Hook Line and Sinker

One Darwin Award, and some Housekeeping

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This is The Darwin Awards, for those who know that humans are not all that homo-sapiens sapiens. Darwin Awards are Irish dirges, lamenting the deceased while laughing at their ignorant foibles. Laughing at the fellow who was juggling grenades like a show-off when he blew himself up. Sorry you’re dead but what were you thinking?

Hook Line and Sinker

Last week Shawn, 39, a pastor in Florida, took a friend and a boat out on Lake Seminole in FL. The boat began to take on water. In distress, unable to swim, no life vest, the two signaled other boaters who called the County Sheriff Dept rescue team. They rescued Shawn and friend, set them back on dry land, case closed.

But wait!

Pastor Shawn started to fret about the abandoned boat, and called a friend to ferry him back out to rescue the vessel. OK sure that makes sense, but—again with no life vest? Hm.

Poor Pastor Shawn tries to jump over to his boat and slips into the drink.

Sidebar: ships founder and people flounder.

No life vest. Shawn is in hot water. Of course the boatmaster who ferried him out tries to pull him out of the water, but fails, and why? Because it is difficult to heave a person out of the water, and the standard technique involves grabbing hold of their life vest and giving a mighty hoist. People don’t have handles!

OK some people have handles. But you get the picture.

Cannot float, certainly cannot walk on water, the pastor is literally sunk. Too bad for him. OTOH one assumes a pastor is glad to meet his Maker. Four hours later divers located and retrieved his body. Really quite sad for Shawn, 39 young. But what was he thinking?

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Where Has Wendy Been?

Glad you asked! Wendy “Darwin” Northcutt (me) built up a wonderful Darwin Awards community, a very active slush pile full of submissions, moderators to review them, comments on stories (my coding), a Philosophy Forum of thoughtful discussions and friendships. Votes system to rank the stories and submissions, golly molly it was rockin’ in the 90’s, in the 00’s, but by the ‘teens Wendy (me) was suffering from a coding block, a writing block, and an email phobia. Long story.

Excruciating to NOT be able to edit a Perl script, update HTML, write a Darwin Awards story. The problem began in the Philosophy Forum where trolls started harassing me. It wasn’t fun to be there. It sucked. I sneaked in under a fake name but that failed. I set up an alternate shadow forum for the trolls but that failed too. Gah. Attacked incessantly in the place I loved. And also some other stuff. Mental meltdown, scar tissue, neural nets disrupted. I could not do coding or writing.

I hobbled along — wrote a few stories each year—until the miracle three months ago: The neural net healed! Suddenly I was free to enjoy a putter around fixing and weeding the Darwin Awards garden. That’s my story! That’s me.

About once a month folks will receive a Darwin Awards newsletter. You can also log into the Substack website to read the newsletter archives, and log into DarwinAwards.com to access the whole shebang of 1000 stories plus the Slush Pile.

Thank you so much. New readers. Old favorites. Thank you.

-Wendy Darwin