The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design (19 page)

One fateful afternoon, fifty-five-year-old Marko retreated to his semidetached workshop to make himself a tool for chimney cleaning. The chimney was too high for a simple broom to work, but if he could attach a brush to a chain and then weigh it down with something, that would do the trick. But what could he use as a weight?

He happened to have the perfect object. It was heavy, yet compact. And best of all, it was made of metal, so he could weld it to the chain. He must have somehow overlooked the fact that it was also a hand grenade and was filled with explosive material.

Marko turned on his welding apparatus and began to create an arc between the chain and the grenade. When the metal heated up, the grenade exploded. The force of the explosion killed poor Marko instantly, blasting shrapnel through the walls of the shed and shattering the windshield of a Mercedes parked outside. Marko’s sooty chimney was untouched, however.

Reference:
Vecernji List

 

R
EADER
C
OMMENTS
:

 

“This fellow made an ‘ash’ of himself.”

 

“A cautionary tale for Santa.”

 

“Soot-black humour.”

 

“Sounds like he blew it!”

 

 

Parents often warn that firecrackers can blow your hand off, but as a twenty-six-year-old Australian learned, they can also remove your gonads from the gene pool. An ambulance rushed to a neighborhood park after receiving reports that a man was hemorrhaging from his behind. The mercifully unidentified man had placed a lit firecracker between the cheeks of his buttocks, stumbled, and fell upon it.

“We do caution people against these acts,” said the local police.

The emergency surgeon said the resulting wound looked like “a war injury.” The explosion was forced upward, “blasted a great hole in the pelvis, ruptured the urethra, and injured muscles,” rendering the man incontinent as well as sexually dysfunctional. He survived to tell the tale, making him eligible for the dubious honor of a Living Darwin Award.

Reference:
Illawarra Mercury

When Peraldo found sticks of old dynamite in an abandoned stable on the hill above his vineyard, he decided to bury the problem. Some might think that burying unstable dynamite would be…unwise. But not Peraldo, a sixty-seven-year-old retired entrepreneur, who had been an explosives expert in the army. He had also worked as a licensed
fuochino
in charge of explosives at construction sites prior to his retirement. He knew the ways of things that go boom.

This dynamite had been sitting around for some time, decaying and sweating highly unstable nitroglycerin. Peraldo carefully placed the high explosives in a hole thirty meters away from the stable and gently covered them with loose earth. Apparently the mound was a little too high to be aesthetically attractive, so Peraldo began patting it down with his hands….

The massive blast rocked the entire town of Chiavenna. Police rushed to the vineyard to investigate. Peraldo was found torn to shreds but, miraculously, still alive and able to elucidate what had happened before he expired from internal injuries.

Reference: www.espressonline.it

Nguyen, twenty-one, was drinking with friends in Hanoi when he pulled out an old detonator he had found. It was about six centimeters long and eight centimeters in diameter, with two wires hanging out. Because it was old and rusty, Nguyen said, it couldn’t explode. His friends disagreed.

To prove his point, Nguyen put the detonator in his mouth and the dangling wires were plugged into a 220-volt electrical receptacle.

Turns out Nguyen was wrong!

The victim had little time to reflect on his mistake, or whether 220 volts alone could have been fatal. According to police, “the explosion blew out his cheeks and smashed all his teeth.” He died on the way to the hospital.

Reference: Deutsche Presse Agentur

 

R
EADER
C
OMMENT
:

 

“I guess he ate his words.”

 

 

At work, Manoel was responsible for cleaning out the storage tanks of gasoline tanker trucks. He had been employed in that capacity for two months when he ran afoul of fuel.

The thirty-five-year-old began to fill a tanker with water, a standard safety procedure that forces flammable vapor out of the container. He returned an hour later to check whether the water level was high enough to proceed. But he had trouble deciding, because it was so DARK inside the tanker.

A resourceful employee, Manoel forgot the very reason he was filling the tank with water when he lit a cigarette lighter to shed some light on the situation. His little test successfully determined that the water level was not yet high enough for safety. The vapor explosion launched him through the air, and he landed in the company parking lot a hundred meters away.

Manoel suffered severe burns, blunt force trauma, and an injury to the head that exposed his unused brain, proving that he had one. Our witless car washer had learned his terminal lesson in safety by the time the firemen arrived.

Reference:
O Estado de São Paolo, Folha de São Paolo

 

An aerospace engineering student comments, “I have a sound understanding of physics. This story says that the unfortunate victim flew one hundred meters, but people less than a mile from a nuclear bomb detonation rarely are thrown more than a hundred meters, and that’s an explosion more than ten thousand times as powerful! I’m also a firefighter, and know that liquid fuel explosions don’t have much mass and rarely throw a body far.”

 

 

Fireworks are a longstanding Lunar New Year’s tradition among Malaysia’s large Chinese minority, and they continue to be widely used to celebrate despite a ban on their sales and use.

Wan, a twenty-nine-year-old excavator operator, spent the evening watching people set off fireworks outside a suburban nightclub. These were no mere firecrackers. They were rockets that shot as high as a ten-story building before exploding.

His curiosity piqued, Wan bent over one of the launching tubes for a closer look, wondering how these powerful rockets worked. He was peering down the tube when it fired, sending him flying ten meters. He died instantly from severe head injuries, according to a senior police official.

Reference:
The Star,
AP

Piling up live artillery is grueling work, so it makes perfect sense that a group of soldiers would take a cigarette break at lunchtime. The warehouse was filled with ninety-two thousand tons of ammunition—until the soldiers lit up their ciggies and inhaled deeply, ignoring warnings that smoking can cause cancer. They flicked the butts away and went back to work. The glowing embers of the tobacco butts acted like slow fuses, which started a small fire that nobody noticed until it ignited a chain reaction of massive explosions.

The explosions lasted for a week, tossing debris as far as twenty-five miles away, destroying buildings in a two-mile radius, and forcing the evacuation of thousands of nearby residents. Red-hot shrapnel set off additional fires in nearby towns and ruptured a minor gas pipeline. Total damage from the smoke break was estimated at $750 million.

Miraculously, only one of the soldiers at the arsenal died in the disaster.

Reference: Reuters, AP, Novosti

 

News accounts report five people killed by explosions, but only two were smokers. The nomination would be disqualified if innocent bystanders were injured—and an AP article said four died from “health problems aggravated by the stress of the disaster.” Novosti, the Russian press agency, said six soldiers were charged with causing the fire, rather than two, and the only direct death was a guard at the facility. It’s not clear if the guard was also smoking, or if the other four deaths were caused by the explosions or simply ill health. Therefore, I am tentatively calling this a Darwin Award, despite minor misgivings.