The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design by Wendy Northcutt Read Free Book Online

he thought, because his license had already been suspended. Shane was sentenced to two hundred twenty hours of community service for driving with a suspended license, dangerous driving, and stealing two orange traffic safety cones.
    For what it’s worth, his license was suspended for another year.
     
    Reference: New Zealand Herald

H ONORABLE M ENTION : H APPY C AMPER
    Unconfirmed by Darwin
     
    C AMPING S EASON 2003, M ELBOURNE , A USTRALIA
     
     
    Emergency services was called to attend to a motor-vehicle fire on the Monash Freeway, a beltway around Melbourne. On arrival they found an agitated young man watching his car go up in smoke.
    After extinguishing the fire, they inspected the small four-cylinder vehicle, which was tightly packed with camping gear. Upon raising the hood, they discovered the cause of the fire: smoldering camping gear that had been stashed in the engine bay, including a bottle of gas used for a portable barbecue!
    The driver explained that he was taking an extended camping trip and had run out of room in the passenger compartment, so he decided to use all that “wasted space” in the engine bay.
    Our Aussie correspondent says, “I reckon that the only waste of space was between this bloke’s ears. If the fireys hadn’t arrived when they did, we would have had the first Ford in orbit.”
     
    Reference: Channel 9 News

H ONORABLE M ENTION : P ICTURE -P ERFECT C OP
    Confirmed by Darwin
     
    7 A UGUST 2003, W YOMING
     
     
    Like a true country child, Tom was born, born to be wild…even though he had grown up to be a county sheriff. The wild one had taken to the road in the company of another lawman and his brother, riding his hog without a helmet to the big motorcycle rally in South Dakota.
    No road trip would be complete without a commemorative photograph. With the wind streaming through his hair at sixty-five miles per hour, Tom decided the conditions were right. He took his camera and turned around to take a picture of the bike behind him. This of course required the bold Harley rider to take his hands off the handlebars.
    As a state trooper described it later, the motorcycle drifted to the right and headed for a telephone pole. Tom lost control trying to wrestle the bike back onto the highway and went sailing through the air, probably wishing he had worn his helmet after all. When he landed, he broke his eye socket, four ribs, and a shoulder bone, and suffered other head injuries and road rash. There’s no word on whether he got the photograph or not.
    Tom had been following a beloved motto: “No Helmets 4 Harleys.” Although he miraculously survived, he nearly proved another adage: “There are old riders, and bold riders, but no old bold riders!”
     
    Reference: Associated Press, Casper Star-Tribune

H ONORABLE M ENTION : N EW H OG
    Confirmed by Darwin
     
    1 O CTOBER 2002, M ICHIGAN
     
     
    Luke was pushing sixty when youthful memories of Easy Rider brought him to the local Harley-Davidson dealership. “It was a mid-age crisis,” he told a reporter. “I’d see dudes with women and thought a motorcycle would put me in like Flynn.”
    When the dealer delivered the gleaming new hog to Luke’s front door, his eyes lit up like a boy receiving a Red Ryder two-hundred-shot carbine air rifle with a compass in the stock—and no grownups around to warn him that his new toy could put an eye out!
    Luke started the engine and felt its pulsing, guttural power. It had been thirty years since he had been in the saddle of a babe-magnet like this. He revved the engine and listened to it purr. He kicked it into gear and roared off down the road. Born to be wild!
    Ten seconds and a tenth of a mile later, Luke slammed into a neighbor’s utility trailer at forty miles per hour as he tried to remember how the throttle worked. The cops who investigated told him it was a miracle he was alive. He survived with just a few broken ribs. “Oh my God,” he said, “I hurt in places I didn’t know could