The Darwin Awards 2010

    The Darwin Awards (darwinawards.com) are given each year to "commemorate those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it."  The winners (or "losers") for 2010 include the following: 

• A man who kept ramming his wheelchair into the closed elevator doors until they opened and allowed him and his chair through.  His last thoughts were surely questions about the whereabouts of the elevator.  Perhaps his disability wasn't only physical.

• The Brazilian couple who decided to copulate in their car…stopped on the freeway…in the fog.  How do we know that's what they were doing?  The positions of their corpses after the big rig ran over their little car.  Not one, not two, but three stupid decisions.  Maybe the Shakers were onto something.

• The hunter who, while crossing a glacier behind his partner, watched the other man slide down the ice sheet and over the edge.  After hearing the man yell that he was okay, the award winner decided to slide down over the edge himself.  Before he hit the rocks 100 feet below he uttered a single word, evidence that he had time to comprehend his stupidity after seeing his friend clinging to the only tree branch just below the lip of ice.  Do you know what it means when you "assume" something?

• The man (the award winner) and his friend, both race car mechanics, who thought they could ride a 55-gallon barrel across a parking lot if they poured 4 gallons of methanol in the barrel and lit it.  They may have been better off drinking this wood alcohol, as it is also known, instead of holding a match to it.

• The man who attempted to keep alive a two-generation family tradition by welding a broken soil tamper used to compact garden soil.  The heat from the welder caused the WWII cannon shell to explode.  Spend a buck or two and buy the right tool.

• The 20-year-old woman who hit the guardrail after falling out of her T-top Chevy at high speed.  She was attempting to change places with her passenger.  They do it in the movies all the time.

• The man who leapt onto a small plateau, across an expanse above the Grand Canyon, to retrieve coins tourists had tossed there.  He made it, collected a significant amount of money, and jumped back to the main rim.  At least, he attempted the jump back.  He may have underestimated the additional weight of the bag of coins which followed his plunging body to the valley floor.  This is why I don't like standing near the edge nor watching others stand near it.

• The South African woman who, aware of the danger, swam across the crocodile-infested river two and a half times.

• The Brazilian man who installed an electric fence around his car after a rash of robberies in his neighborhood, and then forgot to turn it off before attempting to get in his car in the morning.  I'm shocked that another Brazilian earned one of these awards.

• The Dutch man who, while participating in the New Year's Eve tradition of "carbide shooting," decided to stoke the fire by pouring a container of liquid oxygen on it.  I don't even squirt charcoal lighter fluid on a flame.

          On an unrelated topic, unless you believe the State of California will be on this list of Darwin award winners next year, here are a few of the 750 new state laws that took effect on January 1st.

     One of the 750 makes participation in a betting pool (you know, those football pools that surface in offices and lunch rooms every January?) an "infraction."  That puts it on the same level as possession of up to an ounce of marijuana or receiving a traffic ticket.  What if someone places a bet while smoking a joint?  Is that equivalent to reckless driving?

     It is now also illegal for employees of a dental office to arrange credit for your dental bill while you are still under the influence of anesthesia.  Naw…they wouldn't do that, would they?