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Darwin Awards Thread

Ziggurat said:
Is that a Darwin award, or just bad luck? Doesn't that kind of depend on the cause of death? Diving underwater isn't by itself remarkable, and I don't see why the proposal added significant risk. So what about it makes it award worthy?
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I would suggest that since diving under water is not, by itself, remarkable, and since the couple involved were already obviously a couple, renting an underwater vacation cabin and all, a person who manages to drown (presuming that he was not eaten by a shark or something) is worthy of a Darwin award for undertaking an unnecessarily dramatic romantic task for which he was, quite clearly, not suited.
 
smartcooky said:
D
"An Isis fighter was killed by his own drone bomb when the hapless jihadi forgot to charge the device's batteries - sending it straight back to him when its power ran low."

We learned this idiot had wired up his drone with explosives but was killed when its batteries ran low and it flew home."

"With a weak signal for some reason it detonated over his head."​
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Don't know if that one's true but a similar incident did happen in Afghanistan in 2001. A JTAC attached to a group of US special forces and Afghan security forces inadvertently called down a 2000lb JDAM (a GPS-guided bomb) onto his own position when he changed his designator unit's batteries. The unit was programmed to reinitialise with its own GPS coordinates on a battery change. That does seem rather a significant design flaw in a unit supposed to be used for directing very large lumps of free falling high explosive.

Maybe the jihadi's GPS thingy reinitialised with it's own position too?
 
bruto said:
I would suggest that since diving under water is not, by itself, remarkable, and since the couple involved were already obviously a couple, renting an underwater vacation cabin and all, a person who manages to drown (presuming that he was not eaten by a shark or something) is worthy of a Darwin award for undertaking an unnecessarily dramatic romantic task for which he was, quite clearly, not suited.
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Without a cause of death, it's not at all clear that he was unsuited to what he was doing.

I'll give you an example. Scuba diving is a fairly safe activity. There's some risk, but it's not that high. And it's certainly well within the ordinary risks that people willingly take in order to do something fun, and which the Darwin Awards specifically says doesn't qualify.

But if you get a pneumothorax (collapsed lung) while you're scuba diving, that can kill you, quick. There's almost nothing that can be done if you develop one under water (there's lots you can do and much less danger on dry land), and they can occur spontaneously. So if someone dies of a pneumothorax while scuba diving, that's not a Darwin award. That's just bad luck.

Now I'm not saying I think this guy died of a pneumothorax. I've got no idea how he died. But that's sort of the point: without that knowledge, there's no way we can evaluate his qualifications for the award.
 
TX50 said:
Don't know if that one's true but a similar incident did happen in Afghanistan in 2001. A JTAC attached to a group of US special forces and Afghan security forces inadvertently called down a 2000lb JDAM (a GPS-guided bomb) onto his own position when he changed his designator unit's batteries. The unit was programmed to reinitialise with its own GPS coordinates on a battery change. That does seem rather a significant design flaw in a unit supposed to be used for directing very large lumps of free falling high explosive.

Maybe the jihadi's GPS thingy reinitialised with it's own position too?
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Modern commercial and retail drones literally "return to base" when their battery power drops below a certain level. With the really expensive models, it calculates how much battery power it needs to get back from where it is to where it was launched from, and when that level is reached, it ignores further RC inputs and heads for home.
 
arthwollipot said:
Maybe in the thread in which we discussed the case?
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Ah, missed that one. Last post was in May, so it's fallen well off the front page since then. My only thought was, my god, how stupid can you get? So I thought in terms of Darwin Award.

As to the mother's lawsuit, I don't know if she has a good case. Her son was a grown man, and free to make his own choices, however foolish they might be.

However, she might have grounds if what he did was illegal. Just as if his dom had given him a lethal dose of illegal drugs.

The article above says:
The five men worked hard to make their bodies as large as possible, lifting weights for multiple hours a day and eating vast amounts. In pursuit of a sexual fetish for huge genitals, they would inject their penises and testicles with saline to temporarily enlarge them. They would later graduate to using silicone to permanently engorge their genitals. The latter procedure is both illegal and dangerous, and it proved lethal for Tank. He died of a pulmonary embolism induced by his injections in October 2018.

Dylan never notified Linda or Ben Chapman of Tank’s illness, hospitalization, or death, according to the complaint, and he presented himself as having legal authority over Tank’s remains, which were cremated. Tank spent a week in the hospital, part of it in a coma, but his mother would not learn of his fate until a week after his death, the complaint states.
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Say for example, that a dom and a sub are engaging in consensual breath play. The dom accidentally kills the sub. Would that not be some kind of homicide? At least manslaughter. Certain extreme fetishes are inherently dangerous.
 
AJM8125 said:
See if this potential Darwin worthy anecdote from my youth gets a chuckle -

Two of my older brother's more intelligent friends, let's call them Mutt & Jeff because I've forgotten their real names, were low on drug money and exploring their options when Mutt had an idea. Seems Mutt's aunt had a vacation cabin in The Sierra Nevada which apparently had some high-end stereo equipment in it. They would drive to the mountains and burglarize the cabin.

Once they arrived at the cabin, Mutt tells Jeff to wait in the car and be the look out. That was the last time Mutt was seen alive. Jeff searched for Mutt but gave up when night fell and the temperature dropped into the teens. Jeff abandoned Mutt, drove back to Sacramento and told Mutt's parents, who reported him missing to the authorities.

Mutt's body was found stuck in the chimney at his Aunt's cabin. Apparently he tried breaking into the cabin by going in that way. Head first. He froze to death.
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It's happened again:
Body of missing Ohio teen found wedged inside chimney
 
rjh01 said:
I think the real problem is that chimneys should have small exit holes, that are too small for a person to get in. If they are made unusable then this should be done at the exit.

If the above had been done that this teen would still be alive.
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Or a sign mounted at the top of the chimney.

"Death is watching and will take anyone who enters this hole."
 
I agree, a chimney would be best capped in a way that a stupid person cannot climb down it in the first place, but there is always the possibility that a person of sufficient stupidity might open it up anyway.

I once lived in a truly colonial Connecticut house whose chimney was so capacious that a mason repointed it inside by being lowered down inside on a rope. And he was not a thin man. Even so, like most such chimneys it had a smoke shelf, so that one could not get all the way down it. He had to go up the rope to get out.

Maybe one of the basic items of early education should be on how chimneys are made. Challenge them to understand why you can have a fire when it rains. People who live in houses with chimneys should invite their kids to look up them. If you can't see the sky from below you can't reach the bottom from above!
 
arthwollipot said:
Way back when, I used to follow the Darwin awards pretty closely. But then they started to get depressing and I stopped.
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Well, I must confess I never found them as hilarious as some people seem to, but I fail to see much depressing about them. Person X dying because person Y ran him over on the sidewalk is tragic. Person X dying because he jumped onto a highway to moon incoming traffic (which actually happened) is reassuringly delaying the inevitable onset of the idiocracy ;) Or person X dying because some roof beam collapsed and he ended up wedged somewhere while repairing the roof is tragic. Person X dying because she's a cougar who can't live without her ex-boytoy and decides to tresspass and attempt breaking and entering by climbing down his chimney (again, actually happened; scratch one more to chimneys) is just good riddance.

And honestly I feel that the same standard should be (and with the exception of a few cases IS the standard) in litigation too. A few juries seem to go out of their way to award money to idiots who indirectly inflicted self harm, just out of pity that the poor old gal can't afford the medical bills or other sympathy-related reasons. Well, maybe vote for universal health care then, not decide to play Robin Hood.
 
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"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die." Mel Brooks

But I see where you're coming from. The internet has sadly ruined any delusions I may have had about human empathy.
 
The guy getting trapped in the chimney while he was trying to burgle the house, and his mate running away rather than rescuing him, had a certain macabre humour. A child becoming trapped in a chimney while exploring an abandoned house and dying slowly of thirst while trapped isn't funny in the slightest.
 
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