The Darwin Awards Countdown to Extinction

by Wendy Northcutt

  Read more: www.DarwinAwards.com/book/deer

  At-Risk Survivor: The Mane Attraction

  Unconfirmed

  Featuring food, a lion, the military, and insurance

  2009, POLAND | One day a young man living in Wroclaw received a large envelope in the mail. One look and he knew exactly what it was: the draft. In Poland, when a man turns eighteen he is summoned to the medical commission to determine whether he is healthy enough to serve his country.

  There are ways to avoid being conscripted. For instance, being enrolled in higher education or providing sole financial support for a child or suffering a serious physical handicap. Our boy was completely healthy, had no kids, and was not smart enough to continue his education. In short, he was destined to serve his country. And he was determined to avoid it.

  The Polish medical commission has four categories:A. In good health, and able to serve in the army.

  D. Able to serve only during wartime.

  E. Completely unable to serve, even during war.

  B. Temporarily unable to pass the medical exam; e.g., recovering from an accident but expected to return to full health. “B” candidates must attend another medical commission in twelve months.

  Our hero wanted Category B, and another twelve months to find some way of cheating the army. But how? While playing with his cat, he was accidentally scratched, and bang ! The idea was formed. A few serious scratches and stitches would qualify him for a deferment.

  The big cat decided that such insolence must be punished.

  Our man decided that a small cat was not enough, which leads us to the Wroclaw zoo. The incidental spectators watched in amazement as he strode toward the lion cage, reached inside, and started yelling at a large male beast. The King of Cats looked in amusement upon the small being stubbornly trying to provoke him, but when the little hominid pulled its handsome mane, the big cat decided that such insolence must be punished.

  Our man’s plan worked better than he expected. He received not a B, but an E. You see, the irate lion did not simply scratch the idiot. It used its powerful jaws to bite the man’s arm off.

  This story was aired on Polish TV when the amputee sued his insurance company for failure to pay for the missing arm. The company successfully asserted that it does not cover the loss of a limb due to the bite of an intentionally provoked lion.

  Reference: Polish TV

  Reader Comment

  “A piece of advice: Never avoid the draft by provoking a lion.”

  At-Risk Survivor: Not Even Half-Baked

  Unconfirmed Personal Account

  Featuring food, a woman, and electricity

  Fewer and more fastidious, female Darwin Award contenders prefer more wholesome methods for their special acts.

  After an extended night shift, our heroine, a working mother, was exhausted but decided to stay up a few extra hours until the kids came home from school. Being a thoughtful mom and a junk-food junkie, the tired woman decided that this was the time to bake a cake.

  Her ancient yellow electric mixer had a detachable cord that plugged into the back of the appliance. Things were going well—butter, sugar, flour, cocoa—until the loose cord popped out of the old mixer and landed in the dough. Plop.

  Ever the safety-conscious professional, she carefully turned off and set aside the completely inert mixer, and lifted the cord out of the batter. But what did she do with cake batter dripping off the end of the cord? She did what anyone would do—she stuck the live electrical cord in her mouth and found herself on the floor, suddenly very wide awake. Did I mention that the old cord was un-grounded?

  Having lived to tell the tale and having reproduced she is twice disqualified from winning the Darwin Award, but there is an ironic twist. Who would relate such an idiotic thing? Who would be dumb enough to electrify herself mouth first, and honest enough to use it as a safety lesson afterward? Only an Occupational First Aid instructor, introducing the learning module on electric shock!

  What happened to the cake is anyone’s guess.

  Reference: A student of the First Aid Instructor

  WENDY’S DEADLY DINNER PARTY

  To celebrate the publication of a new Darwin Awards book, the author hosted a dinner party featuring Suspicious Mushroom Soup, E. Coli Spinach Salad, Faux Fugu, and assorted deadly delectable and toxic treats. Her centerpriece was carefully picked branch of poison oak, carried home from a walk wrapped in layers of fabric, and carefully transferred to a high-walled glass display vessel. Three days latter . . . your guessed it: She developed a pernicious poison oak rash. The moral of the story is, there is no such thing as picking poison oak safely.

  “He who teaches himself has a fool for a master.”

  —Benjamin Franklin

  At-Risk Survivor: The Great Fruitcake Incident

  Confirmed Personal Account

  Featuring a father, food, holidays, an explosion, and alcohol

  A holiday-themed personal account, with one more reason to be leery of too much Christmas cheer.

  2005 | I love cooking. Every year I bake a few fruitcakes for family and neighbors. I mix in various alcohols, so people actually eat my fruitcakes. Now, I’ve been known to experiment with various types of alcohol. In 2005, I was suffering from a shortage of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, so I searched the kitchen and settled on a bottle of tequila. After mixing a measure of the Mexican liquor into the batter, I poured it and slid the pan home.

  I was suffering from a shortage of Jack Daniel’s whiskey.

  Alcohol burns, so when you bake a fruitcake you use a low temperature. Set the oven no higher than 250 degrees so your cakes don’t catch on fire—never a good thing, and besides, it’s hard to explain why the top of the cake is charred.

  As I slid the pan in, my father came into the room. He also loved cooking, and he was darn good at it. Poking around, he started making suggestions. I remember seeing him look at my oven, look back at me, and laugh. “You’ll never get it done like that.” He reached over and turned the heat up to 350°F.

  I stood there dazed, the smell of fruitcake and burnt hair filling the air.

  Remembering my previous flambé, I sighed and reached toward the stove. I started to say, “Dad, you have to cook it that low, alcohol . . .” But all I had uttered was, “Dad . . .” when my hand touched the knob. There was this loud WHOMP ! The oven door blew open and a sheet of blue flame shot straight up out of it, burning all the hair off my arm—which never grew back!

  I stood there dazed, the smell of fruitcake and burnt hair filling the air, my dad with a look of utter shock on his face. Before heading to the ER, which he was nice enough to take me to, I managed to finish my sentence: “Alcohol burns.”

  A nd you tr y explaining to the ER that your fruitcake exploded . . .

  Reference: Chad Peters, in loving memory of his father, Harold Peters

  Reader Comments

  “More than one fruitcake in that kitchen.”

  “Now we know why fruitcake is lucky.”

  A concerned reader pointed out: “This doesn’t fill the bill, since the independent actions of two people who didn’t communicate fast enough were not, taken separately, stupid acts on the part of either.” The reader is correct. Since no self-selection is evident in The Great Fruitcake Incident, the son would not earn a Darwin Award if things had turned out badly.

  At-Risk Survivor: Hot Buns

  Confirmed by Darwin

  Featuring food, work, and an oven

  FEBRUARY 2009, SWEDEN | Welcome to Sweden, home of Swedish massage, Swedish fish, and one Swedish meatball who de - cided to warm himself in an industrial-strength oven. The incident took place during a freezing February at a facility operated by a maker of kitchen cabinets and fixtures.

  The heating system in the loading area had ceased to function, leaving a shivering truck driver defenseless against the frigid winter. Looking to escape the cold, this driver wandered toward the large oven used for shrink-wrapping and asked the operator if
he could take a spin on the oven’s conveyor belt to get warm! Although the driver was freezing his umlaut off, the hard-hearted operator denied the man’s request.

  Undaunted, the driver waited until no one was looking and managed to hoist himself onto the conveyor belt for a blissful, toast y ride. But all those Swedish smorgasbords had taken their toll. The massive trucker was too heavy for the belt and the motor shut down, leaving him stuck in the 180°C (360°F) oven!

  Undaunted, the driver waited until no one was looking . . .

  Luckily the oven operator noticed the stoppage and was able to rescue the man from the searing heat before he sustained serious damage. Following the incident, Sweden’s Work Environment Authority offered the oven operator counseling to work through the shock he suffered and intends to carry out a risk assessment of surveillance around the shrink-wrap ovens. Apparently they are too tempting to leave unguarded.

  Reference: Fox News, thelocal.se

  Reader Comments

  “Talk about a hot and cold personality!”

  “Hot stuff.”

  “Hot lips!”

  For the scientific or artistic mind, a shrink-wrap oven offers fascinating possibilities. The unfortunate masses who do not own an expensive shrink-wrap oven can use household appliances such as a hair dryer to good effect. For those with sufficient courage and an oven broiler, an empty potato chip bag can be reduced to the size of a postage stamp—with the words still legible in miniature! An intriguing glimpse into the world of home shrink-wrap experimentation:How to Shrink a Bag of Chips

  www.DarwinAwards.com/book/shrinkchips

  At-Risk Survivor: Hard Science, with Zombies!

  Unconfirmed Personal Account

  Featuring food and a hammer

  2010 | Ray and I are great fans of zombie movies and have passed many a late night in front of the TV with popcorn and DVDs. Ever since reading the Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks, Ray is convinced that hordes of the undead will one day rise up. While trying to convince me of the impending apocalypse, Ray cited two facts that I found to be in error.

  1. The human skull is one of the hardest surfaces in nature.

  2. A medieval mace lacks the stopping power to crush it.

  We argued these points for half an hour, without coming to an agreement.

  The next morning Ray texted me to come over and settle the issue. He answered the door wearing a cycle helmet and led me to the backyard, where he handed me a lump hammer (a small sledge) and told me to hit him over the head. I don’t know if the helmet would have stopped the hammer blow or not, and I wasn’t about to try it on my friend. Instead I devised a simple experiment, hoping to avoid any nasty injuries.

  Ray and I went to the supermarket to buy two coconuts, one for the experiment and one because I really like coconut. We returned to the backyard and proceeded to place a coconut on the paving. I picked up the lump hammer and with one solid blow, reduced the coconut to delicious shrapnel. As I was clearing up the shards of nutt y goodness, I said, “If that was your head, you’d be dead.”

  SILLY SCIENCE

  Zombies eat people. But do zombies eat dead people? According to Matt Mogk at the Zombie Research Society, the answer is important. If zombies continue feeding after their victims are dead, then they are effectively destroying their own reinforcements. That would be a Darwinian move.

  I turned to see Ray trying to validate my theory—by head butting the second coconut as hard as he could! Ray was fine after a few stitches, thankfully not a Darwin Award winner this time, but I’ll keep you posted.

  Incidentally Ray was vindicated. He did manage to crack the nut with a head butt. Since he proved that his skull is indeed harder than a coconut, my experiment was inconclusive.

  Reference: Pete Copping

  Reader Comments

  “The unbearable hardness of being.”

  “Jesus was a Zombie!”

  SCIENCE INTERLUDE THE MYSTERY OF SUPER-TOXIC SNAKE VENOM

  By Michael Wall

  (who managed to write this whole essay without using the word snakebite even once!)

  Too Much of a Nasty Thing?

  On March 4, 2008, a juvenile black mamba bit Nathan Layton as he hiked in the bush west of South A frica’s Kruger National Park. The twenty-eight-year-old Englishman was training to be a game ranger and was in good shape, yet he sank into a coma almost immediately and died within an hour. Layton is not under consideration for a Darwin Award—he was just unlucky enough to get nailed by one of the world’s most dangerous snakes.

  Black mambas are fast, agile, nervous, and big, reaching lengths up to fourteen feet. Among venomous snakes, only the king cobra grows longer. Mambas and cobras, their hooded cousins, belong to the family Elapidae and share a potent neurotoxic venom. Its effects are dramatic. A victim’s neurons no longer transmit messages, mus - cles fail to respond to the simplest command, and bitten animals asphy xiate as the venom scrambles nerve signals that tell the diaphragm to expand and contract.

  Kill Bill, a macabre comedy film, features assassins named after deadly snakes: Black Mamba, Cottonmouth, Copperhead, and Sidewinder. Two thumbs-up for Tarantino’s powerful ode to motherhood.

  As Layton’s quick death indicates, black mamba venom is powerful: The venom from a single bite can kill 9,400 lab mice. But mambas aren’t the toxicity champs, not by a long shot; at least twenty-two other snakes pack more of a wallop. At the top of the list is Australia’s inland taipan. This shy, inoffensive serpent—which the late Steve Irwin let tongue-flick his cheek on one episode of The Crocodile Hunter—can snuff out 100,000 lab mice with the venom from a single bite.

  These toxins are much more powerful than snakes seem to need. It’s like they’re rabbit hunting with a bazooka. And the mystery deepens when you consider how costly venom is to produce. One study showed that after being “milked,” rattlesnakes and other pit vipers jack up their metabolic rate by 11 percent for at least three days to refill their glands. So shouldn’t natural selection discourage snakes from making excessively toxic venom?

  It should, and it does. Snakes aren’t as loose with their venom as we may think.

  Mamba venom did not evolve to kill humans or lab mice. Prey animals are tough, so snakes count on their venom to immobilize their prey, and to do so fast. Many venomous snakes tackle feisty, sharp-toothed prey that can outweigh them by 50 percent— formidable foes, especially for animals without arms or legs. A single bite from a wood rat, for example, can snip right through a western diamondback rattlesnake’s spine.

  Venomous Dinosaurs? A recent fossil analysis provides the most detailed evidence yet that some dinosaurs hunted with venom. Sinornithosaurus, a carnivorous Chinese dinosaur that lived 65-100 million years ago, had fanglike front teeth and a large bony pocket in its upper jaw that likely contained a venom gland. In modern venomous taxa, this type of fang discharges venom along a groove on the outer surface of the tooth.

  The hypertoxicity of a rattlesnake’s venom helps it prevent this personal tragedy by knocking the rat out in a matter of seconds. The rattlesnake does not care whether his bite could dispatch a hundred lab mice, or a thousand. All that matters is that it dispatches one rat with a minimum of muss and fuss before the rat has a chance to dispatch him. Super-toxic venom can thus be thought of as a defensive adaptation: It helps keep snakes safe from prey.

  The threat of prey retaliation has been important in snake evolution. For example, many venomous species—including rattlesnakes—instinctively strike and release rodents, then hang back and wait for the reeling animal to keel over. Powerful venom prevents dinner from staggering too far off By contrast smaller less dangerous prey such as lizards are often simply choked down, still struggling.

  Extreme toxicity can do more than knock prey out. For example, it can—and often does—help snakes digest their dinners. This is a big deal to serpents, which swallow large animals whole.

  Think about that western diamondback again. It strikes a wood rat, tracks the dyi
ng animal by homing in on the scent of its own venom, and swallows the prey in one long gulp. Snakes don’t chew their food, so now the snake has an intact rodent clogging its gut.

  Such a meal, tempting as it is, would rot inside us before we had a chance to process it. The rattlesnake, however, has an edge: Its venom is packed with proteins that break down tissue. The snake starts digesting the rat from the inside out the moment its inch-long fangs penetrate the rodent’s furry flesh. Tissue-dissolving venom is a key adaptation that allows rattlesnakes and other vipers to consume absurdly large prey.

  The bite of a juvenile snake, as most hikers know, can be more dangerous than the bite of an adult. Young snakes are more nervous and have not yet learned to conserve ammunition!

  Another reason snake venoms are so toxic is that prey animals are tough. Animals often evolve a degree of resistance to their predators. California ground squirrels, for example, have proteins in their blood that blunt the effects of rattlesnake venom. Sure, a black mamba bite can snuff 9,400 lab mice. But a true assessment of mamba venom toxicity would measure its power to kill natural prey such as African rats. These experiments are seldom done, for it is far easier to work with common, inbred lab mice. But it’s a sure bet that venom from one mamba bite cannot take out 9,400 wild African rats.