The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design (17 page)

“Unusual” and “complicated” is how the Missaukee County sheriff described the mysterious death of nineteen-year-old Christopher.

After an evening spent imbibing large quantities of alcohol, Christopher noticed a shortage in his liquor supply that could not be attributed to his own depredations. He concluded that his neighbor had stolen a bottle of booze! He menaced the neighbor with a knife, to no avail, whereupon he retired to his own apartment to brood about revenge.

Finally he figured out the perfect way to get back at that conniving bottle-thief: Christopher would stab himself and blame the neighbor!

A witness saw Christopher enter the bathroom as he called 911. He calmly informed the dispatcher that his neighbor had stabbed him. Witnesses said he looked fine when he emerged from the bathroom, but a moment later gouts of blood spewed from his chest. Suddenly he began screaming, begging for help. The dispatcher heard a woman shout, “Why did you do this?” He collapsed at the door of his apartment.

Deputies arrived quickly, but Christopher had already bled to death from self-inflicted stab wounds to his chest. An autopsy determined that he had stabbed himself twice.

The first wound apparently didn’t look dangerous enough, so he tried again. The second time, the knife plunged into his left ventricle. This wound was plenty dangerous: He had only two minutes to live.

Christopher died in vain. His deathbed accusation of his neighbor failed, as a witness confirmed that the neighbor was not in the apartment. All Christopher got for revenge was an accidental death sentence.

Reference:
Cadillac News

Ameer, a second-year engineering student at Carleton University, was celebrating his twentieth birthday with friends in his eleventh-floor apartment when they embarked on a spitting contest. His two friends had already made their marks. Ameer thought he could use his engineering skills to improve his performance. A quick mental calculation of trajectory, projectile velocity, and wind speed indicated that winning required more than a simple “stand and spit” technique. Ameer took a running start, flew over the balcony railing, and plunged to his death.

“It was purely accidental,” said Ottawa police. “Momentum carried him beyond.” The building’s security guard heard the thud. “He was one of the smartest guys I ever met in my life. He had a maturity beyond his age.”

Spitting contest deaths are becoming a trend. In 1999, a twenty-five-year-old soldier in Alabama won the first Darwin Award in this category, using the same technique and achieving the same result from a three-story vantage point. Twenty-three-year-old Bartosz of Illinois was nominated for falling twenty feet onto his head in December 2005. Bartosz is remarkable for having fallen over an apartment railing without a running start. But Ameer clearly trumps his competitors with his eleven-story fall.

Perhaps the three have reunited in the afterlife, arm in arm, sailing through the air, their projectiles suspended in front of them like bullets in the
Matrix
movies.

Reference:
Ottawa Sun, La Presse

A Pitesti man with a metal ring stuck on his penis was being sought by doctors, after he fled the hospital consumed by panic.

The unidentified forty-two-year-old said he put the ring on his penis after losing a bet during a drinking game at a pub. He was subsequently unable to remove the ring. Embarrassment kept him from seeking immediate medical help, but after two days, unbearable pain overcame unbearable shame, and he took his smelly and discolored member in for treatment.

Doctors told him the bad news. Gangrene had set in, and his life was in danger. The blood supply had been cut off for too long, and there was nothing they could do but remove his penis, so that the necrosis did not spread to the rest of his body.

The manhunt was ongoing. “There is no way he can escape going under the knife,” said a doctor. “He must come back to the hospital and accept this.” The man’s only consolation is a guaranteed Darwin Award, one way or the other!

Reference:
Daily Record
(U.K.), Ananova

 

A reader says, “NOT TRUE! Some of us naturally ‘little guys’ have managed to have a kid or two, with a little creativity and medical intervention. Surgically cutting a tendon over the penis gives an extra inch or more.”

 

 

Barry Bonds had just made the last out at the bottom of the eighth. At that very moment, Todd had bummed one last beer from a new friend at the San Francisco Giants’ ballpark.

Todd was leaning on the railing of the Arcade port walk, getting to the “bottom eighth” of his beer, when his Maui Jim
^*
designer sunglasses slipped off the top of his head. Down they fell, landing twenty-five feet below, where a helpful bum picked them up and tried to toss them back. But it was too far! Todd called out that he was coming down to get them.

Todd had recently relocated to Santa Cruz for the gnarly waves at Mavericks. His wife described him as “a passionate surfer” talented enough to turn pro. Perhaps his sense of physical prowess was his downfall. The agile thirty-eight-year-old considered and rejected the long walk down, in favor of a quicker alternative. He would climb over the railing, jump to a perch on a light sconce five feet below, then drop like Tarzan to the ground, gratefully reclaiming his shades from the bum.

At least, that was the plan. And the first part, climbing the railing, went fine. The second part was more problematic. Todd missed the sconce and “came down like a pancake,” according to a startled observer a few feet from the point of impact. The crowd was shocked into silence. Why would anyone risk his life for a pair of shades?

Todd would have been chagrined to hear the observer’s next words. “They looked cheap,” he said, apologizing, “I don’t know sunglass brands.”

Reference:
San Francisco Examiner, San Jose Mercury News, Santa Cruz Sentinal

Three doctors published the following account in a highly respected medical journal. The man in question disqualified himself from a true Darwin Award by being smart enough to go to a hospital and admit what he’d done. The report is quoted directly from the journal, with the addition of bracketed “translations” that clarify the medical jargon.

“A thirty-one-year-old man was admitted to the emergency unit with severe abdominal pain and vomiting for two hours. [He’d been sober enough to notice a problem for the last two hours.] An abdominal radiograph disclosed an intestinal obstruction, and a small bowel follow-through study revealed a filling defect in the right-side jejunum. [His gut was backed up because something was stuck in it.] Persistent exploration of the patient’s history [he
really
didn’t want to talk about it] disclosed a visit to the Munich Oktoberfest the night before, during which the patient had ingested a condom filled with beer. [No, we don’t know why, either.]

“Upper endoscopy was unsuccessful in removing the condom. [We couldn’t budge it.] Because the condom was localized close to the abdominal wall, it was finally punctated with a long needle under CT control. [We stuck a really big needle in it, and it burst.] Forty milliliters of a yellow clear liquid [we can’t say in print that it was beer, because we were laughing so hard we didn’t think to send it to the lab] were drawn off when the condom slid
forward spontaneously. The next morning, the condom was identified in the patient’s stool [a high-quality, leakage-resistant condom, showing that the man was at least attempting to nullify his influence on the gene pool], and the patient was discharged in good condition.”

The authors note, “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on intestinal obstruction caused by ingestion of a condom filled with an alcoholic beverage, and its successful transcutaneous treatment. [Hey, we always wanted to be the first doctors to do
something
!]”

Reference:
American Journal of Gastroenterology,
February 2003; 98:512, with “translations” by T. G. Shaw

 

Because dissolved CO
₂
outgasses when a beer warms, a condom of cool beer swells after ingestion, and can stop up the plumbing. The swallower may have assumed he was beating a Breathalyzer by delivering the alcohol straight to his stomach. But that won’t work, because the Breathalyzer tests for alcohol that comes from blood gases that exude from the lungs.

 

 

During a short spell as a police constable, I came to be involved in a reported “serious incident.” Police were called in to assist a severely injured lad of sixteen who was being rushed to the hospital with a nearly severed foot. The victim said he had been walking away from a nightclub when he and a friend became embroiled in an altercation with an unknown person or persons, resulting in his being thrown through a ten-foot plate-glass shop window. The area was sealed off, large amounts of blood on the footpath photographed and washed away for sanitary reasons, and the owner of the windowless store notified.

On reaching the hospital and sobering up, the victim explained the true story. The somewhat intoxicated young buck had bet his friend that he could smash the shop window. After all, he was a fit footballer with powerful legs. And did I say drunk? To make his point, he stood with his back to the glass and performed a “donkey kick” into the bottom of the window.

Our lad failed to take the following points into consideration: Glass is easier to break if you hit the edge, as the energy can dissipate effectively. And the plate glass in this case was 1.5 centimeters thick. Ten feet of thick plate glass falling straight down weighs a great deal.

Although he lost a lot of blood, the victim did not “kick the bucket” and hence this is only an Honorable Mention, but he did ruin any chance of a football career (though he kept his foot), and given the sexual antics of soccer stars he probably reduced the potential spread of his seed as a result.

I felt so sorry for him that I convinced my boss to authorize a police caution, even though the damage ran to more than £5000!

Heeoor, heeoor, heeoor to have known better!

Reference: Marc Buckingham, Personal Account; Surrey Police