The Darwin Awards Countdown to Extinction Read Online Free PDF

driving. They called this a feature rather than a flaw, and decided to have fun with it.
    To make the dynamite sticks safer, they shortened the fuses.
    In the fifties, high-powered explosives were still easy to acquire. So, with quarter sticks of dynamite at hand, my future father and his brother drove around throwing dynamite through the gaps in the floorboards, and basically scaring the daylights out of people in cars behind them. THIS WAS FUN! They even shortened the fuses to make sure that the sticks would “safely” explode before the car behind them drove over them.
    When I heard this story, my first response was, “Weren’t you concerned about the gas tank below you?” To my amazement they both looked rather surprised, exchanged glances, and said, “We never thought of that!” My grandfather just laughed and walked out of the room.
     
    Reference: Anonymous son

At-Risk Survivor: Volunteer “Fire” Man
    Unconfirmed Personal Account
    Featuring fathers, alcohol, explosions, and do-it-yourself!
     
     
    1978, INDIANA | My friend’s father, Mo 2 , was a volunteer fireman and a home mechanic. He was also a heavy drinker who never seemed to be without booze in his hand. One day I was helping him repair one of their cars. Mo, already well into a six-pack when I arrived, believed that the fuel line was blocked. His solution began with jacking the car up a few feet and draining twelve gallons of gasoline from the tank.
    In the process of disconnecting the fuel line from the tank, gasoline spilled all over Mo, soaking his polyester shirt and flooding the floor of the garage. Mo then used several five-gallon buckets to catch the gasoline that was pouring out of the tank. Although the garage door was open to allow ventilation, the fumes were so thick that my friend and I had to step outside to breathe.
    Mo continued to lie on the garage floor, in a pool of gasoline under the car.
    While we were gulping down fresh air, the water heater, located ten feet from gasoline-soaked Mo, kicked on. Ordinarily this would not be a problem because gasoline fumes are heavy, and the universal building code requires gas-fired tanks to be installed eighteen inches off the floor to prevent accidental combustion But the circumstances were not ordinary.

    The entire floor went up in flames, and a large fireball came rolling out the garage door toward us. My friend and I dove to the ground to avoid the flames.
    After the initial blast, Mo picked himself up and reacted as the trained and experienced firefighter he was—grabbing an extinguisher to put out the flames. Only then did he realize that his polyester shirt had melted to his burned chest. He refused his wife’s assistance and, despite his inebriated state, drove himself to the local hospital.
    My friend’s father lost most of the skin on his chest and most of the hair on his head. He also spent several days in the burn unit and was ultimately tossed out of the volunteer fire department.
     
    Reference: George Leavell

    Reader Comment
     
    “This one’s for you, Dad. I just hope you’re smarter than this when you work on the Studebaker!”

SCIENCE INTERLUDE DNA FOSSILS: THE EVOLUTION OF HIV
    By Kristin Sainani
     
     
    In 1981, doctors in California and New York reported a baffling new syndrome: Young gay men were dying from a cluster of rare diseases usually seen only in the elderly or those with severe immune deficiencies. Doctors were witnessing the first glimpse of a frightening new illness soon to cause worldwide devastation—AIDS.
    Phylogenetics: building evolutionary trees based on the genetic similarities between organisms
    Amazingly the virus that causes AIDS is not new at all. HIV and its ancestors have plagued mammals for 100 million years. There are no confirmed cases of infection before 1959, and HIV leaves no fossil record, so how do we know so much about the virus’s history? Clues to its past lie in its genetic code.
    By comparing the genomes of two organisms