The Darwin Awards Next Evolution: Chlorinating the Gene Pool (13 page)

Darwin Award: Not a Shred of Sense

Unconfirmed

The ambulance responded to a frantic call concerning a neighbor’s trip through an industrial tree shredder. It seems the individual had decided to prune his own trees rather than hire a professional. Why not? After all, the local shop rented shredders that could make quick work of yard debris, including tree limbs up to eight inches in diameter.

To save time (those fateful words) the neighbor had placed the shredder at the base of a great oak tree, where he could drop branches directly into the hopper. He intended to cut off the top third of the oak, which had been killed by lightning.

With the shredder running wide open, the neighbor climbed his ladder to the first tree branch, stepped off the ladder, slipped—and fell. The paramedics found him very dead, half in and half out of the hopper, one leg shredded to the hip.

Not married, no kids, removed self from the gene pool.

Reference: Eyewitness account of an M.D. who practiced
emergency medicine for thirty years

Darwin Award: Stubbed Out

Confirmed True by Darwin

17 APRIL 2006, ENGLAND

There’s always someone who thinks good advice doesn’t apply to him. For example, if a doctor advises that you are going to be covered with a flammable medical treatment, most people would take this advice on board and not strike a match until the flammable material has been removed.

Philip was in the hospital to treat a skin disease, said treatment consisting of being smeared in paraffin-based cream. Philip was warned that the cream could ignite, so he definitely should NOT smoke. However, Philip, sixty, knew better than his doctor. And he just had to have another cigarette.

Smoking was not permitted on the ward, but Philip took this setback in stride and sneaked out onto a fire escape. Once he was hidden, he lit up…inhaled…and peace descended as he got his nicotine fix. It was only after he finished his cigarette, at the moment he ground out the butt with his heel, that things went downhill.

The paraffin cream had been absorbed by his clothing. As his heel touched the butt, fumes from his pajamas ignited. The resulting inferno “cremated” his skin condition and left first-degree burns on much of his body. Despite excellent treatment he died in intensive care.

Using the Darwin checklist (criteria outlined on Chapter 8):

1. Reproduction—he may already have children, but he won’t have more.
   
2. Excellence—this one I’ll remember!
   
3. Self-selection—he was warned that paraffin and smoking don’t mix.
   
4. Maturity—at sixty he was old enough.
   
5. Veracity—major UK news carriers covered the story.
   

This ticks all the boxes, and though one feels sorry for the family, his death serves as a warning to others. If a doctor tells you not to smoke, there’s a very good reason.

Reference:
The Mirror, Yorkshire Today, The Guardian

Reader Comments:

“Up in Smoke”

“You Light Up My Life”

“Another smoker goes down in flames.”

“He suddenly had this burning desire for a smoke.”

“Dying for a cigarette.”

Darwin Award: Going to Seed

Unconfirmed

1999, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA

Darren was dumb even for a junkie, but what he lacked in IQ he made up in creativity. In the supermarket, he noticed a bag labeled
BIRDSEED
100%
POPPY SEED
. A hundred percent poppy seed equals a hundred percent opium! Figuring he was onto something good, he seized his chance to circumvent the stranglehold of the international drug cartels. He bought a bag of birdseed, boiled it into a thick black paste, and proceeded to inject the paste into his vein.

Nothing happened, so he did it again.

An hour later he was brought unconscious to the emergency room, as sick as it is possible to be. His chest X-ray showed thousands of tiny seedlike objects scattered throughout his lungfields. The working diagnosis was miliary tuberculosis, so called because the TB deposits resemble millet seeds. Little did the medical team realize the X-ray revealed actual seeds!

Only two weeks later, after he recovered from life-threatening septicemia and multiple organ failure, did the true poppy seed story emerge. Darren survived but subsequently died of a garden-variety overdose.

Reference: Eyewitness account by MedicineMan

Darwin Award: Pining Away

Unconfirmed

Rare Double Darwin!

Three hale and hearty young soldiers had finished their basic training. Before heading out to their respective assignments they decided to spend their few days of leave with one’s grandmother, who lived in the town where they had completed basic training. The men descended upon Grandmother, who filled them with home cooking and gave them soft beds to sleep in.

Grandmother had a swing job to make ends meet, so the privates were left alone late into the night. They wondered how they could repay her for her kindness. A plan began to coalesce from their late-night discussions.

Grandmother had three children. To commemorate the birth of each child a pine tree had been planted in the front yard. In the fifty years since the last tree was planted, the pines had grown considerably, and the middle tree now blocked the view from the living-room window. The privates decided they would cut down that tree, letting the sun and the view into the room.

A case of beer went into the planning.

To keep the fifty-foot tree from crushing the house the privates reasoned that they would tie a rope to the top of the tree and pull the rope away from the house as the tree was cut.

The middle pine, the doomed one, was slightly closer to the house than the others. Two privates climbed an end tree, wound a rope through its upper branches, and threw the rope to a private in the middle tree. He tied the rope around the trunk. By this device they could pull the rope from the ground. The middle pine tree would fall away from the house, and the privates were also clear of the path of the falling tree.

Climbing a pine tree is very sappy work, and scrapes and gouges are inflicted by the natural roughness of its bark. But the hale and hearty privates completed the preliminaries without complaint. The middle tree was lassoed and levered by the rope running through the end tree.

So far, so good.

Two privates were situated on the ground, each straining to pull the tree away from Grandmother’s house. The third private revved his thirty-horsepower chainsaw and started to cut. Lo and behold, the tree actually fell away from Grandmother’s house! However…

The rope-pulling privates had wrapped the rope around their waists, not considering that the falling pine weighed several tons. As the middle pine tree fell, both privates were ripped off their feet and smashed through the branches of the end pine tree. At the height of their acceleration they broke through the top branches of the tree and were briefly airborne before being jerked toward the earth when the middle tree hit the ground. The privates entered into Darwin history, either on the way up through the branches or on the way down to the ground.

The event spoke for itself.

Reference: Eyewitness account of the attending physician

Reader Comments:

“Can’t see the forest…”

“Sometimes the bark is worse than a bite.”

“This is what happens when soldiers don’t have officer supervision.”

Darwin Award: Into the Abyss

Unconfirmed

An enterprising lumberman had felled a large tree and needed to haul it up a steep embankment. So he jacked up the rear end of his pickup and swapped one of the rear tires for a bare rim. He attached one end of a rope to the rim and the other end of the rope to the felled tree. He put the pickup into gear, expecting the rim to act as a makeshift rope crank that would pull the tree up the embankment, saving him lots of sweat.

A great idea? Not if you’re reading it here! You see, the tree vastly outweighed the truck. The man was standing with one foot on the ground and the other foot on the accelerator. When he gunned the engine, the tree acted like an anchor and the truck yanked itself backward. The open door rammed into him, and he was swept over the embankment along with the pickup.

When the dust settled, our lumberman had entered the great beyond. But his escapade served as a warning to the next lumberman, who cut up the tree where it lay and carried it off.

Reference: Another brilliant submission from the files of a thirty-year veteran of the ER, who says, “You cannot make this up!”