Bottom of the News… Friday, June 27, 2008

Good morning my fellow Rotarians… Well, it's that time again... The annual Darwin Awards were recently announced. These awards recognize people who kill themselves in the most extraordinarily stupid ways. Yes, they have awards for this and please know that each of these are true!

To begin, here are a few of the semifinalists...

Snake Catcher
A man in Alabama died from rattlesnake bites. It seems that he and a friend were playing a game of catch, using the rattlesnake as a ball. The friend, no doubt a future Darwin Awards candidate, was hospitalized.

Bungee Jumper
A 22-year-old Reston, VA , man was found dead after he tried to use octopus straps to bungee jump off a 70-foot rail road trestle. Fairfax County police said the man taped the straps around one foot and anchored the other end to the railroad trestle. Citing the apparent cause of death as “major trauma”, investigators noted that the length of the cord was longer than the distance between the trestle and the ground.

Cigarette Lighter
Warehouse employees in west Texas noticed the smell of a gas and sensibly, management evacuated the building extinguishing all potential sources of ignition; lights, power, etc. Upon evacuation, two technicians from the gas company entered the building, but found difficulty navigating in the dark without lights.

After a massive explosion, investigators surmised that one of the technicians must have used a cigarette lighter for light. The explosion was massive, sending objects up to three miles away and nothing was found of the technician’s bodies. The lighter however was found and was virtually untouched by the explosion.

Rocket Scientist
Now, the winner of this year's Darwin Award (awarded, as always, posthumously):

The Arizona Highway Patrol found a smoldering pile of metal embedded in the side of a cliff rising above the road at the apex of a curve. The wreckage resembled the site of an airplane crash, but it was a car. The type of car was unidentifiable at the scene. Police investigators finally pieced together the mystery.

A rocket scientist from Arizona had somehow obtained a Jet Assisted Take Off unit (or JATO), which is a solid fuel rocket that is used to give heavy military transport planes an extra 'push' for taking off from short airfields.

The scientist took his Chevy Impala to a long stretch of road in the desert, attached the JATO unit to his car and after getting up some speed fired off the rocket.

It appears that the 1967 Impala hit the JATO ignition at a distance of approximately 3.0 miles from the crash site. The JATO would have caused the Chevy to hit 350 mph running at that speed for 20-25 seconds. The driver, and soon to be pilot, would have experienced G-forces comparable to what F-14 pilots experience under full afterburners and he most likely passed out before the crash.

Marks on the highway show the car became airborne for his last 1.4 miles. He hit the cliff face at a height of 125 feet leaving a blackened crater 3 feet deep in the rock. Most of the driver's remains were not recoverable.

And these are the 2007 Darwin award winners, or subtitled… “Stupid ways to kill yourself!” There you have it, the Bottom of the News for this Friday, June 27, 2008.
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