The Darwin Awards Next Evolution: Chlorinating the Gene Pool (7 page)

Feeling overzealous, he decided to split the log anyway. He lined up his shot and brought the ax down dead-center, only to bury the blade deep in the girthy log without splitting it. With a swift action he jerked up on the handle to free the ax for another swing. His doing so made the log scoot forward about a foot before the ax broke free.

Rather than move the heavy log back into place the man stepped forward a foot to take another swing. The second swing met with the same result as the first, as did the third attempt, the fourth, and so on. In his relentless determination to split the unsplittable the man did not notice that he and the log had traveled some twenty-five feet across the yard and were now positioned beneath the clothesline.

As he brought the ax down for another whack at the log, the ax head caught the clothesline, which acted in the same manner as a bowstring. The ax had barely touched the top of the log when the clothesline reached its maximum draw, propelling the ax head back toward the man at an ungodly velocity. It found its mark right between his eyes.

Fortunately, the blunt side of the ax head made contact, and rather than killing him, it merely collapsed his sinus and fractured his skull. He recovered and learned a very important lesson: Always be aware of your surroundings when hurling a sharp object through the air with great force.

Reference: Eyewitness account by an anonymous informant, who says
“I
know
this story to be true because the man of whom I speak…was me.”

Reader Comments:

“Ax how it’s done.”

“Talk about an ax-ident…”

“Don’t ax, don’t tell.”

At Risk Survivor: Gag Reflex

Unconfirmed

12 AUGUST 2004

A story to make parents shudder…

Friends were hanging out in the basement, joking around and playing video games. Matt was irritable that night. He chose to deal with the situation by threat. If certain named people did not stop bothering him, he said as he loaded his Tippmann 98 Custom paintball gun, he would shoot them.

Matt assured everyone that the safety was on, and he would not shoot unless provoked. Yet, oddly, one friend was not reassured. He jumped on Matt and wrestled for the gun. Matt threw him aside, and (as he later explained) to prove the safety was on, he opened his mouth, inserted the barrel of the paintball gun, and pulled the trigger.

His eyes widened as the paintball fired into his throat at three hundred feet per second. He fell to his knees coughing blood but refused to let anyone call an ambulance. Trouble with parents would surely result! Yet his throat was so swollen that he had difficulty breathing.

After two hours Matt recovered long enough to kick everyone out and suffer in private. He couldn’t eat for three days and couldn’t talk for a week. Once he was able to open his mouth, he realized he had blown his uvula clean off. It was gone! And he had no gag reflex either.

His uvula is not yet growing back, but he shows no symptoms of long-term damage. Considering how many people die or are seriously injured by blanks, he was extremely lucky. The best part of the story is that neither his parents nor his doctor and dentist ever found out!

Reference: Eyewitness account by Brandon Burdette

Reader Comments:

“Paintball Gun + Teen Boys = Trip to ER.”

“Paint your tonsils.”

At Risk Survivor: The Spirit Is Willing

Confirmed True by Darwin

11 DECEMBER 2007, GERMANY

Being frugal can be carried too far! A sixty-four-year-old man returning from holiday in Egypt was carrying two pints of vodka. He ran afoul of security while switching planes at the Nuremberg Airport. Rules now prohibit carrying large quantities of liquid aboard a flight, and the staff was adamant. He could not take that vodka on the plane.

Instead of handing over the alcohol, or paying a fee to check his carry-on luggage, the man quickly quaffed the two pints. That much vodka can easily kill a man! He was soon unable to stand upright.

A doctor was summoned. She determined that he had consumed a potentially life-threatening amount of alcohol and sent him to a local clinic for treatment of alcohol poisoning.

Reference: Associated Press

Reader Comment:

“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

At Risk Survivor: Head Shot

Unconfirmed

AUGUST 2007, VIRGINIA

Skeet shooters at the Amelia Wildlife Management Area were taken aback when two large black males strode toward the firing line across the open shotgun range, toting a sawed-off Ithaca and a large black box. After twenty minutes of target practice they opened the black box and retrieved a polished Desert Eagle .50 AE handgun.

The other shooters, seeing that the two men had brought a gigantic handgun to a rifle range, began to pack up and leave, praying that the officer who periodically checks the range would make an appearance before someone got hurt.

The shorter man loaded his pistol and began sighting on a can about nine yards downrange. His technique for firing the weapon was straight from a movie. He held the handgun out, with his right elbow twisted ninety degrees to the left. The rifle shooters looked on with horror as the round’s tremendous recoil whipped the weapon backward into his open mouth, knocking out several teeth.

Needless to say, one doesn’t expect him to survive much longer.

Reference: Anonymous eyewitness account

At Risk Survivor: Storm-Water Surfer

Unconfirmed

JANUARY 2007, AUSTRALIA

When flash floods turned Brisbane streets into raging rivers, a twenty-five-year-old Brisbane man came frightfully close to literally sucking himself down the drain of the evolutionary gene pool.

This man thought it would be great fun to catch a wave on his surfboard. Fun was fun, until his foot wedged in a storm drain and he was sucked down. After a bumpy and winding three-kilometer ride through the storm sewer, he popped out in a creek, relatively unscathed.

The young man who found the lucky survivor had this advice for those thinking to emulate the surfer’s adventure: “Never surf on a flooded street.”

Reference: Sky News, Australia

Personal Account: A Slippery Slope

Unconfirmed

1960s, NORFOLK, UK

Norfolk, the small seaside town at the mouth of the river Yare, keeps a modern lifeboat at anchor in the harbour. The old lifeboat shed is nearby. Its cobbled slipway descends at a thirty-degree angle straight into the river. Four hundred yards away the harbour opens into the North Sea. The next stop is the coast of Holland.

I was eight years old and not afflicted by the degree of supervision that kids endure nowadays. That summer a bunch of us decided it would be a great wheeze to take a discarded tractor tyre from the dump and take turns curling up inside it while the others rolled us down the slipway into the river. The name of the game was to struggle out before the tyre reached the water.

This provided several minutes of hysterical fun, until the inevitable happened. All hell broke loose as the lucky winner and the tyre rapidly made their way to open sea…. The sight of the big yellow Coast Guard helicopter and its crew saving his ass went some way toward compensating for the pain inflicted upon mine by my dad that evening.

Reference: Anonymous eyewitness account

Personal Account: Bicycle Chain of Accidents

Unconfirmed

JULY 2000 OR 2001, SOUTH COAST OF ENGLAND

A gripping lesson in Newton’s Three Laws of Motion.

This account is a testament to the intelligence of teenagers, who are prone to recklessness—a fact I should have borne in mind. On a Sunday afternoon six years ago, our gang of five had taken it into our brains that, since we live near the sea, it would be fun to play on the cliffs.

We took turns riding our bikes up to the cliff’s edge and braking at the last possible moment, the objective being a typical competition between young males. The drop to the water was over one hundred feet. After one boy almost flew off the cliff, we made it “safer” by tying rope around our waists, attached to separate pegs anchored securely in the ground. This, we thought, would avert trouble.

Uh-huh.

One boy’s bike squeaked terribly when he braked, and it was getting on everyone’s nerves. So he took care of the squeak in an ingenious way: He oiled the brakes. Some of you might already realize that this presents another problem, but we didn’t see it.

When it was his turn, he rode up to the cliff with the ironic cry, “Watch this!” Indeed we did watch. We watched him apply the brakes, we watched his expression change to terror, and we watched him disappear from sight as he sailed over the cliff.

The rope did its job and halted his descent. But his rope was longer than the others and suffered the strain of sixty feet of falling teenager, as did the waist around which the rope was tied. The impact of stopping broke several ribs and almost cleaved him in two. Not surprisingly, he fainted.