Darwin Award Possibilities

Carole sent these along this morning.  She didn't intend anything but  a giggle,  however I see future 

Darwin Award possibilities.  Take a look;

My daughter and I went through the McDonald's driveway window and I gave the cashier a $5 bill.  Our total was $4.25, so I also handed her 25c.  She said, 'you gave me too much money.' I said, 'Yes I know, but this way you can just give me a dollar coin back.'  She sighed and went to get the manager who asked me to repeat my request.  I did so, and he handed me back the 25c, and said 'We're sorry but we don’t do that kind of thing.'  The cashier then proceeded to give me back 75 cents in change.  Do not confuse the people at MacD's.

We had to have the garage door repaired.  The repairman told us that one of our problems was that we did not have a 'large' enough motor on the opener.  I thought for a minute, and said that we had the largest one made at that time, a 1/2 horsepower.  He shook his head and said, 'You need a 1/4 horsepower.'   I responded that 1/2 was larger than 1/4 and he said, 'NOOO, it's not. Four is larger than two.'  We haven't used that repairman since...

I live in a semi rural area.  We recently had a new neighbor call the local city council office to request the removal of the DEAR CROSSING sign on our road.  The reason: 'Too many dears are being hit by cars out here! I don't think this is a good place for them to be crossing anymore.' 

IDIOT SIGHTING IN FOOD SERVICE.

My daughter went to a Mexican fast food and ordered a taco.
She asked the person behind the counter for 'minimal lettuce.'
He said he was sorry, but they only had iceberg lettuce.

I was at the airport, checking in at the gate when an airport employee asked,  'Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge?'  To which I replied, 'If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?'  He smiled knowingly and nodded, 'That's why we ask.'

The pedestrian light on the corner beeps when it's safe to cross the street.  I was crossing with an 'intellectually challenged' co-worker of mine.  She asked if I knew what the beeper was for.
I explained that it signals blind people when the light is red.  Appalled, she responded, 'what on earth are blind people doing driving?!'  She is a government employee.....

When my husband and I arrived at a car dealership to pick up our car after a service, we were told the keys had been locked in it.  We went to the service department and found a mechanic working feverishly to unlock the driver’s side door.  As I watched from the passenger side, I instinctively tried the door handle and discovered that it was unlocked.  ‘Hey,' I announced to the technician, 'its open!'  His reply, 'I know. I already did that side.'

STAY ALERT!
 

They walk among us, they breed, and they vote…....

Two Second Shorts of Animated Space Death

"Death in Space" is a collection of 2 second scenes depicting the many ways to meet an untimely death in outer space.

kind of like a tongue in cheek Darwin in space Award.

Death in Space from Thomas Lucas on Vimeo.

Some Possible Darwin Award Nomination

A friend knows just how much I like the Darwins so here are some folks that should be nominated.

 For those who are not familiar with the Darwins, the awards are tongue in cheek lists of people that have strengthened the gene-pool by removing their own genes in a most spectacularly stupid fashion.

Like she texted:

Some of these people are probably not with us anymore...

    

20 Year Study of the Darwin Award

Now for those of you that do not recall what the Darwin Awards are all about:  The Darwin Award is given posthumously for a stunningly stupid act or an act so stupid that it brings about the demise of the performer.  Or as Time online puts it so elegantly:  Every year, Darwin Awards are symbolically given to people who manage to die in such an extraordinarily idiotic manner that they ensure the long-term survival of the human species, by removing one idiot from the gene pool.

That being said, a twenty year study of the awards and recipients showed by far that males performed the bulk of award winning performances while the merest fraction went to women.

I thought it would be fun to pass on some of the winning posts as provided by the British Medical Journal.

The award study defined idiotic risks as "senseless... where the apparent payoff is negligible or non-existent, and the outcome is often extremely negative and often final.

The study's authors took the 20 year compilation and discarded the truly adventurous or professional risk takers which  still left them with  318 awards: 282 given to men, and 36 to women.

The Darwin is unlikely to be awarded to individuals who shoot themselves in the head while demonstrating that a gun is unloaded. This occurs too often and is classed as an accident.  In contrast, candidates shooting themselves in the head to demonstrate that a gun is loaded may be eligible for a Darwin Award -- such as the man who shot himself in the head with a "spy pen" weapon to show his friend that it was real."

Another example of a Darwin winner includes the terrorist who didn't put enough postage on his package when sending a mail bomb; it was returned to him, and he promptly opened it and perished. Or the man who attached a shopping cart to the end of a train car, which dragged him to his death.  Or the man from South Carolina who had disguised himself by spray painting his face gold during an armed robbery, and died from the toxic paint fumes.

Another Darwin Award Nomination...

Every now and then I hear of a person who by some odd twist of fate have managed to exclude themselves from being a Darwin Award alumni.  It is clear however that souls are neither of a higher order or extremely lucky, no, far from it.  Often these should have been misanthropes one head bang away from compete idiocy, case in point, let me introduce Portsmouth  NH resident Scott Pipher,  who reported that an Old Orchard Beach prostitute of shorting him 10 minutes.( Yes, that OOB.  Maine has had its share lately of prostitute drama, and yes I know Mr. Strong)

The police blotter said Pipher called police on March 25 and complained that the woman he hired did “not give him his money's worth” by cutting their time together by ten minutes.

As comical as that sounds, it gets better when Pipher was arrested a short time later for engaging in prostitution!  Oh it gets better!

It would seem that there is an internet database for use by "escorts" which is kind of a bad boy or black list of clients.  According to the article Pipher:

• is described as being “notorious for booking out-calls and then not answering his door or phone

Sadly Pipher is not completely alone in this idiotic behavior.  It seems that police had become familiar with his misdeeds.  According to a police report, a woman called and complained that Pipher had reserved her services for a private dance, but he refused to answer the door when she arrived.  

From the Seacoast Online article:  

• The dancer claimed it was a theft of her services, but police Capt. Mike Schwartz countered it wasn't a theft because she never danced

You can not make this stuff up! The future of the human race is bleak indeed if these brain-trusts are the future!

If you doubt me at all, check out the Seacoast Online article here

So I humbly nominate Scott Pipher  for a future Darwin award. 

And Another Darwin Award Hopeful

Atlanta GA. A man was arrested after attempting to rob a local bank. The suspect exited the bank after failing to obtain any funds. The suspect re-entered the bank when he discovered that he didn't have enough money to cover the fee of the taxi he hired to take him to and from the robbery. Meanwhile, the cabbie, fearing the suspect may attempt to skip on the fair, used her cab to block in the suspect's vehicle, and drew the attention of the local police.

The really strange part of this tale is why the suspect re-entered the bank. Well it seems that the officer contacted by the cabbie, knew nothing of the previous bank robbery and convinced the suspect into going back to the bank for cab fare. Of course he was promptly arrested by other officers who had been call earlier concerning the robbery.

Some WTF Moments....

Long time listener Dan passed me an article from The Boston Herald. In it are detailed some very possible future recipients of future Darwin Awards. Now for you that are not aware of what the Darwin Awards are for... let me enlighten you. To receive a Darwin you must perform an act so utterly stupid that the end result is death and therefor removing your genes from the reproductive pool. Now these folks are nominees in that their acts are Darwin eligible but they have managed to escape death to this point.

Take these examples for instance:
A teen breaks into an Orange Park Fl home only to be instantly arrested. Seems the owner was a member of the police department....

After a knife wielding assailant robs a man in Nightcliff AU, is arrested while trying to swim naked across, as luck would have it, Darwin Harbor. He professed in court not to remember the incident as some unknown being had hijacked his body and was programming him to commit heinous crimes. The article states that mental health professionals are examining him.

There are several other examples like the elderly gent who called 911 because he was suspicious that the car he had seen appeared to be full of terrorist and he was suspicious of their "foreign" plate.....from Canada. Or the Portland OR man who was surprised to see the police at his door on Valentine's Day. It seems witnesses had seen him leaving a parking lot with a naked woman tied up in his back seat. It seems that the couple thought this would be a fun way to celebrate the holiday....

And there are more in the 2/19/12 issue of the Boston Herald....

The Darwin Awards for 2009!

I know, not really Science Fiction, but I really love the Darwin Awards and there was a fake list going around on email, so I thought I would update with the real deal.

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."

2009 runner up Dying to Go (12 April 2008, Florida) Traffic was moving slowly on southbound I-95. Shawn M. had recently left a Pompano Beach bar, and now he was stuck in traffic. As the saying goes, you don't buy beer--you just rent it, and Shawn couldn't wait another moment to relieve himself. "I need to take a leak," he told his friends. Traffic was deadlocked, so the waterlogged man climbed out, put his hand on the divider, and jumped over the low concrete wall... only to fall 65 feet to his death. "He probably thought there was a road, but there wasn't," said a Fort Lauderdale police spokesman. The car was idling on an overpass above the railroad lines.

2009 Winner Crushing Debt (26 September 2009, Belgium) The city of Dinant is the backdrop for this rare Double Darwin Award. Two bank robbers attempting to make a sizable 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 bungler'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.

Darwin Award candidate!

Lord knows I love boing boing, and here is a good example. Here was the headline:

Spitting contest participant dies

ahhh yes - funny enough in its own right - but it gets oh so much funnier. Here we go........

A 29-year-old Swis man died in a spitting match with a friend. Apparently, the two pals were up late at a hotel when they decided to see who could spit the greatest distance off the balcony. One of the men took a running start and, but lost his balance and plummeted to the street below.

So, I nominate this brain trust for a posthumous Darwin.