Actually, I don’t think he qualifies for a Darwin Award since the stunt appears only to have hurt him — you have to die in order to earn a Darwin — but he is a prime example of how natural selection weeds out people who don’t think things through:
Animation courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
My favourite part is the surfboard coup de grace at the end.
If you have any ideas of what a successful outcome of the stunt would like, please feel free to explain in the comments.
Here’s a collection of interesting memes, pictures, an cartoons floating around the internet that I…
Tap to see the source. This is yesterday’s daily New Yorker cartoon, created by Brendan…
C’mon, let it not be Asians this time. Last time was pretty bad. Here’s the…
Jon Stewart’s right, and we’ve been here before. Where we are now, I’ve been before…
Poppies thrive in overturned soil, which is why they bloom in battlefields. I’m in the…
In times of high dudgeon, there’s a tendency to throw integrity out the window. One…
View Comments
That's gotta hurt.
That is truly scary. I wonder if it has to do with a lack of experiential science education. I know I would have tried that with a inanimate object first, and probably would have realized that this just wasn't going to work. We used to make ski jumps out of bales of hey, snow and ice, building them up bit by bit, and digging a pit that we'd fill with fluffy snow. Observation and practice with smaller things stopped us from trying something royally stupid while learning how far we could push things. I taught my students how to make batteries out of lemons and showed them how much less power there was than a 9v, and let them extrapolate on the feeling they'd get going from 0.7v to a 9v to 110, then bringing in the notion of DC vs AC. I doubt anyone with lots of learning experiences like that would go and jam a live wire in their mouths, or try to surf down the side of a building on to hard earth.
The mind boggles.
Seems to me he was probably trying to do a 'surf off the house' thing.
As best I can tell, it wass a matter of the board jerking still for a sec while he tried to balance on it, when he expected it to keep moving (mmm...friction co-efficients), causing him to fall forward. It's a fairly shallow glide, and a short fall. He probably would have done ok if he'd had a friend help him on and give a little jump instead of trying to hook in on the fly.
Crazy kids...
Not that I ever jumped my old bike off a car when I was a kid or anything...
depending how how badly he was injured by the surfboard, that could qualify him for the (dis?)Honorable Mention - if it prevents him from passing along the stupid gene.
Since the official wording of the Darwin Awards is to the effect of "removing themselves from the reproductive pool," I believe that exceptions have been made on occasion for people who survived their stupidity but were rendered sterile thereby.
To qualify for a Darwin Award, you have to remove yourself from the gene pool. This is usually done by dying but there have been some others. There was the guy whose pickup truck wouldn't go because of a blown fuse and he discovered that his rifle shells were the same size and the truck would start if he put a (live) round of ammo in place of the fuse (aimed at his crotch as he drove along while the shell was slowly heated by the electricity).
This begs the question, can someone who is already removed from the gene pool still win a Darwin? For instance, a woman who is infertile or a man who's had testicular cancer.
Must one do something that actually removes one's self from the gene pool or can one simply do something that would end their reproductive fitness if they had any to remove?