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Discuss the Darwin
Awards Smart Report
(Train Tracks edition)
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Yesterdays News
2012/01/01 - January 2012
The Smart Report:
Homo sapiens sapiens
Endangered Species.

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Darwin Awards: The Evolution Revolution.

DATE 2012-01-12
The Smart Report: Chapter One. "Training The Monkeys." Momentum is synonymous with locomotives; a speeding train is nearly an unstoppable force. Three (true) train Darwin Awards are covered below, two involving the paranormal experience. Learn why it's important to choo choose weapons wisely when you battle momentum.

Due to extraordinary species-wide stupidity, today we tell these Darwin Awards from the viewpoint of a fictitious character named Mike***. While Darwin Awards deaths occur around him, Mike's thoughts satirize the "Headed-For-Extinct Think" typical of Homo sapiens sapiens. Darwin Awards Headquarters hopes you enjoy (and learn from) today's lessons:

Trains and Politics: Momentum Always Wins.

• At that moment, the connecting doors opened, and in walked Yasin A., 22. Yasin grabbed a handrail with both hands and swung his feet up against the window in a macho little burst of energy. Bam! Unfortunately, swinging feet-first from the handrail into a window succeeded not only in bursting the glass, but also in sucking Yasin out of the moving train! He was a shoe-in winner of a Darwin Award. The athlete was trained, you might say. Several days later the body was found, completely by coincidence, when workers were changing a fitting in the area. Dead on the tracks in a manner so mysterious--given that our fictional viewpoint "Mike" was about to quietly leave the scene--that police spent two days trying to reconstruct what had happened. [REFERENCE:Shoe In Winner]

"Mike" didn't want any trouble, so he quietly moved into the adjacent compartment. He hoped that Yasin wore clean underwear that day, and he mused about on his own underwear and its propriety in similar circumstances. Such inconsequential concerns occupy the minds of great humans, and presumably more than one has wandered into the path of danger with that same distracting thought.

Why does this illustration show his crack? Linkthru and ask.

Food For Thought: Would Yasin's results differ depending on whether the handrail was vertical or horizontal? The orientation of the handrail was not reported; above is an artist's view.

'Yasin' is a Turkish name. A 1980 coup d'etat in Turkey displaced mass involuntary immigrants who became "guest workers" in Germany, where the event happened.

R.I.P.

In the adjacent compartment people were talking noisily, so Mike lost his train of thought and absently tucked the newspaper under his arm. He overheard a pretty woman avidly describing a Russian lunatic...

• The Russian believed his brain had psychic powers to stop vehicles 'dead' in their tracks. The woman laughed when she said, 'dead.' This man was not a garden lunatic, he was a famous mentalist by the name of E. Frenkel. Evidently he had started small--a bicycle here, an automobile there, the occasional streetcar. Methodically he went about determining the largest mass his brain could stop by sheer force of will.

  The Russian psychic came to believe that he needed to put himself in mortal peril to find the upper limit. "In extraordinary conditions of a direct threat to my organism, all reserves will be called into action," and even the mass of a train could be deflected. With confidence, he tossed his briefcase aside and stepped onto the tracks, with arms raised, head lowered, and body tensed, he waited. The engineer was quick to apply the emergency brakes, but momentum took its unswerving course. As a child would know, a train is more than a match for a brain, and that fatal experiment was the end of the distinguished career of E. Frenkel. [REFERENCE: Train Of Thought]

This seemed farfetched to Mike. Why would the man toss his briefcase to the side? That fact didn't fit. He pulled out his phone and Blekko'd for news related to the topic. He found [one yellowed page on the net], a report that looked authentic and claimed to be from the Associated Press. Perhaps it was true, perhaps the mental case did psych himself out.

R.I.P.

Humans have opposable thumbs. Mike used his to thumb the paper to his favorite ulcer news, stupid politics. Politics was getting so this-side, that-side, every side was behaving like monkeys. He read with contempt another statement so obviously ridiculous that it would get a man laughed out of a bar in four states plus Maine. Comedy, tragedy. Politics does deserve a Darwin Award, he thought. Who better to mock than Homo sapiens with its monkeys elected by monkeys to rule over monkeyland? His ulcer grumbled, but Mike ignored it. He was smarter than all those political monkeys, he thought, TOO smart to run for office, that is for sure.

The walls of the train were littered with advertisements. Daily life, for the extinction-bound human, is filled with ecouragements to spend money. One lurid poster advertised a movie based on a true story:

• Back in 1891 a North Carolina train wreck killed about two dozen people. The wreck became the center of a legend that a ghostly train returns to the site on the annual anniversary. Nearly one hundred years later, a sizeable group of excited ghost hunters were standing on a train trestle, waiting for the legendary ghost train with their cameras raised, when a real train came through on schedule. Eleven of the ghost hunters were able to dodge the bullet, but 29-year-old Christopher was thrown from the trestle, and died. Darwin Award! [REFERENCE: TNTC]

Mike supposed the movie would put heroic spin on the event, perhaps cast Christopher as a hero who died heroically rescuing a squirrel. Mike hopes that his own last act will likewise add good karma to his record.

Although Mike thinks the notion of paranormal activities is ridiculous, and the ghost train stalkers were ridiculous, he himself is superstitious about certain things such as blowing out all the candles on the birthday cake, and karma, for sure. Karma was probably coming to the athlete-moron in the other compartment, the one who went flying out the window feet-first.

"Karma always catches up to you," Mike muttered as he stepped off the train. Right on time, as always!

R.I.P.

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Darwin Awards: Extinction of Species.
"Clap, clap, clap."

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Contribute to the Evolution Revolution! We are seeking licensees for sensational new story formats. We favor licensing the Darwin Awards directly to the artists who create. If you can portray in a new way, animate, storyboard or add punchlines or sketches to our stories, now's the time to consider licensing the Darwin Awards for your dream project! School class projects and other not-for-profit ideas are also of interest. Please submit your licensing proposal to: Mooglie Boogh and "we'll have lunch and chat out the details of your lovely awesome work, ciao doll-face!" says she.