The Darwin Awards Countdown to Extinction (6 page)

“We have more degrees, but less sense; more knowledge but less judgment.”

—the Dalai Lama

 

 

This weekend was the final straw. Being an extremely cost-conscious person, Dad decided to put half a can of varnish in the toaster oven to liquefy it, as this was the
cheapest
approach. You guessed it—the stuff caught fire! I found him in front of the flaming oven contemplating grabbing the can with his bare hands. Two-foot flames were shooting out of it, causing me to utter a line spoken far too many times in our home:

 

 

Father’s attempts at Darwin fame have included

He may not yet have used up nine lives, but my father, the PhD, appears to have a running start on Darwin infamy.

 

Reference: Anonymous daughter

 

“Working with PhDs, I’m completely
not
surprised by this . . .” “I have always said, the more degrees, the dumber.”

 

 

 

My father-in-law tinkers and most often fixes things. I have seen him take apart toasters, motors, electronics, and power washers. He often has several projects on the go. One day he came home with a neighbor’s broken microwave and disappeared into his workshop to suss out the problem.

A while later I heard weird noises coming from the workshop, and peeked in. The microwave was now working fine but its front door was missing. The machine was running, and he had his head tucked inside the oven!

I ran in and pulled the plug.

He did not take himself out of the gene pool (not then) but the microwaves may have increased the odds of cancer: A few years later he developed a brain tumor. It was successfully removed and he still tinkers today, but we keep a closer eye on him.

 

 

Reference: Anonymous son-in-law

 

 

In the mid-eighties my father sailed on the research ship
Regina Maris
to study whales in Greenland. One night he noticed there were a lot of icebergs floating by the boat. Icebergs!

After drinking several beers too many with a friend, he and the friend decided to do something stupid. A quick hop onto an iceberg proved that they could stand on it. So my dad decided to hop from iceberg to iceberg with his friend until they reached the nearest village two miles away. Hop after hop, they made their way across the ice floe. As the lights of the village and the shoreline grew nearer, they grew colder and began to pick up the pace. Alas, in their hurry, they accidentally hopped together onto one small iceberg. It broke under their combined weight, plunging them into the icy salt water where they quickly sobered up.

After thrashing about in the ch-ch-chilly water for several interminable minutes, they managed to climb out onto another iceberg, and carefully hopped the rest of the way to shore. The men limped into the village, where they were admitted to the hospital. Treated for hypothermia and a touch of frostbite and released little worse for the wear, to this day my dad never goes into the ocean

 

Reference: Anonymous son

 

 

MID-1950 s , about their youth and shared a rather Darwinian story. In their twenties, they succeeded in assembling one great car out of three junkers. After they accomplished this, they had enough parts leftover to make a second working car—but only barely. This car was missing most of its floorboards, so they could see the ground flash past while driving. They called this a feature rather than a flaw, and decided to have fun with it.

In the fifties, high-powered explosives were still easy to acquire. So, with quarter sticks of dynamite at hand, my future father and his brother drove around throwing dynamite through the gaps in the floorboards, and basically scaring the daylights out of people in cars behind them. THIS WAS FUN! They even shortened the fuses to make sure that the sticks would “safely” explode before the car behind them drove over them.

When I heard this story, my first response was, “Weren’t you concerned about the gas tank below you?” To my amazement they both looked rather surprised, exchanged glances, and said, “We never thought of that!” My grandfather just laughed and walked out of the room.

 

Reference: Anonymous son

 

 

1978, INDIANA | My friend’s father, Mo
²
, 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. Mo, 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 twelve gallons of gasoline from the tank.

In the process of disconnecting the fuel line from the tank, gasoline spilled all over Mo, soaking his polyester shirt and flooding the floor of the garage. Mo then used several five-gallon buckets to catch the 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.

Mo continued to lie on the garage floor, in a pool of gasoline under the car.

While we were gulping down fresh air, the water heater, located ten feet from gasoline-soaked Mo, kicked on. Ordinarily this would not be a problem because gasoline fumes are heavy, and the universal building code requires gas-fired tanks to be installed eighteen inches off the floor to prevent accidental combustion But the circumstances were not ordinary.