2009 Darwin Award Winners Announced 208
Greg Lindahl writes "From the woman who jumped in a swollen creek to rescue her drowning moped, to the man who hopped over the divider at the edge of the highway to take a leak, and plunged 65 feet to his death, 2009 was a year both exceptional and unexceptional for Darwin Award-worthy behavior!"
Future winner (Score:4, Funny)
I have, on more than one occasion, been referred to as a future award winner. Given how epically my attempt at a 3-phase mains-powered coilgun failed... I feel they may be right.
At least I'll win something in my life. Even if it takes my life to win it.
You won't win it *inside* your lifetime (Score:2)
At least I'll win something in my life. Even if it takes my life to win it.
Actually, by the award criteria, you won't win a Darwin award in your life but rather just off the far end of it.
(Or, given your dispositions, it might actually be the near end :P)
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"...you won't win a Darwin award in your life but rather just off the far end of it."
Not true. If you lose the ability to procreate before(?) having done so and live you are eligible.
But you are required to do it in an unusual way. Methods that become common are retired from eligibility.
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Blowing your balls off with a railgun qualifies as unusual in my book.
I stand corrected (Score:3)
Not true. If you lose the ability to procreate before(?) having done so and live you are eligible
Thank you for clarifying and correcting me :)
Though I think my original parent is much more likely to die than self-sterilize; at least the imaginary self-caricature personae is...
All Birth Control Users are Darwin Award Winners (Score:2)
A direct quote from this year's Darwin Awards: "Catholic priests take vows of celibacy. Since priests voluntarily remove themselves from the genepool, the entire group earns a mass Darwin Award." Priests aren't all that "unusual," and with respect to evolution they're no different from anybody else who chooses no
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Since you just need to remove yourself from the gene pool, you don't have to lose your life. You could just horribly maim your genitals!
Weak. (Score:5, Insightful)
These are Darwin award worthy?
First off, the rigor. Minor complaint, but it'd be neat if they linked to a police report, or a newspaper article on these incidents.
Second off, the stupid. These are by far not the stupidest deaths I've read about last year. the DAs are getting weak.
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I have to wonder why there's no mention of the Somali pirates who took over that American container ship. I mean, what did they expect was going to happen? There were Americans on that thing!
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Even better, what about the fucking morons who attacked some NATO warships? To be fair to the pirates, some of the ships were French, but still that's pretty retarded.
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RTFA, there are references. If you click on "Original Submission", there are links to the news articles.
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You failed to take into account that stupid people are a renewable resource (and a growth market).
Re:Weak. (Score:5, Funny)
You failed to take into account that stupid people are a renewable resource (and a growth market).
Also, depending on the Darwin Award in question, a biofuel, an industrial lubricant, or a tasty new snack.
Oh my god! (Score:2)
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I have mixed feelings about this (Score:5, Insightful)
We're all just one failed experiment or innocent mistake away from being on the Darwin Awards list.
Sure, that guy who jumped over the barrier to relieve himself should have been more careful. But does that mean we need to celebrate his death?
That priest with the balloons--OK, he should have bailed earlier, or figured out his GPS in advance of his trip. Clearly he made some mistakes. But he was trying to do something for a charitable cause.
Lots of smart people make dumb mistakes; we're all only human. An old saying "There but for grace of God go I" seems to apply in many of these situations.
That DUI woman who drowned in the creek--she's a pathetic sort of person, obviously lacking in common sense. But not knowing the full story (the author speculated and extrapolated an awful lot in this case) I hesitate to condemn her as deserving of the Darwin awards.
All in all it was a mediocre set of awards this year. I've seen better.
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I once got a shock during enclosure maintenance when I touched a secondary supply that wasn't powered off. It was a minor shock, but that's partly because I was wearing insulated boots and had the other hand in my pocket. (i.e. there was no path to ground.)
The kicker is that I had a voltage tester in my pocket but I didn't bother to pull it out that one time.
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"We're all just one failed experiment or innocent mistake away from being on the Darwin Awards list."
Not really. Garden variety stupidity is not supposed to be eligible (killing oneself with a loaded weapon, for instance).
But a drunk driver who drowns after jumping into a flooded creek trying to save their moped. That is a much higher WTF.
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Sure, that guy who jumped over the barrier to relieve himself should have been more careful. But does that mean we need to celebrate his death?
Yes. Yes it does.
Next!
Re:I have mixed feelings about this (Score:4, Insightful)
We're all just one failed experiment or innocent mistake away from being on the Darwin Awards list.
No kidding. Just last weekend I was changing the lightbulb in a lamp. Took the bulb out, and noticed a bit of styrofoam or paper in socket. Thought to myself, "that shouldn't be there, it could be a fire hazard!" and stuck my finger in to fish it out. A sudden tingling/burning/biting sensation clued me in to the fact the lamp was still plugged in, and while I'd rotated the switch a couple of times in the process of realizing the bulb was out, I'd apparently left it in the ON position when I stopped.
So I took my finger out of there, inverted the lamp, and let the styrofoam fall out on its own. No real damage done in that instance, but for a sometimes intelligent person that was a brief moment of serious stupidity.
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Sure, but to get a Darwin award you'd usually need to willfully bypass some safety measure, not merely make a mistake. So if your wife said "honey, that's not safe" and unplugged the lamp, and then you came up with some plan to get her out of the room just so you could plug it back in and electrocute yourself, then maybe. Also, if you inject milk into your scrotum, you've clearly gone beyond "intelligent person but brief moment of serious stupidity".
Slashdotted (Score:4, Funny)
We killed the site. Can they get a Darwin Award for that?
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My thoughts exactly. Darwinawards.com offers simple HTML and images. That's all, no fancy graphics, interactive multimedia or web 2.0 style forums to ring up traffic. Nevertheless, the site has self-destructed due to an 'unprecedented' (most would call it 'obvious') surge in traffic following the announcement of the 2009 winners.
Thank you, darwinawards.com, for removing yourself from the internet pool.
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Re:Slashdotted (Score:4, Informative)
I'll sum it up for you.
A 50 year old female goes out on her moped during flash flood, gets drunk, tries to drive home and gets washed into creek. Cop saves her, but she jumps back in to save moped. Dies.
20-something male has to pee and gets out of car. Jumps over side embankment, only to find out that he's on an overpass elevated 65 feet above the ground. Falls. Dies.
Two bank robbers use way to much dynamite in attempt to rob an ATM. Take out entire building. Die.
Priest does a "Lawn-chair Larry" for charity. Winds change and blow him towards water. Doesn't parachute over dry land even though this is the situation for which he has the chute. When over the water, calls for help. Can't figure out how to use the GPS he brought along. Disappears. Dies.
Is found later.
Overall, pretty weak. Two of them do not belong as they contain members of our species that were likely not going to reproduce anyway. (priest and 50 year old woman)
Re:Slashdotted (Score:5, Insightful)
Priest does a "Lawn-chair Larry" for charity.
You mean "for the church." I'm not sure many would consider raising money to open chapels for truck drivers "charity" (I know I don't).
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"20-something male has to pee and gets out of car. Jumps over side embankment, only to find out that he's on an overpass elevated 65 feet above the ground. Falls. Dies."
How could they possibly know that that was the reason he went over the rail?
Oh wait. twitter. [penny-arcade.com]
These are pretty lame and that means something (Score:2)
It obviously means that people are getting smarter. But they are dying anyway.
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Re:These are pretty lame and that means something (Score:4, Funny)
Last time I checked, Congress still has 535 members.
Notorious history of the "Darwin Awards" (Score:3, Informative)
Funny as it may be... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's two sides to every story. Watch this piece of reporting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PbFeIxrilI [youtube.com] -- Don't you start feeling for that guy? Don't you hope he gets rescued? Well, it's the same priest that got the Darwin Award, so how is this possible? Moments ago you were amused by his idiocy...
Of course the video comes packaged in church marketing, so it's supposed to make you feel like that. But would you still call him an idiot? Or rather a stupid but noble man?
I for one would call him naive. Naive for the cause he chose, naive thinking he'll be alright after getting drifted away, naive not bailing out when he had the opportunity. And that got him killed, but he didn't give up because he thought his cause was just.
Maybe we should take pride in such naivety, instead of branding it as utter idiocy.
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I'm going to go with idiot.
He decided to do something risky, for which he didn't have the right kind of training and he didn't even know how to use his equipment! Being an experience sky diver doesn't help you much as a balloon pilot, but it should have taught him enough to know he should be familiar with his equipment before launching.
His reason for doing it is also pretty silly. It was a publicity stunt. If he was flying a secret infiltration mission in WWII or something, fine, but a stunt to set a wor
darwin award to darwing web site poor design (Score:2)
you have to click on each one to read the story ? wtf? they couldnt put it all on one page ?
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Way too many sites do this.
These are getting just plain mean (Score:4, Interesting)
These things have gone from funny to angry and vindictive. In particular, that overpass-falling one strikes me as an easy mistake. Here in Raleigh, we just had two people do something very similar: an overpass (near the Crabtree area, for locals) looks for all the world like it's a single bridge. But in reality, each lane is its own structure, with about four to six feet between the two that drops straight down to the freeway below. I'd driven by a hundred times and had no idea, and while yes, I'd like to think I'd look before I leaped over, I could easily see paying more attention to traffic than the divider itself and making the same mistake.
That entry happened, according to the site, in Florida, so it's a different area. But there's certainly not enough information there to make a judgment call on his intelligence.
Times have changed (Score:3, Insightful)
It appears now we ridicule people who do something unusual and pioneering (however naive), like the priest in TFA. Have we had the Darwin awards in centuries past, we would have ridiculed the death of every explorer we ever had instead of mourn it.
Re:While slightly humorous (Score:5, Insightful)
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They were thinking it though.
Re:While slightly humorous (Score:4, Informative)
Read the article though and regardless of it, they were an idiot. She went into the creek on the moped, the officer PULLED HER OUT with a rope, interviewed her, and when he went to the car for a second she bolted and jumped back into the creek.
Don't matter what she was jumping in for, she was an idiot.
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Granted. Or at least, an Idiot for the Moment. Which pretty much everyone could win an award for, I dare say. For example, almost every professional sports player, it seems :)
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"I'm not calling you stupid, I'm just saying you do stupid things." Yeah, heard that one before. It was bullshit then and it's bullshit now.
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Nonono, we're not mocking them for dying. We're mocking them for being stupid!
Re:While slightly humorous (Score:4, Interesting)
They're all random people no one knows, and frankly, people don't feel a lot for people they don't know. I think it's more stupid when people go "oh no, 50 people died on other side of the world - let's pretend we're sad" and then completely ignoring how many people die every die, and how many people die in wars and such. I can bet you don't really feel sad for the iraqi insurgents, do you? If you feel sad for a random person, you should feel sad for another random person too.
And black humor is old thing.
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It's a little distasteful to insult the dead. I may get -1 flamed for this, but am I the only one who feels this way?
It is impossible to insult the dead, although it's possible to offend their living friends and relatives...
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It is not impossible to insult the dead. You could insult the dead by making them undead.
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your definition of not impossible intrigues me.
Re:While slightly humorous (Score:4, Informative)
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For me it's not so much the mockery as the snarky self-righteousness mixed with credulity. There's a big list of folks who I'd like to keep from propagating their kind of stupidity, and the people who click "forward" on every "Darwin Award" announcement are way up there on it.
Slashdot editors: Take Darwin's picture off this. He deserves better.
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For me it's not so much the mockery as the snarky self-righteousness mixed with credulity. There's a big list of folks who I'd like to keep from propagating their kind of stupidity, and the people who click "forward" on every "Darwin Award" announcement are way up there on it.
Meh. People have different senses of humor. There's nothing wrong with not sharing someone else's sense of humor. There's arguably something wrong with wishing them dead because their sense of humor differs from yours...
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Forget about the dead; that chipper, gloating tone that those little "tales" always have, is an insult to the living. It rubs me the wrong way and is the main reason why the Darwin Awards annoy me.
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Not everyone who is a candidate ends up dead - just unable to procreate.
When the site is up again - check for "Milk The Balls".
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I never understood the "don't speak ill of the dead" idea. Yes, you should never stand around and cheer people's deaths, but if they were stupid, why should I not say so just because they are dead? Imagine you heard about someone who almost drowned trying to save their moped from a flooded creek. Most people's first reaction would be "what a moron". Why should that change just because the person died? Did they become smarter in death?
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Because it's not funny when someone dies. And when someone is dead they cannot defend their case to insults.
Hypothetically speaking, The lady who drowned trying to save her moped - it could have been all she had. Maybe she didn't have any other transportation, and thus she wouldn't have been able to get to work on time. Then she'd lose her job, lose her money, and wouldn't be able to feed her children.
The point is - yes, people do stupid things. People Die doing stupid things. Stupid things are funny, but i
Re:While slightly humorous (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. The lady in question was driving a moped because she had a prior DUI. She ran a police roadblock into a flooded street and ended up going over an embankment into a flooded creek. The police rescued her. She then jumped BACK into the creek.
Yes indeed, could have happened to any one of us.
But yes, things are less funny when people die because, you know, we've got so few people and it's so hard to make new ones.
Re:While slightly humorous (Score:5, Insightful)
"And when you go around mocking the people who died doing something stupid, often times you are too busy laughing to know the whole story."
And how would knowing the whole story make her actions any less stupid? Her actions led to her death. Mocking her actions is a good thing-it might encourage others not to do similar things.
I'd like to think I would never do anything as stupid as that but if I do, I fully expect to be mocked for it. Because I'd deserve it.
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its alot less funny when people die.
Not really.
When something isn't funny, people rarely know the whole story either. You gonna criticize people who get sad over someone's death, and say "You don't know, they could have been a serial rapist, or they could have been in constant pain." You should be happy they're dead.
Grief is a selfish emotion. When you're grieving, you're not thinking "Oh, the departed are so poorly off, I wish I could improve their lot in death!" You're thinking "I miss them, I want them back, I want them not dead. I want I
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> I never understood the "don't speak ill of the dead" idea.
It is for historical reasons. We used to bury our dead with their stuff, but we broke their weapons before putting them into the grave, for our own protection. For the same reason, it was not wise to speak ill of them.
The reason why we still have that rule is best explained with the famous bananas and monkeys example:
http://paws.kettering.edu/~jhuggins/humor/banana.html [kettering.edu]
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Why is it distasteful to insult the dead?
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They don't have the chance to defend their logic and reasoning for doing so.
Are you going to say that you have never in your life done something that is stupid, but seemed like a good idea at the time?
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This isn't a court of law where we're resurrecting them and killing them again. These are merely jokes. I don't have anything against random people on the internet laughing at my stupid mistakes, and I, being living, still have a reputation to uphold.
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Are you saying that you can't laugh at others' stupidity just because you yourself have been stupid?
Even if she were alive, she almost certainly would not come around to a random message board and defend herself.
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I'm saying that when someone singles me out and says "You are so dumb you deserve to die" I'd like to be able to ask why they think so and inform them of exactly why I took the course of action I did.
It's not insulting that they report a funny or odd death. It happens, and its worth a chuckle. It's insulting that they tagline Darwinism (The toughest or most adaptive survive) to it.
It puts an air of arrogance that they themselves are obviously smarter than everyone who has died unnaturally simply because the
Re:While slightly humorous (Score:4, Interesting)
It puts an air of arrogance that they themselves are obviously smarter than everyone who has died unnaturally simply because they themselves are still alive.
People who go out of their way to kill themselves despite numerous, clear safety measures are stupid. Sure they may have reasons for what they did, stupid reasons. OK, there still significant disagreement over the meaning of "intelligence", but taking reasonable steps to avoid death is a handy rule of thumb (excepting making a sacrifice to save other lives). You can read the comments of family members for many of these submissions, and the usual theme is not "he made a noble sacrifice" but "he was always doing crazy stuff like that".
Plus, anyone who breaks into a live power station to steal the copper from the power lines (which is about half the Darwin Award submissions these days) is not only stupid but an asshole, and deserves all possible criticism.
Re:While slightly humorous (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, but at least I had the common sense NOT to do several things that are almost guaranteed to make you appear in the obituaries. You will probably notice that the Darwin Awards rarely if ever show freak accidents. It's usually awarded for doing something that is almost guaranteed to kill you, and that you, as a being more or less capable of thinking coherently, should know that. Care to show me the logic in:
Taking a billiard ball in your mouth" [darwinawards.com]
Digging out armed land mines to place them somewhere else [darwinawards.com]?
Juggling grenades [darwinawards.com]?
Using the blunt end of a loaded shotgun to crack open a window [darwinawards.com]? (last line, not that the other short mentionings were any smarter...)
Cutting off your balls over a bet [darwinawards.com]?
Or your head [darwinawards.com]?
And so many examples more that are impossible NOT to end up lethal.
How do you want to defend ANY of those "logics"?
Re:While slightly humorous (Score:5, Insightful)
I do take this kind of seriously. When I was 10 and in school, one of my classmates, in fact her entire family, died instantly when they drove off an over pass or a freeway. I was brought to school over this overpass everyday. At that time there was very little traffic. To this day i wonder what the parents were thinking about, or doing, instead of driving, that was worth the life of their children. It may be disrespectful to the dead, and I admit I cannot know the circumstances around the incident, but I do certainly hold those parents in low regard.
I can't help but feel these cautionary tales are a good public service. They remind us that the world is dangerous, and the miracle is that we humans have a brain that we can use to survive. Unless we don't.
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and the hope is that since the genes were not transferred, these things never to have to happen again.
See this is the only thing that really bugs me, it suggests that because of a persons ONE mistake in life they shouldn't have the right to pass on Genes.
Its fine to have "Odd News" and some tiny jabs at ridiculous scenarios. It does exactly as you said - spread information thats beneficial to everyone. Informs people of dangers, good stuff.
It's just the arrogance associated with "It's better off they died" - whether to promote a message or to remove "bad genes" that puts me off.
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What those parents were doing that was worth the life of their children was DRIVING THEM TO SCHOOL so they could turn out to be self-appointed judges for other people's mistakes, just like YOUR parents drove YOU to school so
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Publicizing a stupid death is not what upsets me, but rather the concept behind "Darwin Awards".
Basically what they are saying is that the person was so stupid that they did not deserve to survive or reproduce.
They are of the opinion that these people deserved to die.
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But let's face it - the Darwin Awards are funny in the same way as South Park is. It's the perverseness of it, perhaps a reaction to the stifling and hypocritical political correctness found in segments of our society (e.g., the modern university).
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"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die." Mel Brooks [quotedb.com]
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No basically what they are saying is that whatever genetic or environmental conditioning that person had that led them to make the poor choices that led to their death has died with them, and thus hopefully has not been passed on to a future generation. Thus it ensures that the strongest and fittest of our species survive and reproduce.
It sort of falls along the lines of why does our society really needs labels such as "Do not use on roof" on a snow blower, "Caution moves when in use" on a scooter, or "Not
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They are of the opinion that these people deserved to die.
Deserved? Why, do you believe in "fate" and "destiny"? If so, then why argue because clearly these people died because it was meant to be.
I have news for you, everyone WILL die. Including you. So we all "deserve" to die.
The site is merely a statement of fact. These people died unnecessarily by their own carelessness. The tongue in cheek part is that, if a tendency for such carelessness
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They are of the opinion that these people deserved to die.
Deserved? Why, do you believe in "fate" and "destiny"?
No. I don't believe in fate or destiny. By deserved, I mean the site is making the claim that "they are so stupid it is beneficial to society for them not to live/reproduce"
Personally, if I got so drunk out of my mind on new years that I died, I wouldn't want the world to think its better off that I died when my contributions to society could have more than outweighed the silly-ness in which I passed away.
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Basically what they are saying is that the person was so stupid that they did not deserve to survive or reproduce.
Yes. Yes they are.
Next!
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No but it doesn't mean they were bad either.
Some guy could find the cure for cancer, die the next day with a laptop on the bed catching fire.
We'll post them a Darwinism award for dieing in such a ridiculous way, being proud that their bad genes are not passed on while completely ignoring any good genes or positive contributions they could have made.
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We're not insulting them; we're honoring them for removing their genes from the gene pool before they could replicate.
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It's a little distasteful to insult the dead...am I the only one who feels this way?
Yes. Yes you are.
Next!
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It's a little distasteful to insult the dead.
Dead caveman [youtube.com] around the world applaud your stance against Geico.
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Dude - errr - Monkee,
It's no big deal. Some people are jerks, and need to be made fun of. They don't stop being jerks or being funny just because they are dead. You loved your (mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, dog or whatever) before he/she died, right? You still love him/her? See, nothing has changed, except you can't hug them or talk to them. Same deal here. The village idiots are still the village idiots. Dead village idiots are even better than live ones, because the manner of their deaths is usually
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It certainly is distasteful. We've all done stupid things in our lives, but that doesn't mean you deserve to die.
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Sorry, but it's poking fun at morons that just happen to be dead. We'd laugh just as much if they somehow survived.
And, bluntly, this year's winner really, really, really deserves it. Whether I mean the award or death is up to the reader. Let's see:
1) Driving with a motorcycle in a thunderstorm, with water already flooding the streets, in an area where you have been living all your life and probably already saw this before.
2) Driving (speeding, no less) past a police road block telling you that the road ahe
Re:While slightly humorous (Score:5, Funny)
Ha! Died while posting!
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Never apologize in advance. There's always time to apologize afterwords.
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I guess we went to different schools. My lessons included, "Never explain or apologize. Your friends don't need it, and your enemies won't believe it." I think that was in Social Studies. Or, maybe Sunday School. I dunno, but I heard it somewhere. ;^)
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You can't be certain the average represents a midpoint of the number of people who are smarter or dumber because a "curve-buster" could move the population numbers on either side of the average, up or down depending on the distribution of really-really-smart vs. really-really-dumb individuals. Median works mathematically, but it does feel clunky in prose.
and upgraded a server, people will rtfa (Score:2)
In fact, they should've anticipated the increased traffic,
I think i'll have to submit their website for next year...
Coral Cache link to avoid /.ing Darwin Awards (Score:2, Informative)
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Hey we're good now, come on over.
It's a fun challenge to keep up with a slashdotting.
This is the first year I've been able to tweak the settings
to hold my own.
ServerLimit 512
MaxClients 512
MaxRequestsPerChild 50000
I've been told the website design is so dinosaur it's practically 2002. Kids today.