Bill makes some good points. Who on occasion hasn't thought about beating
in the windshield of a girlfriend's car with the butt end of a shotgun?

Just kidding. I've always seen the function of the Awards not as a
superiority fix but as a cautionary tale, instructive for the very reasons
that he cites: we all do stupid stuff on occasion (I once attempted to save
time by ironing a shirt that was still on my body). So the message to me is
not "They sure are dumb and I'm smart," but rather "Think this through,
otherwise very bad things might happen, especially if alcohol is involved,"
a traditional leitmotif of the DAs, though apparently not this year.

Fear of making this list MAY give someone pause before doing something
ill-advised. That's good. Adding to the pain of family and friends is not
good at all. Thanks to Bill, I have mixed feelings about all this now.

Nick Honerkamp


At 10:49 AM 1/13/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>The Darwin Awards have been around for a long time and are the source of much
>amusement. But I am uncomfortable with them: we are ridiculing people who have
>died in embarrassing and unfortunate circumstances. We are assuming an
>arrogant, judgmental stance, congratulating ourselves on being alive and on
>not having suffered the same ignominious fate as have these poor slobs. But if
>these stories are true, we are talking about genuine human tragedies. Of their
>own making, perhaps, but how many of us don't occasionally make stupid
>mistakes that could at some point and under the right circumstances cost us
>our lives, too? I see the Darwin Awards as cruel jokes, and can't help
>wondering what the survivors of these people - their husbands, wives, sons,
>daughters, mothers, fathers--might feel about having their loved ones publicly
>ridiculed because of the way they died, and in certain cases they have died
>some very painful, agonizing deaths. I would suggest we ask why we find these
>violent deaths so funny, so amusing, so entertaining.
>
>Finally, I wonder if this is not simply a hi-tech equivalent of the public
>execution where we can all find amusement in knowing that one of our number
>has died for his or her follies, and where we can remind ourselves of our
>self-righteous superiority that is so obviously the reason we survive and
>those fools die.
>
>Your local curmudgeon,
>
>Bill