Dumb and dumber

Stupidity by young men in Ajman and Australia echoes the Darwin Awards, but these three could not even do that right.

Every year, the Darwin Awards are a tongue-in-cheek chronicle of people who are deemed to have improved the overall human gene pool by removing themselves from it, usually in a spectacular fashion. Based on events in the first few days of 2014, nominations for the latest rounds of the awards will be hotly contested and the notion of human intellectual evolution is, at best, no more than an unproven theory.

Take the case of two men in Ajman on Sunday who sat inside their car, closed the windows and then released the contents of two lighters so, as they later told the police, they could inhale the contents. Such an activity is dumb enough since the mildly intoxicating effect often comes at a price of brain damage, but one of the pair triggered the lighter, causing the gas to explode and landing them both in hospital.

Or the young man in rural Australia who tried to surprise his wife by hiding naked in their top-loading washing machine but found himself unable to get back out. The emergency services had to be summoned and extracted him with the help of liberal doses of olive oil.

In both cases, the men survived – and thus are ineligible for a Darwin Award – suggesting that even in that, they have displayed ineptitude.