It seems there are times when stupidity is a revered trait rather than a handicap. Of course, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with stupid people. Who else could do the tedious tasks which would send intelligent folks round the twist in an hour? We need people to work in McDonald’s. We need checkout assistants. We need night-club bouncers (ok, strike that last example). If nothing else, they provide amusing clippings for TC… In modem life, idiocy often goes unpunished, people aren’t responsible for the consequences of their actions, and intelligence is no longer cherished, rewarded, or necessary. Back in primitive days, if you were dumb, you died. The stupid didn’t live to pass on their genes to any offspring. Thus, the gradual improvement in humankind, through the slow but steady process of evolution.

Certain individuals still bravely sacrifice themselves for the gene pool. The “Darwin Awards” honour those who do away with themselves in spectacularly stupid ways. This year’s winner came after the Arizona Highway Patrol found a pile of smouldering metal embedded in a cliff above a curve on the road. It looked like a plane crash, but turned out to be a car, though it was impossible to tell what sort until the forensics had been over it. It appears the driver had stuck a Jet Assisted Take Off unit — used by heavy army transport planes taking off from short runways — onto his Chevy Impala, found a stretch of desert road, and put his foot down…

The facts as best as could be determined are that the operator of the 1967 Impala hit the JATO ignition at a distance of approximately 4 miles from the crash site” said the report. If the JATO worked properly, it would have reached maximum thrust in five seconds, causing the Chevy to hit well over 350 mph. The driver, “soon to be a pilot” as the report puts it, would have felt G-forces of the type experienced by dog-fighting F-14 jocks under full afterburners, “basically causing him to become insignificant for the remainder of the event.” The car remained on the tarmac for 2.5 miles before the driver tried — and completely melted — the brakes, blowing the tyres and leaving thick rubber marks on the road surface. It then became airborne for an additional 1.4 miles, hitting the cliff face 125 ft up and leaving a blackened crater 3 ft deep in the rock. Most of the driver’s remains were not recoverable; however small fragments of bone, teeth and hair were extracted from the crater and fingernail and bone shards were removed from a piece of debris believed to be a portion of the steering wheel…

Winners in the ‘team’ category were the six people, including four from the same family, who drowned when they jumped into a well to save a chicken in South Egypt. According to al-Ahram newspaper, the chicken had fallen into a farmer’s well in the village of Nazlet Emara in Sohag province. The farmer’s son (18) quickly dived in to try and save it, but slipped and drowned. His two brothers and sister, aged 20, 16 and 14 respectively, jumped in one after the other to save him, but all met the same fate. Two neighbours who came to the siblings’ rescue also drowned. A police team which removed the corpses from the well found the chicken alive and floating in the water. [Reuters, 1-8-95]

[continued elsewhere in TC…]