I’m almost ashamed to admit that I take great pleasure in reading about the annual Darwin Awards. Every year there’s a new crop of stories detailing some poor yokel’s death by miscalculation. There’s even a category for survivors.
What draws me to these stories is the affinity I have to the poor schmucks, bless their hearts. I read once with great interest about a couple of fellows who blew a fuse in a pickup truck. Having no spare fuses handy, they replaced it with a .
22-caliber bullet. I nodded as I read, thinking, “That makes sense; they’re about the same size.” The inevitable happened — the round heated up and fired, killing one of the men — and the story ends with a Darwin Award.
Bill Perkins While it’s not something I aspire to, I fully expect to be among a group of Darwin winners eventually. One of my earliest memories involves peanut butter and pain, and set the stage for a lifetime of misadventure. I was a toddler, I believe, and had toddled my way into the kitchen, grabbed a jar of Jif from the cabinet and climbed a shelf to reach into the silverware drawer and fish around for a utensil, winding up with one of Mother’s good forks.
As I sat on the kitchen floor raking peanut butter on my tongue, I noticed that about a foot up the pine-paneled wall was an off-white rectangle with two sets of two vertical slots. I scooted over to investigate, and poked at one of the slots with my greasy fork. What came next is a blur.
There was pain, crying, and m.