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Yay Darwin

Started by Ed, December 03, 2007, 04:46:26 PM

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Ed




Funny stuff :grin: http://www.darwinawards.com/ Basically, it's a site dedicated to telling the stories of people who have met their demise through their own stupidity.

Quote from the site:

A Chronicle of Enterprising Demises
Honoring those who improve the species...by
accidentally removing themselves from it.

***

There's also a section of near misses, filed under the 'Honourable Mentions' category. Here's a true story about a guy who dreamt of floating around in his lawn chair :grin:

1982 Honorable Mention
Confirmed True by Darwin



(1982, California) Larry Walters of Los Angeles is one of the few to contend for the Darwin Awards and live to tell the tale. "I have fulfilled my 20-year dream," said Walters, a former truck driver for a company that makes TV commercials. "I'm staying on the ground. I've proved the thing works."

Larry's boyhood dream was to fly. But fates conspired to keep him from his dream. He joined the Air Force, but his poor eyesight disqualified him from the job of pilot. After he was discharged from the military, he sat in his backyard watching jets fly overhead.

He hatched his weather balloon scheme while sitting outside in his "extremely comfortable" Sears lawnchair. He purchased 45 weather balloons from an Army-Navy surplus store, tied them to his tethered lawnchair dubbed the Inspiration I, and filled the 4' diameter balloons with helium. Then he strapped himself into his lawnchair with some sandwiches, Miller Lite, and a pellet gun. He figured he would pop a few of the many balloons when it was time to descend.

Larry's plan was to sever the anchor and lazily float up to a height of about 30 feet above his back yard, where he would enjoy a few hours of flight before coming back down. But things didn't work out quite as Larry planned.

When his friends cut the cord anchoring the lawnchair to his Jeep, he did not float lazily up to 30 feet. Instead, he streaked into the LA sky as if shot from a cannon, pulled by the lift of 42 helium balloons holding 33 cubic feet of helium each. He didn't level off at 100 feet, nor did he level off at 1000 feet. After climbing and climbing, he leveled off at 16,000 feet.

Read the rest, here - http://darwinawards.com/stupid/stupid1998-11.html
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

SamLeeFreak

It's so sad that he ended up killing himself later. I admire the moxy  of a guy like that!

rsmccoy

Love the site, hard to believe some of these people actually made it into adulthood.
It's better to burn out, than fade away...