DARWIN AWARDS 2008

DARWIN AWARDS 2008

“Named in honor of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, the Darwin Awards commemorate those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.”

It must be granted that the annual Darwin Awards, as ghoulish as they are, serve as reminders to residents of Planet Earth that a whole lot of stupidity exists on the third rock from the sun.

They “celebrate” people who have committed some of the dumbest stunts imaginable, which stunts usually result in a fatality thereby substantiating Charles Darwin’s theory that only the fittest beasts and other life forms of the Earth survive. The others, those that don’t make the cut such as the Labrador duck or the hog-nose skunk, don’t necessarily shuffle off this mortal coil into oblivion and extinction due to stupidity but rather misfortune.

Not so with the human beast, the human species, as recognized by the contemporary Darwin Awards. Homo sapiens seem to thrive on stupidity.

The official Darwin Awards website, http://www.darwinawards.com/, features the chosen mottos of the organization, including, “Chlorinating the Gene Pool,” “Where Evolution Hits the Pavement,” and “The Tree of Life is Self-Pruning,” all of which, although harsh, are easily verifiable by news events large and small.

That website also includes a quotation from the late, acerbic comic and social observer, George Carlin: “Just think how stupid the average person is,
and then realize that half of them are even stupider!”

Past Darwin Awards have been given to Texas public officials investigating the causes of an accidental, double electrocution who attempted to recreate the scene of the deadly mishap, resulting in the double electrocution of the two investigators. Another Texas winner was the alcoholic with a throat ailment who couldn’t drink his favorite adult beverage so gave himself an enema of 3 litres of sherry and was dead the next morning. Finally, showing that Texans don’t have a dumb monopoly, there was the story coming out of Ghana in which a tribesman covered himself with a lotion thought to make him impervious to bullets and invited fellow tribesmen to shoot at him, and he was promptly killed.

Dumb tales are legion.

The winner for 2008 as determined by votes of Darwin aficionados was “The Balloon Priest.” The good father’s heart was in the right place, raising funds for charity, but his lawn chair was in the wrong place, attached to clustered, helium-filled balloons. Emulating a previous effort, by “Lawn Chair Larry” in 1982...

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CRINGE, FUNNY, AND IRRELEVANT TALES

CRINGE, FUNNY, AND IRRELEVANT TALES

There were 8 million stories in the old “Naked City” television series and it sometimes seems another 8 million hit the newswires daily. Some few are cringe-worthy, some evoke a chuckles, but most are overblown instances of the need for newspeople to publish or perish, aka, Who Cares Stories.

CRINGE STORIES:

A. Madonna to buy off Guy Ritchie with a divorce settlement of up to $90 million: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D953B1Q01&show_article=1. This is cringe-worthy only because Ritchie should have taken the multi-wed slut from Michigan for at least $100 million!

B. Honest to goodness cringe story: United States Excluded from Latin America Summit: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a0a8IQrfwSFU&refer=worldwide. China, Russia, and even Iran are making inroads with our Latin neighbors and making a joke of the nearly two century old Monroe Doctrine which defined that area as part of our “sphere of influence.” The handwriting is on history’s wall and it reads, “America’s Day is Over.” All empires eventually reach a conclusion but the American Empire is going into the dustbin of history with barely a fight. T.S. Eliot called it in “The Hollow Men:” which ends, “This is the way the [American] world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.”

On the lighter side,

CHUCKLE STORIES:

A. The Iraqi shoe-thrower: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/15/mideast/shoe.php. Although I realize throwing one’s shoe at someone is considered a deep insult in the Arab world, as is just exposing the soles of one’s shoes, which is the reason Arabs wash their feet before entering a mosque. I don’t know or care about the derivation of that tradition but both the shoe-throw-as-insult and the foot washing no doubt find their origins in all that camel dung that Arabs probably step in daily and I imagine camel dung caked on shoes or sandals or between toes isn’t a pretty sight. President Bush, to his credit, seemed entertained rather than upset as he deftly dodged the missiles and kept smiling. Personally, I’d hurl my shoes and my dirty jockeys at any leader of the military that humiliated and defeated my country. Living in a third-rate nation must be a daily downer.

B. New York’s Fat Tax: ...

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