Darwin Portrait. One of the last photographs taken of Charles Darwin, circa 1878. © From the Richard Milner Archive, via the American Museum of Natural History
Stupid people are like children, peeing in the crystal clear waters of our gene pool. Occasionally, a stupid person moves us one step closer to our goal of an adult swim by removing himself from the gene pool in a fashion that can only be referred to as morbidly hilarious.
And then there's the award that dares to step away from our "culture of life," and celebrate the naturally deselected. As the honor's website notes, the annual Darwin Award salutes "the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who remove themselves from it." Now that 2006 has finally rolled around—that leap second felt like an eternity—Wendy "Darwin" Northcutt, the woman behind these curious prizes, has looked back on the past year of accidents and calamities to single out four fatal faux pas for the 2005 Darwin Awards:
A 24-year-old Swiss second lieutenant picked up an award for learning a lesson Indiana Jones taught us long ago in Raiders of the Lost Ark: Don't attack with a sword if your opponent has a gun.
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While trying to demonstrate a surprise knife attack on an armed soldier, the lieutenant grabbed a bayonet and leapt at an unsuspecting young man nearby. The surprised soldier had just finished target practice with live ammunition; he had recently been trained on how to quickly release the safety catch and ready his weapon. The unsuspecting soldier used these newly honed maneuvers to save himself by preparing his gun and firing at the lieutenant with deadly accuracy. The lieutenant didn't get any posthumous medals from the Army, but he did receive a Darwin Award.
Marko, a 55-year-old man from Croatia, won a Darwin for an ill-fated attempt at chimney sweeping. No, Marko didn't fall down the chimney and asphyxiate from the smoke—that would be far too banal for these awards. Instead, since Marko's chimney was too tall for a broom to clean from below, he decided to weld a weight to a chain attached to his brush and drop the contraption from the roof through the chimney. He had the brush, he had a chain, all he needed was the weight. He found an ideal attachment: small, heavy and apparently perfectly weldable.
It wasn't until poor Marko began to weld the object to the chain that he realized his weight wasn't some deformed Bocce ball. Rather, it was a hand grenade packed with explosive material. The grenade's contents ignited when Marko heated the metal, and the blast that killed him most likely added more soot to the chimney.
A 21-year-old named Nguyen from Vietnam snagged a Darwin mention for staking his life on a claim that an old, rusty detonator wouldn't explode. He put the device in his mouth and boldly told a friend to plug him in to a 220-volt socket.
Had the detonator merely conducted the electricity, Nguyen would have had a very bad day: 220 volts to the chest can cause a cardiac emergency, and Nguyen's salty, wet saliva would have conducted plenty of current to his mouth, giving him an excruciating electric shock. But electrocution was the least of Nguyen's worries. His flawed belief that the detonator wouldn't detonate would be his undoing. The explosion blew out his cheeks and teeth, and he died on the way to the hospital.
The final award comes a bit late for the late Philip Quinn of Kent, Washington. On November 30th, 2004, for some reason, the 24-year-old Quinn placed a lava lamp on his stove. Maybe he was disappointed with its meager bubbling and hoped that a slow boil would improve the effect.