IJMC - The Darwin Awards?

I've sent out things under the auspice of the "Darwin Awards" before. I 
still think they're composed by different people every year...and no one 
has ever been able to point me at the actual creator/mantainor. The 
closest I've come is some DJ in California. But, regardless of whose they 
are...they're ususaly painfully hilarious...                       -dave






Proof that the gene pool could use a little chlorine (a.k.a. Darwin Award
candidates and winners).

* BUXTON, N.C. A man died on a beach when an 8-foot-deep hole he had dug
into the sand caved in as he sat inside it. Beachgoers said Daniel Jones,
21, dug the hole for fun, or protection from the wind, and had been
sitting in a beach chair at the bottom Thursday afternoon when it
collapsed, burying him beneath 5 feet of sand. People on the beach on the
Outer Banks used their hands and shovels, trying to claw their way to
Jones, a resident of Woodbridge, Va., but could not reach him. It took
rescue workers using heavy equipment almost an hour to free him while
about 200 people looked on. Jones was pronounced dead at a hospital. "You
just wouldn't believe the outpouring of concern, people digging with their
hands, using pails from kids," Dare County Sheriff Bert Austin said. 

* In February, Santiago Alvarado, 24, was killed in Lompoc, Calif., he
fell face-first through the ceiling of a bicycle shop he was burglarizing.
Death was caused when the large flashlight he had placed in his mouth (to
keep his hands free) crammed against the base of his skull as he hit the
floor. 

* According to police in Dahlonega, Ga., ROTC cadet Nick Berrena, 20, was
stabbed to death in January by fellow cadet Jeffrey Hoffman, 23, who was
trying to prove that a knife could not penetrate the flak vest Berrena was
wearing. 

* Sylvester Briddell, Jr., 26, was killed in February in Selbyville, Del.,
as he won a bet with friends who said he would not put a revolver loaded
with four bullets into his mouth and pull the trigger. 

* In February, according to police in Windsor, Ont., Daniel Kolta, 27, and
Randy Taylor, 33, died in a head-on collision, thus earning a tie in the
game of chicken they were playing with their snowmobiles. 

* In October, a 49-year-old San Francisco stockbroker, who "totally zoned
when he ran," according to his wife, accidentally jogged off a
200-foot-high cliff on his daily run. 

* In September in Detroit, a 41-year-old man got stuck and drowned in two
feet of water after squeezing headfirst through an 18-inch-wide sewer
grate to retrieve his car keys. 

* In September, a 7-year- old boy fell off a 100-foot-high bluff near
Ozark, Ark., after he lost his grip swinging on a cross that marked the
spot where another person had fallen to his death in 1990. 

******DARWIN AWARD WANNA-BE'S******

* In Guthrie, Okla., in October, Jason Heck tried to kill a millipede with
a shot from his .22-caliber rifle, but the bullet ricocheted off a rock
near the hole and hit pal Antonio Martinez in the head, fracturing his
skull. 

* In Elyria, Ohio, in October, Martyn Eskins, attempting to clean out
cobwebs in his basement, declined to use a broom in favor of a propane
torch and caused a fire that burned the first and second floors of his
house. 

* Paul Stiller, 47, was hospitalized in Andover Township, N.  J., in
September, and his wife Bonnie was also injured, by a quarter-stick of
dynamite that blew up in their car. While driving around at 2 a.m., the
bored couple lit the dynamite and tried to toss it out the window to see
what would happen, but they apparently failed to notice that the window
was closed.