Category Archives: Thursday Thirteen

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
~Bertrand Russell

It’s time for the Thursday Thirteen again. If you have a Thursday Thirteen of your own, leave your website in the comments section and I’ll try my darndest to visit it

Random Darwin Awards for the Past 13 Years

For those who don’t know… the Darwin Awards are awards giving out posthumously for people who die doing stupid things around the world. The awards say, “Named in honor of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, the Darwin Awards commemorate those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.”

I find them hilarious because I can’t believe the stupidity of some people.

1. 2008 Darwin Award: Two men who had just returned from boot camp decide to make sure a tree they were cutting down didn’t fall on a house by wrapping the rope around their waists. They flew like Superman for a while.
2. 2007 Darwin Award: A man decides to get rid of moles by inserting metal rods into their holes and attaching them to a high-voltage power line.  Uh… he didn’t know that the ground is a conductor of electricity.
3. 2006 Darwin Award: A man wants to disassemble an RPG  for scrap metal by driving over it several times.  When that didn’t work, he used a sledge hammer to do the job.  The RPG isn’t the only thing that is scrap now.
4. 2005 Darwin Award: A man, in his drunken mind, decided that he couldn’t have consumed all the alcohol that was missing in his house and decided his neighbor must have done it. To get revenge on the “bottle thief,” he decided to stab himself in the chest, call 911 and blame it on the neighbor.  His first stab didn’t seem too bad so he did it again… and pierced the left ventricle of his heart. Witnesses were able to confirm that the neighbor did not steal the alcohol. Guess he showed the neighbor!
5. 2004 Darwin Award: A man was too impatient to wait for his lava lamp to heat up so he had the genius idea of helping it heat up by placing it on the stove.  He must have been absent during his middle school science classes when he learned that heat expands things.  The autopsy showed that he died of glass shards impaled into his heart.
6. 2003 Darwin Award: Robbers were surprised to see policemen surround the building they were robbing. So they decided to go out in a blaze of glory and fled shooting at everything, including at the police, in sight.  The problem? They were using real guns but shooting blanks.  They soon found out the cops weren’t using blanks.
7. 2002 Darwin Award: When pulled over for erratic driving, a man decided to flee the officers on foot instead of manning up to a probation violation.  He then made the genius decision to shoot a 9mm wildly behind his back at the officers as he ran.  But the officers didn’t kill him.  Nope, he ended up shooting himself in the back of his head as he ran.
8. 2001 Darwin Award: Travis, 16, was on the roof of a church lowering a stolen generator to the ground, when his jacket became wrapped in the electrical cord and pulled him over the ledge to dangle precariously in the air. Though he could have cut himself free with the sharp knife in his pocket or wriggle out of his jacket, he didn’t. The surviving thief, unaware of his friend’s plight, waited 15 minutes before leaving Travis, trapped in the freezing rain, to die of exposure.
9. 2000 Darwin Award: At the Grand Canyon, the edges are roped off for obvious reasons. Many people toss coins onto the ledges below like a dry wishing well. One man decided to capitalize on this by climbing down and collecting the coins. When he tried to jump back up, the weight of the coins in the bag caught him off balance. He soon found himself in the same place as coins that didn’t stay on the ledge.
10. 1999 Darwin Award: One man (do you see a pattern here?) decided to rob a clothing store named the Dum Dum Botique (great name, huh?).  In order to do this, he bent the bars guarding the windows and jumped in.  Unfortunately, his sweater caught on the bars. He was found the next day strangled to death by his sweater.
11. 1998 Darwin Award: A car thief thought he was helping out the people he stole from by eventually torching the car so they could at least claim insurance on it. When he torched his last van from the inside he didn’t realize the driver’s side door handle was broken. His body was later found inside the burned van.
12. 1997 Darwin Award: A man died of a cobra bite. Not because he happened upon it outside.  No, this man reached into the tank of his friend’s pet cobra.  When it bit him, he refused to go to the hospital saying, “I’m a man, I can take it.”
13. 1996 Darwin Award: A lawyer was showing his law students the strength of a skyscraper’s window by ramming it with his shoulder.  It wasn’t the first time he did this, but it was the quickest trip to the first floor that he ever had.