The Darwin Award wining story
October 4, 2001 8:08 PM   Subscribe

The Darwin Award wining story straight from the horse's mouth. Sorry Darwin. Looks like you posted another urban legend. Thanks for playing tho.
posted by jcterminal (9 comments total)
 
Originally here. For a long time it also lived at Cardhouse. And yet - amazingly - it has never been posted to MeFi's front page as far as I can tell, although it was last mentioned inside a thread in May.

This was the first story that convinced me that the old chestnut about nobody ever reading more than a few hundred words on the web was nonsense. It takes ages to read that sucker, but I couldn't look away...
posted by rory at 8:30 PM on October 4, 2001


Didn't this appear in an issue of Wired at one point?
posted by Alison at 8:36 PM on October 4, 2001


Alison: yeh a year or so ago

This is pretty old, and the Darwin awards posted a retraction and placed it in the 'urban legends' dept a while ago.

But I suppose there might be some people who havn't heard.
posted by delmoi at 8:50 PM on October 4, 2001


Fantastic story! I agree with rory - I had to read the whole thing too!
posted by snowgum at 7:00 AM on October 5, 2001


Fantastic story! I agree with rory - I had to read the whole thing too!
posted by snowgum at 7:03 AM on October 5, 2001


This is pretty old, and the Darwin awards posted a retraction and placed it in the 'urban legends' dept a while ago.

Argh. There is no such thing as the "Darwin awards." Or at least there shouldn't be.

The phrase used to be a joke, "so-and-so deserves a Darwin award." The phrase got consistently attached to this story so that not only did people believe the story, they took the Darwin award joke literally, assuming there really was some group giving out such awards. Finally, dozens of people cropped up, each claiming to be The Darwin Awards.

And, of course, none of them mention that you're inelligible for the award if you have kids before you die.
posted by straight at 7:35 AM on October 5, 2001


These guys certainly seem to have the best claim to being the "real" Darwin Awards. I looked at a couple of dozen of those links in the Google search, and a lot of them are VERY old webpages, or links back to these guys.
posted by briank at 8:39 AM on October 5, 2001


These guys certainly seem to have the best claim to being the "real" Darwin Awards.

The point is, that anyone claiming to be a "real Darwin awards" is really just a copycat of the original joke idea that there was such a thing as the Darwin awards.

The likelihood that any of the folks currently claiming to decide who gets the "Darwin Award" for the year being the people who actually came up with the joke in the first place is almost zero, since half the point of the original joke is that there was no such award!
posted by straight at 9:23 AM on October 5, 2001


a lot of them are VERY old webpages

Also, the "Darwin Award" joke is older than the web.
posted by straight at 9:47 AM on October 5, 2001


« Older Zero-Knowledge's Freedom Network to shut down.   |   Right now, on MLB.com, Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments