COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES -- peter buffa
You’ve probably heard of them. Maybe not. The Darwin Awards. Fascinating
stuff. There are a number of organizations that claim to be the official
arbiters of the annual Darwin Awards, but it’s really a constantly
evolving list of stories about people who have removed themselves from
this imperfect world through acts of unimaginable stupidity.
Hopefully, the connection between people who go on to their greater
reward in this way and Darwinism is obvious, because we are on sensitive
ground here and I’m not about to explain it.
I can’t imagine why, but I get a lot of e-mail, calls, etc., about new
contenders for Darwin Awards. The relative incidence of
death-by-stupidity has become so intense in recent months that, as Willie
Lowman’s wife in “Death of a Salesman” said, “... attention must be
paid.”
As you know, last Sunday was the day we set our clocks back. You know,
“Spring forward, Fall back.” I love those pithy sayings. It’s what I
remember best from eight years of Catholic grade school. Know how to
remember when to use “desert” and when to use “dessert?” You always want
two servings of dessert, so it has two S’s. Know when to use “principle”
versus “principal?” The principal is your pal. Get it? “Principal ...
pal?” I got a million of those. You’re lucky I only get so much space.
Where were we? Ah, yes. The Darwin Awards.
You may recall a recent news item about a pair of car bombings in two
Israeli cities. Incredibly, the explosives in each car detonated
prematurely, killing all the terrorists, save one, far from their
intended targets and, fortunately, minimizing the mayhem they had
planned. Only recently were the details of what really happened released.
Apparently, Israel switches between daylight savings and standard time as
do we, but its neighbors do not. The bombers crossed the Israeli border
the day before their planned reign of terror. At some point, they noticed
the time difference and adjusted their watches accordingly.
Unfortunately for them, no one remembered that the timing devices on the
car bombs were now set an hour later than the time on their watches. When
each big bang turned into a big dud, the 60-minute error was just long
enough for the terrorists to climb back into their cars and travel far
from the center of each city, thinking they were on their way back home
which, I suppose you could say, they were. Result? Instant Darwin Award
winners.
In August, a German man wanted to get a good view of a near-total eclipse
of the sun, which, he calculated, would occur during a business trip he
was making on the autobahn. To be safe, he purchased a pair of
near-opaque glasses, with which to view the celestial pyrotechnics.
Unfortunately, instead of pulling off the road, he decided to observe the
solar eclipse through, appropriately enough, the sunroof. When he glanced
back to the road, he discovered, sadly, that opaque glasses are good for
watching eclipses but bad for driving -- especially at the average
autobahn speed of Mach 2. It was a spectacular single-car crash, and a
well-deserved Darwin Award winner.
In Japan, a current fashion craze for young women is outlandish hair
colors, micro-minis and outrageously tall platform shoes -- anywhere
between six and 12 inches tall. Last Monday, a 25-year-old woman was
killed when she drove into a wall at high speed because her platform shoe
became wedged between the brake pedal and the accelerator, making it
impossible to stop.
It was, in fact, the second Darwin-eligible death this year directly
attributable to platform shoes. The story jogged my memory and sent me
scurrying to my files to find a list of excuses extracted from police
reports of traffic accidents around the country:
1. “The pedestrian was uncertain which way to run, so I ran over him.”
2. “The other car collided with mine without giving warning of its
intention.”
3. “A truck backed through my windshield into my wife’s face.”
4. “My car was legally parked when it backed into the other vehicle.”
5. “A pedestrian hit me, then went under my car.”
6. “I was attempting to kill a fly when I drove into the telephone pole.”
It’s OK, bud. At least you weren’t watching an eclipse.
My sentimental favorite was a recent Darwin Award candidate who was
ultimately disqualified because no one actually died.
In the Midwest, a woman came home, walked into her kitchen and found her
husband clutching a counter top, shaking violently and jerking his head
back and forth -- apparently being electrocuted before her eyes. She had
the presence of mind not to touch him, charged outside and found a piece
of 2-by-4 beside the kitchen door. She ran back to the kitchen, reared
back and whacked her still convulsing husband as hard as she could,
knocking him to the floor and breaking his wrist in the process.
Only then was he able to rip the headphones from his ears and scream,
“What the [expletive] are you doing?” Thinking he was home alone, he had
strapped on his headphones, cranked up his favorite track on his mini-CD
player, and got a little carried away with his dancing.
The story may not have earned a Darwin Award, but I think it’s a valuable
insight into the special way of communicating that every long-term
relationship needs to survive. I gotta go.
* PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Fridays. He
can be reached via e-mail at o7 PtrB4@AOL.comf7 .
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