star was paying the price for a life led too fast and too furious. The mighty sun had ripped through her precious store of hydrogen and briefly worked through the heavier elements until her nuclear furnace went dry; then she blew her starry guts out. The light of her destruction, now part funeral pyre and part grave marker, would thread its way past stellar nurseries and gaudy nebulae for over a hundred thousand years, until a small portion fell on the alien shores of a distant, blue-green planet circling a modest yellow star. There it would come to the attention of a recently evolved denizen that walked on two legs, known by the name of Colin Henshaw.

  Prior to the day that violent supernova appeared in the sky, many mysteries of space and time were wrapped up in a pretty box called the Hot Inflationary Big Bang Model. The Big Bang explained why our cosmos is expanding; the Hot Inflationary Model covered how ripples of matter and energy arose in the infant universe to form the first galaxies and stars.

  The looming question remaining in cosmology was how fast the universe is expanding, and whether it will end in fire or ice. If the mass of the universe is below a critical magnitude, it will keep expanding forever, and our cosmos will end in Heat Death: a perpetual state of utter black emptiness and cold. The background temperature will gradually approach absolute zero and such will be the fate of the cosmos to the grim end of time. If the mass of the universe is above that critical magnitude, one day it will stop expanding and slowly begin to contract. As the universe collapses, it will grow hotter and denser until time itself ends, and everything is contained in a single point kno
wn as a singularity: the Big Crunch. Both pictures are simple and compelling—and, as it turns out, wrong.

  In the 1980s, cosmologists measured the universe’s rate of expansion to a higher degree of accuracy than ever before. When they extrapolated the rate backward in time they ran into one hell of a paradox: The universe was younger than the oldest stars within it! It would be another decade before science would began to unravel this unwelcome twist. To understand how astronomers eventually made the biggest discovery since the Big Bang itself, let’s return to that supernova.

  On a balmy South African evening in 1987, our amateur astronomer noticed a tiny brilliant point in the Large Magellanic Cloud; one of two puffs of stars hanging high above the blazing disk of our own Milky Way galaxy. It hadn’t been there before. He called up a few observatories and asked them to check it out, certain that the professionals were already aware of the oddity. In that, he was wrong. Within hours of his report, though, every major observatory on Earth locked onto that region in the sky, to witness one of the most beautiful and destructive shows nature can put on. Supernova 1987A had arrived, the nearest to earth in a millennium.