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Darwin Awards 2006
ms1234 writes "The year is coming to and end so it is time to see how our genepool is doing. Darwin Awards 2006 includes everything from whacking RPGs with hammers to recreating experiments by Franklin."
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A friend of mine, who steadfastly refuses to read instructions, was assembling his new wet saw (used for cutting ceramic tile)), when I arrived at his house to help install the tile. A wet saw usually has a diamond coated blade similar to a circular saw (but without teeth), and a water reservoir and pump to cool the blade. The pump obviously has an electric cord, which is usually routed by or through the water reservoir.
Because he hadn't read the directions he had routed the pump's electric cord IN FRONT OF THE SAW BLADE, and it would have been cut in two and dropped into the water pan when he started up the saw. What's more, he had it plugged into a 30-amp circuit. Luckily for him, I saw how he had put the saw together before he fired it up.
The scary thing? He still won't read the instructions.
The one about the pastor who couldn't walk on water is either particularly hard to believe, or else it is leaving out the most critical/entertaining part of the story.
When I imagine someone trying to walk across a river, the picture that comes to mind is that the fool steps into the river and notices that his feet are wet. Then he takes a few more steps and notices that he's up to his thighs in water. At this point, he's neither dead nor still under the illusion he can walk on water.
So what happened? Did he, having lost face, decide to continue into the water and drown himself? Or did he begin his water walking in a deep part (e.g. take the ferry halfway into the river and try walking from there?). Or did he successfully walk on water until he got to the deep part, then realize how impossible it was and suddenly suffer a loss of faith and fall through the surface? ;-) Or is the story just bullshit?
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No point in arguing, but I will clarify. For the "modern medicine", I'm not speaking of the sick and weak but more specifically dealing with the people that do dumb things that result in shooting themselves in the face or drinking themselves to oblivion and then being fixed up in the hospital. Same goes with smokers (disclaimer: both my parents smoke and my grandmother passed from lung cancer two years ago)...people smoke knowing it's going to kill them sooner than they would naturally die yet they do it and then the hospitals and keep them living, allowing the smokers to not only fill their own lungs with a cancerous death but also those non-smokers around them.
"Current laws"...one could argue helmet laws. Other laws that diminish our intelligence are all the disclaimers we have to put on everything now. "Do not stick fork in eye", "coffee is hot", etc. If someone doesn't have the common sense not to stick their hand in a blender while it is on, they probably should learn a lesson one way or the other.
I by no means want people to get hurt. It just pains me to see common sense going down the drain...and the people with lack of common sense being "rewarded" with lawsuits that pay them for their lack of common sense.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang