It was either Harlan Ellison or Frank Zappa
that said, “The two most abundant things in the universe are hydrogen and
stupidity.” The latter couldn’t be closer to the truth. Everyday around water
coolers, digging ditches with pals, or having drinks with the buddies, somebody
has a story about someone doing something stupid. In certain circles we call
these less-than-subpar intelligence life-forms pariahs and outcasts…
In other circles…
Well, they’re sort of…ya know…celebrated…
That’s right. Every year since around 1985
the dumbest of the dumb have been forever immortalized. At first the list
circulated via word of mouth, but then in 1993 the list hit the Internet, and
by 2000 books were in print, and morons were mainstream.
Nowadays we can get most of our fill of the
flippantly foolish and foppish from videos via YouTube. (Say that ten times fast…) But for some,
well, there’s www.DarwinAwards.com. That’ll give you
the most comprehensive list of the dumbest, dopiest, dolts that have ever
attempted to do something going against the very laws of intelligence itself,
and were immediately witch-slapped in the face by the good ol’ backhand of
karma for it.
Today at TI&IT we’re going to delve into
the world of the mentally deficient and the half-baked. All of these examples
can be found at the website mentioned above, and if you’d like to purchase some
of the print versions of “The Darwin
Awards” by Wendy Northcutt I will include a link at the end of the article.
Without her delightful investigative reporting of the idiotic we wouldn’t have
these wonderfully witless antics to tickle your whimsy today.
Before we get into the brain cell deficient
however, let’s give you all a little background on The Darwin Awards for those
of you unfamiliar. Trust me; there is no shortage of nominees either.
The Origin of Stupidity
I agree Yoda. And so do the rules of being a
nominee for the Darwin Awards. See…now this may sound a touch insensitive, but there is only one of two ways for someone
to be bestowed this honor. The nominee had to have done something monumentally
stupid and died, or they had to have done something that caused them to become
sterile. Either way, they have to remove themselves from the gene pool somehow.
Now that may seem a bit harsh but there isn’t
exactly a rarity of rash simpletons amongst the throngs of the human race. In
fact, with the advent of Social Media it seems stupidity is growing at an even
faster and much more alarming rate. But how exactly did the Darwin Awards get
kicked off?
The Darwin Awards first began on the Internet
of course…well, not exactly the
Internet. More like the Internet’s second closest ancestor. Usenet. Don’t know
what that is? Not a big deal, it’s the topic of our next section.
AOL Killed the
Bulletin Board Star
The history of unnatural selection seems to
date back to the 1980s and an early version of the Internet called “Usenet”.
Usenet, like the Arpanet, was a precursor to the Internet we use today. It was
somewhere between a hybrid of email and an internet web forum, loosely
resembling a bulletin board, hence the term “Bulletin Board System”. Yet aside
from being drastically different than Arpanet (Which was the original Internet
developed by the military), their limitations, and a radical wan in popularity;
like the ardor of a Twilight girl’s fandom they refuse to die.
Take “Mono” as it’s known affectionately by
its users worldwide for instance. Www.mono.org
will take you to a BBS that’s not only still up and running, but is still
actively contributed to with 5,000+ threads going up monthly. BBS’s could be
navigated with the use of a keyboard only, which was good, considering the computer
mouse wasn’t a widely used accessory when BBSs were first introduced.
It was an easy way for the general populace
to upload and share valuable information anywhere in the world with ease. That’s
what made it a natural forum for the unnaturally yet delightfully dimwitted
antics of Darwin-ites the whole world over. When people began their jolly journalism
of criminal folly they started by uploading to Usenet in the 80s. The response?
Worldwide reception of an elated nature. Everyone wanted more, so it made sense
that when the World Wide Web (your [WWW] prefix in the URL) went live in the
mid-90s, the Darwin Awards found themselves a proper home on a proper server.
While
Bulletin Board Systems have found themselves outdated and outnumbered by the onslaught
of online forums, the Darwin Awards have found themselves an unrivaled acclaim
amongst the masses. It’s no wonder. The dumber someone else is the smarter it
makes us feel. That’s psychology 101 folks. But how do we know that these
people really existed? Let alone could possibly be so stupid!?
Wendy faced that same problem as well. How
did she deal with it you ask?
Well…that’s why we call it “journalism”.
Submission,
Confirmation, and Reward
Since Wendy’s brilliant concept went global
she literally receives thousands of
Darwin Award candidates in her inbox every day. Naturally, this is difficult to
sort through. I’m sure all of the stories are likely hilarious (what I’d give
to see her email…) but that brings us to our next segment, verification. How do
we know all of these stories are true?
This was headed off in 1985 on a Usenet post
describing the awards as being, “given posthumously to people who have made the
supreme sacrifice to keep their genes out of our pool. Style counts, not
everyone who dies from their own stupidity can win.” Since 1995 every
submission that’s made it onto the website and into her various book
compilations has been personally verified through local sources and tedious
investigative reporting. Some entries however have been “grandfathered” in to
protect their titles as they were put up long before she had the means to prove
the verity of them. Either way, whatever’s clever I say.
While Wendy probably wasn’t the one who
started the Usenet group (I have no way to verify the identity of the original
poster on the discussion forum), she did start the website, and she did write
the books. That is why I have to give her the credit in this article today. If
you visit the website you will see that each article is categorized at the
outset by the phrases, “confirmed true by Darwin,” or “Unconfirmed”. Confirmed
true by Darwin doesn’t mean Charles popped out of his grave and said, “Yep, met
that twit in the afterlife and he’s just as daft as his epitaph states!” It
means that Northcutt herself has verified the claims through various means.
By 2000 the first book (pictured above) went
into print, and thank the Lord for that, because I’ve never laughed so hard in
my life then when I picked up my first copy. It’s a good thing it took off too,
because Wendy gave up a lucrative career in Neurobiology doing research on
Cancer and telomerase. (Telomerase are the enzymes responsible for cell aging,
a potential “fountain of youth” if you will. Currently they’re kind of a big
deal…)
Initially she received resistance in getting
her works published by companies telling her to remove her works from the
Internet first and then they’d talk. She refused, stating that “It’s a
community! I could not do that, even though it might have cost me a lot of
money, I kept saying no.” Eventually a publisher named “Plume” took up the
sword of her silver tongue and agreed to print her works containing 10% of the
material found on her website.
Kudos Plume. Good call.
She’s received numerous letters supporting
her, almost as many as the letters defaming her. One person is quoted as
writing in, “This is horrible. It has shocked our community to the core. You
should remove this.” Not a chance. Sorry to say but if your loved one did
something stupid enough to make it into a News report, then they will likely be
remembered only for that mistake anyway.
There are honorable mentions on the website
as well, people that were inordinately stupid but didn’t meet the requirements
for the actual award. Some of the people actually survive the stupid, which
sometimes can be amazing in and of itself considering the criteria. Speaking of
which, let’s talk about the criteria next and finish up today with some of the
greatest goofballs who ever “lived”.
Ten Pounds of Dumb in
a Five Pound Sack
If YouTube has taught this current generation
anything at all it’s that not everyone was blessed with an abundance of smarts.
Thankfully for the rest of us it provides morbid and cheap entertainment. I say
morbid because in order to be considered for a Darwin Award you have to be,
well, dead.
That isn’t the only stipulation. You can
sterilize yourself as well. Either way, as long as you can’t reproduce,
regardless of why, and your headstone can read as a cautionary tale to others,
you may just be eligible. This is the criteria as posted by Wikipedia:
Inability
to reproduce
·
The
nominee must be dead or rendered sterile. This has been the subject of dispute.
Some are off the table because of age, others have already reproduced. Wendy
dealt with this issue head-on by issuing what’s called “The Deserted Island
Test”. If the nominee would be unable to reproduce with a fertile member of the
opposite sex on a deserted island, then the nominee would be eligible, so long
as they meet the rest of the criteria.
Excellence
·
This
doesn’t mean what you think it means. Excellence is awarded for outstandingly
stupid judgment. The candidates must be unique in their idiocy. Example:
Swimming into a lake to retrieve a golf ball and being eaten by an alligator,
while unlucky, not eligible. Swimming into a lake to retrieve a golf-ball that’s
surrounded everywhere by clearly
posted signs in 120 pt. font saying, “Keep Out! Alligators will eat you!”
Eligible.
Self-selection
·
You
made it happen to yourself. I.E. killing a friend with a shotgun you didn’t
know was loaded, dumb, but not eligible for an award. Killing yourself with a
shotgun while trying to exterminate an annoying fly buzzing around your
kitchen, extremely eligible.
Maturity
·
Capable
of sound judgment. Nominees must be past the legal age of consent and be able
to at least drive and must not be mentally infirm. Picking on the handicapped
is not only mean, it’s not admissible.
Veracity
·
The
story must be confirmed, one way or another.
So there you have it, anybody can be dumb, and
that’s why rules needed to be put in place, because anybody can be
spectacularly stupid, but only the chosen few get to be Darwin Award
recipients. Let’s take a look at a few examples of awardees over the last
couple of decades.
That’s One Way to
Pierce it…
Labeled as an “At-Risk Survivor” by Northcutt’s
website, in 2009 an Oklahoma resident concocted a half-cocked plan to
(assumptively anyway…) keep thieves off his property without killing anybody.
The idea sounds noble enough. The young man was replacing the pellets in his
shotgun shells with plumber’s putty, which would create a sort of rubber bullet
on the cheap.
Everything was going great, until, like all
great ideas, the testing phase. The man, with a pillow for protection, fired a
round of his experimental projectile into his abdomen. The first test was
successful so he removed the pillow to see what the damage would be without a
buffer in between. Needless to say…the damage was…extensive…
The young man is reported as saying, “Something
went wrong, but what?”
I’m no expert, but I’m going to have to
assume it went wrong when you decided to play human Guinea Pig sir. But Kudos
on your award.
“I Believe I Can Fly…Oh
Wait…No I Can’t”
It makes no difference which era you were
born in, stupidity has abounded since man bounded into a bipedal state. Take
Franz Reichelt (pictured above) for instance. No, he wasn’t an early 20th
century version of Batman, turns out, that strange little garment he’s wearing,
wasn’t just a fashion statement either. It was intended to be a parachute.
Needless to say it didn’t catch on. In 1912,
Reichelt, convinced his invention would work, gathered the press together at
the base of the Eiffel Tower in France. Getting up on a platform at the top he
readied himself for his dummy drop. And a dummy drop it was as the dummy fell
from the top of the tower and plummeted respectively to his death.
Good thing Orville and Wilbur didn’t take
their early aviation lessons from Franz, eh? This story was confirmed by a
personal account in 2003. Congratulations on your award Mr. Reichelt, you
certainly earned it.
Low-Speed Pursuit
In 2005, 26-year-old Joseph of Indiana got it
in his head he was going to run from the police. His mode of transportation?
Why, a moped of course! With the fuzz on his tail and the wind in his hair, ol’
Joe gunned the throttle on his little Yamaha and took off like a bat out of…well…a
nursing home… In a blaze of light, he was off!
Or so he would have had he not been on a
moped…
After redlining the glorified scooter to a
maddening 40 MPH (64 Km/h) he was almost home free…until he sped through an
intersection and lost control. This Hell’s Angel on a hummingbird crashed
dead-on into a tree killing himself instantly.
Probably should have stuck to Grand Theft
Auto video games Joey.
This Lady Takes the
Cake
Sometimes the stories you can’t prove tend to
be the funniest of all. This one is an at-risk survivor, an unconfirmed story,
but the woman is twice disqualified since she has bred post-incident. What did
she do you ask? Well, let’s just say, her intelligence, and her pastries, were
slightly half-baked.
Coming home from a long shift at work, the
unnamed nominee decided to bake some cake for the little ones. Things were
going great as she added in the ingredients to the bowl and mixed them with her
antique electric beater. The problem with these beaters though is that the cord
wasn’t permanently fastened into the base of the mixer, it was detachable.
Whilst mixing, the cord came free and landed
smack dab into the batter. She set the mixer aside and decided to go about
cleanup the old fashioned way; by licking the batter clean. Sticking the
ungrounded electrical cord into her mouth she was quite literally shocked at
the stupidity of her mistake shortly thereafter.
While we said she was disqualified, what
makes this story worth an honorable mention is the end. Turns out, the woman
was a First Aide safety instructor as her profession. Needless to say, she
gives quite an electrifying lecture on the dos and don’ts of powered kitchen
appliances.
Peeping Pedró
Plummets through Prison per Pornography
Another story confirmed true by Wendy
Northcutt, in 1999, in a Mexican prison there was a small interruption to an
inmate’s intimate moment. Raul Diaz was a guard well known for taking up the
shift on the roof overseeing the correctional facilities inhabitants during
conjugal visits. For those of you who don’t know what a conjugal visit is…let’s
just say…”private time”.
While privacy isn’t exactly a top tier
concern in most penal systems, this private’s penile activity seemed to be
under an unnatural amount of scrutiny from Diaz. Diaz however got his when, not
paying attention, he tripped over an air vent and came crashing down into the
room where “boom boom” time was in full swing.
Outraged the inmate tried to start a failed
riot. Local law enforcement recovered a dirty magazine and a pair of binoculars
on the hapless corpse of the hard-up with a hard-on. The porn? Retained as
evidence. The binoculars? Returned to the family of the deceased as they held “sentimental
value”.
I’ll tell you this much…
He certainly put the “mental” in “sentimental”.
So there you have it. I’m sure if you head
over to the website and just click on the “Random Story” button you’ll be
laughing like an idiot for hours on end. I know I certainly was. Just remember,
whenever you think you’re dumb…
…at least you don’t have an award for it.
-
Ryan
Sanders
Thanks for reading
everyone! Feel free to share the dumb around on Twitter and Facebook! Be sure
to head over to the To Infinity and…In Theory Facebook page to give us a like,
and follow us on Twitter @ToInf_InTheory. Follow any of the links below for
further reading and to pick up a copy of any of Wendy Northcutt’s wonderful
works! Happy Learning! And P.S., don’t be a Darwin Award Recipient! Not
everyone should strive to be the best!
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