The Darwin Awards: How Stupid Can Someone Be

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

The Darwin Awards: How Stupid Can Someone Be

The Darwin Awards salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it…

The Darwin Awards is a website of story’s, some confirmed and some not, of just how stupid can someone be in the art of dying or coming close to it.

Some of the story’s are very painful to read while others will have you giggle or going, OMG! what a moron.   Either way its a very good read.

How Stupid Can Someone Be:
Here’s one of my favorite story’s.

Lawn Chair Larry
1982 At-Risk Survivor
Confirmed True by Darwin

So honestly how stupid can someone be?  Take Larry here all he wanted to do was fly which is something I am sure many of  us would love to do but Larry went about it all wrong.

He purchased 45 weather balloons from an Army-Navy surplus store, tied them to his tethered lawn-chair and filled the four-foot diameter balloons with helium.

Then, armed with some sandwiches, Miller Lite, and a pellet gun, he strapped himself into his lawnchair. He figured he would shoot to pop a few of the many balloons when it was time to descend.

When his friends cut the cord anchoring the lawnchair to his Jeep, he did not float lazily up to 30 feet. Instead he streaked into the LA sky as if shot from a cannon, pulled by the lift of 45 helium balloons, holding 33 cubic feet of helium each.

He didn’t level off at 100 feet, nor did he level off at 1000 feet. After climbing and climbing, he leveled off at 16,000 feet.

At that height he felt he couldn’t risk shooting any of the balloons, lest he unbalance the load and really find himself in trouble. So he stayed there, drifting cold and frightened with his beer and sandwiches, for more than 14 hours.

He crossed the primary approach corridor of LAX, where startled Trans World Airlines and Delta Airlines pilots radioed in reports of the strange sight.

Eventually he gathered the nerve to shoot a few balloons, and slowly descended. The hanging tethers tangled and caught in a power line, blacking out a Long Beach neighborhood for 20 minutes.

Larry climbed to safety, where he was arrested by waiting members of the LAPD. As he was led away in handcuffs, a reporter dispatched to cover the daring rescue asked him why he had done it.

Larry replied nonchalantly, “A man can’t just sit around.”

The Federal Aviation Administration was not amused. Safety Inspector Neal Savoy said, “We know he broke some part of the Federal Aviation Act, and as soon as we decide which part it is, a charge will be filed.”

Other Darwin Story’s

This site is filled with story’s like that but one of my other favorite’s on this site is called “Scrotum Self-Repair” Confirmed true by the doctor who saw this patient.

Reading this story literally made me queasy and I don’t get that way very often especially from reading something.

I’ll let you read the full details but the short version of this story is that this guy was lonely and in the shop so he decided to have fun with the grinder.  Just saying that makes me ill lol.

Anyway things go way wrong, I mean really really wrong.  Lets just say I don’t think he dated much before and defiantly didn’t date much after this incident.

So how stupid can someone be? Visit the Darwin Awards to find out.