From: ManikGrl
Midnight Phone Call
1992 Darwin Awards Winner
Ken Charles Barger, 47, accidentally shot himself to death in December
in Newton, N. C., when, awakening to the sound of a ringing telephone
beside his bed, he reached for the phone but grabbed instead a Smith &
Wesson .38 Special, which discharged when he drew it to his ear.
Hickory Daily Record - 21 December 1992
Jet Assisted Take-Off
1995 Darwin Awards Runner Up
The Arizona Highway Patrol, when they came upon a pile of smoldering
metal imbedded into the side of a cliff rising above the road, at the
apex of a curve. The wreckage resembled the site of an airplane crash,
but it was a car. The type of car was unidentifiable at the scene. The
folks in the lab finally figured out what it was, and what had happened.
It seems that a former Air Force Sergeant had somehow got hold of a JATO
unit, (Jet Assisted Take Off unit, actually a solid-fuel rocket) that is
used to give heavy military transport planes an extra `push' for taking
off from short airfields. He had driven his Chevy Impala out into the
desert, and found a long, straight stretch of road. Then he attached the
JATO unit to his car, jumped in, got up some speed, and fired off the
JATO! Best as they could determine, he was doing somewhere between 250
and 300 mph (350-420kph) when he came to that curve.... The brakes were
completely burned away, apparently from trying to slow the car.
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 the steering wheel.
Note: this story is widely held to be apocryphal.
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Idiots and Computers:
My neighbor works in the operations department in the central office of
a large bank. Employees in the field call him when they have problems
with their computers. One night he got a call from a woman in one of
the branch banks who had this question: "I've got smoke coming from the
back of my terminal. Do you guys have a fire downtown?"
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1. In Kentucky, 50 percent of the people who get married for the first time
are teenagers.
2. Kotex was first manufactured as bandages, during W.W.I.
3. Einstein couldn't speak fluently when he was nine. His parents thought
he might be retarded.
4. In Los Angeles, there are fewer people than there are automobiles.
5. About a third of all Americans flush the toilet while they're still
sitting on it.
6. You're more likely to get stung by a bee on a windy day than in any
other weather.
7. An average person laughs about 15 times a day.
8. Research indicates that mosquitoes are attracted to people who have
recently eaten bananas.
9. Penguins can jump as high as 6 feet in the air.
10. The average person is about a quarter of an inch taller at night.
11. A sneeze zooms out of your mouth at over 600 m.p.h.
12. The condom - made originally of linen - was invented in the early
1500's.
13. The first known contraceptive was crocodile dung, used by Egyptians
in 2000 B.C.
14. A Saudi Arabian woman can get a divorce if her husband doesn't give
her coffee.
15. The Neanderthal's brain was bigger than yours is.
16. Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn't
wear pants.
17. The average bank teller loses about $250 every year.
18. In 1980, there was only one country in the world with no telephones,
Bhutan.
19. Every person has a unique tongue print.
20. Your right lung takes in more air than your left one does.
21. Women's hearts beat faster than men's.
22. Pollsters say that 40 percent of dog and cat owners carry pictures of
the pets in their wallets.
23. Bubble gum contains rubber.
24. You can only smell 1/20th as well as a dog.
25. Only 55 percent of all Americans know that the sun is a star.
26. The sound of E.T. walking was made by someone squishing her hands
in Jello.
27. Even if you cut off a cockroach's head, it can live for several weeks.
28. Most American car horns honk in the key of F.
29. The world population of chickens is about equal to the number of
people.
30. Every time Beethoven sat down to write music, he poured ice water
over his head.
31. In 75% of American households, women manage the money and pay
the bills.
32. A monkey was once tried and convicted for smoking a cigarette in South Bend, Indiana.
33. About 70 percent of Americans who go to college do it just to make
more money.
34. It's against the law to catch fish with your bare hands in Kansas.
35. Some toothpaste's contain antifreeze.
36. Sigmund Freud had a morbid fear of ferns.
37. Millie the White House dog earned more than 4 times as much as
President Bush in 1991.
38. Bird droppings are the chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the
Western Pacific.
39. There are more plastic flamingos in America than real ones.
40. Most lipstick contains fish scales.
41. Lee Harvey Oswald's cadaver tag sold at an auction for $6,600 in 1992.
42. Mosquitoes have teeth.
43. Spotted skunks do handstands before they spray.
44. Hypnotism is banned by public schools in San Diego.
45. The three best-known western names in China: Jesus Christ, Richard
Nixon, and Elvis Presley.
46. When snakes are born with two heads, they fight each other for food.
47. Most cows give more milk when they listen to music.
48. 27 percent of U.S. male college students believe life is "a meaningless
existential hell." (big surprise, eh?)
49. In 1980, a Las Vegas hospital suspended workers for betting on when
patients would die.
50. Aztec emperor Montezuma had a nephew, Cuitlahac, whose name
meant "plenty of excrement."
51. Thomas Edison was afraid of the dark. (Hence, the light bulb?)
52. "Kemo Sabe" means "soggy shrub" in Navajo.
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This truck driver hauling a tractor-trailer load of computers stops for
a beer. As he approaches the bar he sees a big sign on the door
saying "NERDS NOT ALLOWED -- ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK!"
He goes in and sits down. The bartender comes over to him, sniffs,
says he smells kind of nerdy, asks him what he does for a living. The truck
driver says he drives a truck, and the smell is just from the computers
he is hauling. The bartender says OK, truck drivers are not nerds,
and serves him a beer.
As he is sipping his beer, a skinny guy walks in with tape around his
glasses, a pocket protector with twelve kinds of pens and pencils, and
a belt at least a foot too long. The bartender, without saying a word,
pulls out a shotgun and blows the guy away. The truck driver asks
him why he did that. The bartender said not to worry, the nerds are
overpopulating the Silicon Valley, and are in season now. You don't
even need a license, he said.
So the truck driver finishes his beer, gets back in his truck, and
heads back onto the freeway. Suddenly he veers to avoid an accident, and the
load shifts. The back door breaks open and computers spill out all over
the freeway. He jumps out and sees a crowd already forming, grabbing
up the computers. They are all engineers, accountants and
programmers wearing the nerdiest clothes he has ever seen. He can't
let them steal his whole load. So remembering what happened in the
bar, he pulls out his gun and starts blasting away, felling
several of them instantly. A highway patrol officer comes zooming up
and jumps out of the car screaming at him to stop.
The truck driver said, "What's wrong? I thought nerds were in season."
"Well, sure," said the patrolman, "But you can't bait 'em."
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