2009 Darwin Award Winners Announced

Greg Lindahl writes "From the woman who jumped in a swollen creek to rescue her drowning moped, to the man who hopped over the divider at the edge of the highway to take a leak, and plunged 65 feet to his death, 2009 was a year both exceptional and unexceptional for Darwin Award-worthy behavior!"

Comments

While slightly humorous

[Monkeedude1212]

It's a little distasteful to insult the dead. I may get -1 flamed for this, but am I the only one who feels this way?

Re:While slightly humorous

[d34dluk3]

If they died honorably rescuing people or something, yeah. Jumping in a creek after a freaking moped, not so much.

Re:While slightly humorous

[dschmit1]

It is not the dead that are being insulted, it is the manner in which they decided to become so.

Re:While slightly humorous

[osu-neko]

It's a little distasteful to insult the dead. I may get -1 flamed for this, but am I the only one who feels this way?

It is impossible to insult the dead, although it's possible to offend their living friends and relatives...

Re:While slightly humorous

[sproingie]

For me it's not so much the mockery as the snarky self-righteousness mixed with credulity. There's a big list of folks who I'd like to keep from propagating their kind of stupidity, and the people who click "forward" on every "Darwin Award" announcement are way up there on it.

Slashdot editors: Take Darwin's picture off this. He deserves better.

Re:While slightly humorous

[osu-neko]

For me it's not so much the mockery as the snarky self-righteousness mixed with credulity. There's a big list of folks who I'd like to keep from propagating their kind of stupidity, and the people who click "forward" on every "Darwin Award" announcement are way up there on it.

Meh. People have different senses of humor. There's nothing wrong with not sharing someone else's sense of humor. There's arguably something wrong with wishing them dead because their sense of humor differs from yours...

Re:While slightly humorous

[fermion]

I understand the sentiments, but think for a second what is actually going on. The Darwin awards are publicizing fatal accidents that should not have really occurred, and they are doing so in a not so stupid way. They could have "The stupid awards for people who offed themselves in the stupidest manner possible and left there friends and family grieving as asking why things like this happen", but they don't. They have an award for people who off themselves in unexpected ways, and the hope is that since the genes were not transferred, these things never to have to happen again. In fact, by spreading the meme that stupid accidents are preventable, what they may actually be doing to saving another family from having to grieve over a family member that chooses physical possessions over life.

I do take this kind of seriously. When I was 10 and in school, one of my classmates, in fact her entire family, died instantly when they drove off an over pass or a freeway. I was brought to school over this overpass everyday. At that time there was very little traffic. To this day i wonder what the parents were thinking about, or doing, instead of driving, that was worth the life of their children. It may be disrespectful to the dead, and I admit I cannot know the circumstances around the incident, but I do certainly hold those parents in low regard.

I can't help but feel these cautionary tales are a good public service. They remind us that the world is dangerous, and the miracle is that we humans have a brain that we can use to survive. Unless we don't.

Re:While slightly humorous

[yurtinus]

All sorts of people find all sorts of things distasteful. It doesn't make anybody wrong or right. There's no reason to get judgmental over something so trivial as humor. I think our ability to sit back and chuckle at life rather than get offended is a tremendously useful trait.

Re:While slightly humorous

[spun]

Right. The lady in question was driving a moped because she had a prior DUI. She ran a police roadblock into a flooded street and ended up going over an embankment into a flooded creek. The police rescued her. She then jumped BACK into the creek.

Yes indeed, could have happened to any one of us.

But yes, things are less funny when people die because, you know, we've got so few people and it's so hard to make new ones.

Re:While slightly humorous

[winwar]

"And when you go around mocking the people who died doing something stupid, often times you are too busy laughing to know the whole story."

And how would knowing the whole story make her actions any less stupid? Her actions led to her death. Mocking her actions is a good thing-it might encourage others not to do similar things.

I'd like to think I would never do anything as stupid as that but if I do, I fully expect to be mocked for it. Because I'd deserve it.

Re:While slightly humorous

[DriedClexler]

We're not insulting them; we're honoring them for removing their genes from the gene pool before they could replicate.

Re:While slightly humorous

[CannonballHead]

Granted. Or at least, an Idiot for the Moment. Which pretty much everyone could win an award for, I dare say. For example, almost every professional sports player, it seems :)

Re:While slightly humorous

[Obfuscant]

To this day i wonder what the parents were thinking about, or doing, instead of driving, that was worth the life of their children. It may be disrespectful to the dead, and I admit I cannot know the circumstances around the incident, but I do certainly hold those parents in low regard.

What those parents were doing that was worth the life of their children was DRIVING THEM TO SCHOOL so they could turn out to be self-appointed judges for other people's mistakes, just like YOUR parents drove YOU to school so you could be here today.

You make the point for this thread better than anything anyone else has said. You have NO IDEA what happened, but you'll happily assume that the parents were grossly negligent ("instead of driving") and condemn them for an accident that may very well not have been their fault. In case you missed the point, the only difference between your saintly parents and "those parents" who are obviously scum for killing their children is that YOUR parent's child didn't die in a traffic accident and their's did. There's a saying that some civilized people use: "There but for the grace of God go I". In case you don't understand, it means "whatever it was that happened to THEM could have happened to ME, instead."

I expect you've never seen black ice form on an overpass, or a sleepy 18-wheel driver try to use your lane, or any of a thousand other things that could have caused the accident without it being the fault of "those parents" you regard so lowly. But obviously, they were negligent somehow, because YOU know they were, even after you admit you know NOTHING about what happened.

Weak.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

These are Darwin award worthy?

First off, the rigor. Minor complaint, but it'd be neat if they linked to a police report, or a newspaper article on these incidents.

Second off, the stupid. These are by far not the stupidest deaths I've read about last year. the DAs are getting weak.

I have mixed feelings about this

[yog]

We're all just one failed experiment or innocent mistake away from being on the Darwin Awards list.

Sure, that guy who jumped over the barrier to relieve himself should have been more careful. But does that mean we need to celebrate his death?

That priest with the balloons--OK, he should have bailed earlier, or figured out his GPS in advance of his trip. Clearly he made some mistakes. But he was trying to do something for a charitable cause.

Lots of smart people make dumb mistakes; we're all only human. An old saying "There but for grace of God go I" seems to apply in many of these situations.

That DUI woman who drowned in the creek--she's a pathetic sort of person, obviously lacking in common sense. But not knowing the full story (the author speculated and extrapolated an awful lot in this case) I hesitate to condemn her as deserving of the Darwin awards.

All in all it was a mediocre set of awards this year. I've seen better.

Re:I have mixed feelings about this

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, folks, stop the ululations. You observe Halloween, don't you? Dealing with our own moribundity in a mocking and offensive manner is a tradition. When the living reduce people to their spectacular death, they do so as a reflection on their own carnality. It's nothing personal and certainly not intended to diminish any noble intentions the award winners may have had. It's just a way of reminding ourselves that we're all gonna go some day.

Re:I have mixed feelings about this

[Quirkz]

We're all just one failed experiment or innocent mistake away from being on the Darwin Awards list.

No kidding. Just last weekend I was changing the lightbulb in a lamp. Took the bulb out, and noticed a bit of styrofoam or paper in socket. Thought to myself, "that shouldn't be there, it could be a fire hazard!" and stuck my finger in to fish it out. A sudden tingling/burning/biting sensation clued me in to the fact the lamp was still plugged in, and while I'd rotated the switch a couple of times in the process of realizing the bulb was out, I'd apparently left it in the ON position when I stopped.

So I took my finger out of there, inverted the lamp, and let the styrofoam fall out on its own. No real damage done in that instance, but for a sometimes intelligent person that was a brief moment of serious stupidity.

Re:I have mixed feelings about this

[lgw]

Sure, but to get a Darwin award you'd usually need to willfully bypass some safety measure, not merely make a mistake. So if your wife said "honey, that's not safe" and unplugged the lamp, and then you came up with some plan to get her out of the room just so you could plug it back in and electrocute yourself, then maybe. Also, if you inject milk into your scrotum, you've clearly gone beyond "intelligent person but brief moment of serious stupidity".

Re:Slashdotted

[CannonballHead]

No... in their eyes, that's not stupidity on their part, it's success. ;)

Why do we do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of posting a link on slashdot, causing the site to go down, why not indirectly link to it, or perhaps link to the Google cache?

Re:Slashdotted

[Atzanteol]

Priest does a "Lawn-chair Larry" for charity.

You mean "for the church." I'm not sure many would consider raising money to open chapels for truck drivers "charity" (I know I don't).

Funny as it may be...

[xlotlu]

There's two sides to every story. Watch this piece of reporting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PbFeIxrilI -- Don't you start feeling for that guy? Don't you hope he gets rescued? Well, it's the same priest that got the Darwin Award, so how is this possible? Moments ago you were amused by his idiocy...

Of course the video comes packaged in church marketing, so it's supposed to make you feel like that. But would you still call him an idiot? Or rather a stupid but noble man?

I for one would call him naive. Naive for the cause he chose, naive thinking he'll be alright after getting drifted away, naive not bailing out when he had the opportunity. And that got him killed, but he didn't give up because he thought his cause was just.

Maybe we should take pride in such naivety, instead of branding it as utter idiocy.

Re:Funny as it may be...

[ceoyoyo]

I'm going to go with idiot.

He decided to do something risky, for which he didn't have the right kind of training and he didn't even know how to use his equipment! Being an experience sky diver doesn't help you much as a balloon pilot, but it should have taught him enough to know he should be familiar with his equipment before launching.

His reason for doing it is also pretty silly. It was a publicity stunt. If he was flying a secret infiltration mission in WWII or something, fine, but a stunt to set a world record? The fund raising is irrelevant - there are smarter ways to raise money.

Times have changed

[dragmyfeet]

It appears now we ridicule people who do something unusual and pioneering (however naive), like the priest in TFA. Have we had the Darwin awards in centuries past, we would have ridiculed the death of every explorer we ever had instead of mourn it.

Does the crotch bomber qualify?

[tomohawk]

He didn't die, but he might be unable to reproduce.