1999 Personal Accounts

The Darwin Awards salutes the spirit portrayed in the following personal accounts, submitted by loyal (and sometimes deceased) readers.

Cat-Astrophe  1999 Personal Account (April 1999, Canada) A Toronto condo resident in Miississauga, Ont., came home with a bag of cement to do some repairs on his driveway. He stored the bag in his garage till needed. His 12-year old son discovered the bag, thought it was cool stuff and proceeded to feed the family kitten with a mixture of wet cat food and cement. The kitten died within hours on the kitchen floor with a belly hard as rock. The kid, afraid of being found out, shoved the kitten into the waste disposal unit in the kitchen sink. After supper, the mother turned on the unit and a fragment of cement from the cat's belly hit her squarely in the forehead. With a yelp, she collapsed onto the floor while the husband ran into the kitchen and looked into the waste disposal unit. Another fragment of cement went through his left eye into his brain. I've heard this firsthand and still don't believe it, but it's a true story, I swear, even if I can't prove it. DarwinAwards.com © 1994 - 2008 Submitted by Pierre Therrien Yo Mero argues for Urban Legend status: " I find this tale, with its infantile inventive, hard to believe. Why would a kid that age mix cement with cat food, and how could he get the kitty to eat a sufficient quantity to support the rest of the story? He would have found it necessary to stuff the poor animal worse than a goose for foie-gras. "Furthermore, what child would hide a carcass from his mother ... in the dishwasher? In a corner of his closet, behind the garage, almost anywhere else would have been more realistic. "And finally, the laws of physics hold everywhere except in urban legends. This story suspends the laws of physics in two says. First, concrete hardens slowly, reaching its full strength only after 28 days. In the time span implied by this tale, even "set" concrete will crumble under low levels of force, much less under the ravages of a trash disposal's blades. Second, while a garbage disposal has the potential to impart high velocity to an object, the fact remains that such velocity is in a horizontal direction, not in the implausibly favorable quasi-vertical direction required to strike two consecutive schmoes on their faces. And as already stated, freshly-set concrete crumbles easily and would not have penetrated someone eye to reach the brain. By comparison, a .38 bullet would have roughly four times the mass, and 100 to 1000 times the velocity, and would not pulverize on impact. "Although it is inventive, this tale is a product of a fertile imagination, rather than an actual occurrence."

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