Stupid ways to die

It’s tough enough to go through life without being killed by the stupidity of someone else but to be killed because of our own stupidity is really dumb. For example, on October 4th 2010 (yesterday) my wife and I were driving through the town of Port Perry, Ontario and when we arrived at a major intersection. The green light was in our favour. I didn’t need to stop so I continued driving through the intersection at 50 kilometres an hour. (approx 32 miles per hour) Suddenly, the driver of a smaller car that was at the intersection decided to make his left turn just as I was going through the intersection. He cut right in front of my much heavier car and we missed him by inches. If my car had struck his car broadside, his car would have been demolished and he would have been killed. The law in Ontario is that a driver making the left turn in a case like that is 100% wrong and in that stupid man’s case, he would have been 100% dead wrong. What follows are cases where people made stupid mistakes and as a result, they were 100% dead wrong.

6th century BC: Greek wrestler Milo of Croton came upon a tree-trunk split with wedges. Testing his strength, he tried to rend it with his bare hands by inserting his fingers in the gap. The wedges fell, trapping his hands in the tree making him unable to defend himself later from attacking wolves that devoured him.

]480-475 BC: Heraclitus, a Greek Philosopher who, testing his theory that heat could stop the liquid of life from escaping the body, sought to cure his dropsy by having his followers encase his body in cow manure. He perished in the attempt.

430 BC: Empedocles, Pre-Socratic philosopher, secretly jumped into the lava of an active volcano (Mt. Etna). According to Diogenes Laërtius, this was to convince the people of his time that he had been taken up by the gods on Olympus.

162 BC: Eleazar Maccabeus was crushed to death at the Battle of Beth-zechariah by a War elephant that he believed to be carrying Seleucid King Antiochus V; charging into battle, Eleazar rushed underneath the elephant and thrust a spear into its belly, whereupon it fell dead on top of him.

1601: Tycho Brahe, Danish astronomer, according to legend, died of complications resulting from a strained bladder at a banquet. It would have been extremely bad etiquette to leave the table before the meal was finished, so he stayed until he became fatally ill.

1751: Julien Offray de La Mettrie, the author of L'Homme machine, a major materialist and sensualist philosopher, died of overeating at a feast given in his honor.

1771: Adolf Frederick, king of Sweden, died of digestion problems on 12 February 1771 after having consumed a meal consisting of lobster, caviar, sauerkraut, smoked herring and champagne, topped off with 14 servings of his favourite dessert: semla served in a bowl of hot milk. He is thus remembered by Swedish schoolchildren as "the king who ate himself to death."

1871: Clement Vallandigham, U.S. Congressman and political opponent of Abraham Lincoln, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound suffered in court while representing the defendant in a murder case. Demonstrating how the murder victim could have inadvertently shot himself, the gun, which Vallandigham believed to be unloaded; discharged and was mortally wounded. The defendant was acquitted.

1912: Franz Reichelt, tailor, fell to his death off the first deck of the Eiffel Tower while testing his invention, the coat parachute. It was his first ever attempt with the parachute and he had told the authorities in advance he would test it first with a dummy. Well in fact, it really was a dummy that plummeted to his death.

1927: Isadora Duncan, dancer, died of a broken neck when one of the long scarves she was known for caught on the wheel of a car in which she was a passenger.

1928: Alexander Bogdanov, a Russian physician, died following one of his experiments, in which the blood of a student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis, L. I. Koldomasov, was given to him in a transfusion.

1939: Finnish actress Sirkka Sari died when she fell down a chimney. She was at a cast party celebrating the completion of a movie, her third and last. She mistook a chimney for a balcony and fell into a heating boiler, dying instantly.

1942: 32 men died when the British cruiser HMS Trinidad accidentally torpedoed itself.

1944: Inventor and chemist Thomas Midgley, Jr. accidentally strangled himself with the cord of a pulley-operated mechanical bed of his own design.

1945: Scientist Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. accidentally dropped a brick of tungsten carbide onto a sphere of plutonium while working on the Manhattan Project. This caused the plutonium to come to criticality; Daghlian died of radiation poisoning, becoming the first person to die in a criticality accident.

1946: Louis Slotin, chemist and physicist, died of radiation poisoning after being exposed to lethal amounts of ionizing radiation from the same core that killed Harry K. Daghlian, Jr.. He allowed the core to become fully shielded by a spherical beryllium reflector when the screwdriver he was using to separate the two halves of the shield slipped, causing the core to go critical. The sphere of plutonium was thereafter nicknamed the Demon core.

1947: The Collyer Brothers, extreme cases of compulsive hoarders, were found dead in their home in New York. The younger brother, Langley, died by falling victim to a booby trap he had set up, causing a mountain of objects, books, and newspapers to fall on him crushing him to death. His blind brother, Homer, who had depended on Langley for care, died of starvation some days later.

1959: In the Dyatlov Pass incident, nine ski hikers in the Ural Mountains abandoned their camp in the middle of the night, some clad only in their underwear despite sub-zero weather. Six died of hypothermia and three by unexplained injuries. The corpses showed no signs of struggle, but one had a fatal skull fracture, two had major chest fractures, and one was missing her tongue.

1975: Bandō Mitsugorō VIII, a Japanese kabuki actor, died of severe poisoning when he ate four fugu livers (also known as pufferfish). The liver is considered one of the most poisonous parts of the fish, but Mitsugorō claimed to be immune to the poison. The fugu chef felt he could not refuse Mitsugorō and lost his license as a result.

1978: Janet Parker, a British medical photographer, died of smallpox in 1978, ten months after the disease was eradicated in the wild, when a researcher at the laboratory Parker worked at accidentally released some virus into the air of the building. She is believed to be the last smallpox fatality in history.

1978: Kurt Gödel, the Austrian/American mathematician, died of starvation when his wife was hospitalized. Gödel suffered from extreme paranoia and refused to eat food prepared by anyone else. He was 65 pounds (approx. 30 kg) when he died.

1981: David Allen Kirwan a 24-year-old, died after attempting to rescue a friend's dog from the 200°F (93°C) water in Celestine Pool, a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park on July 20, 1981. Kirwan suffered third-degree burns over 100% of his body and died the next morning at a Salt Lake City hospital. Kirwan is the only known case of someone dying after deliberately jumping into one of the park's hot springs.

1981: American photographer Carl McCunn paid a bush pilot to drop him at a remote lake near the Coleen River in Alaska in March to photograph wildlife, but failed to confirm arrangements for the pilot to pick him up again in August. Rather than starve, McCunn shot himself in the head. His body was found in February 1982.

1981: Boris Sagal, a film director, died while shooting the TV miniseries World War III when he walked into the tail rotor blade of a helicopter and was decapitated.
1981: Paul Gauci, a Maltese 41-year old man, died after welding a butterfly bomb to a metal pipe and using it as a mallet, thinking it was a harmless can.

1982: David Grundman was killed near Lake Pleasant, Arizona while shooting at cacti with his shotgun. After firing several shots at a 26 ft (8m) tall Saguaro Cactus from extremely close range, a 4 ft limb of the Cactus that was weakened by the gunfire detached and fell on him, crushing him.

1983: American author Tennessee Williams died when he choked on an eyedrop bottle cap in his room at the Hotel Elysee in New York. He would routinely place the cap in his mouth, lean back, and place his eyedrops in each eye. Williams' lack of gag response may have been due to the effects of drugs and alcohol abuse, and it is highly likely that Williams was high when the cap ended up in his throat as drugs and alcohol were found in his room and inside his body. When I was six, I accidentally swallowed two pennies that were in my mouth while I was lying down and my five-year-old daughter swallowed a ring when she was lying on her bed. We both lived through the ordeal.

1984: Jon-Erik Hexum, an American television actor, died after he shot himself in the head with a prop gun during a break in filming, playing Russian Roulette using a revolver loaded with a single blank cartridge.

1993: Garry Hoy, a 38-year old lawyer and a senior partner at the Holden Day Wilson Law firm in Toronto, Canada, fell to his death on July 9, 1993, after he threw himself against a window on the 24th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre in an attempt to prove to a group of visiting law students that the glass was "unbreakable." His first attempt failed to damage the glass at all. On his second attempt the glass still didn't break, but popped out of the window frame, and he fell over 300 feet to his death.

1993: Michael A. Shingledecker Jr. was killed almost instantly when he and a friend were struck by a pickup truck while lying flat on the yellow dividing line of a two-lane highway in Polk, Pennsylvania. They were copying a daredevil stunt from the movie The Program. Marco Birkhimer died of a similar accident while performing the same stunt in Route 206 of Bordentown, New Jersey.

1995: A 14 year old girl, Ryan Bielby, fell 25 feet to her death while trying to exchange seats with a friend on the rollercoaster the Timber Wolf at Kansas City's Worlds of Fun amusement park.

1996: Sharon Lopatka, an Internet entrepreneur from Maryland, solicited a man via the Internet to torture and kill her for the purpose of sexual gratification. Her killer, Robert Fredrick Glass, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for the homicide.

2001: Bernd-Jürgen Brandes from Germany was voluntarily stabbed repeatedly and then partly eaten by Armin Meiwes (who was later called the Cannibal of Rotenburg). Brandes had answered an internet advertisement by Meiwes looking for someone for this purpose. Brandes explicitly stated in his will that he wished to be killed and eaten. Meiwes was sentenced to prison for thirty years.

2004: Phillip Quinn, a 24-year-old from Kent, Washington was killed during an attempt to heat up a lava lamp bulb on his kitchen stove while observing it from a few feet away. The heat built up pressure in the bulb until it exploded, spraying shards of glass. One pierced his heart, killing him.

2005: Kenneth "Mr. Hands" Pinyan of Gig Harbor, Washington died of acute peritonitis after seeking out and receiving anal intercourse from a stallion, an act he had engaged in previously on numerous occasions without injury. Pinyan delayed his visit to the hospital for several hours out of reluctance to explain the circumstances of his injury to doctors.

2007: Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old woman from Sacramento, died of water intoxication while trying to win a Nintendo Wii console in a KDND 107.9 "The End" radio station's "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest, which involved drinking large quantities of water without urinating.

2009: Sergey Tuganov, a 28-year-old Russian, bet two women that he could continuously have sex with them both for twelve hours. Several minutes after winning the $4,300 bet, he suffered a heart attack and died, apparently because of having ingested an entire bottle of Viagra just after accepting the bet.

2009: Vladimir Likhonos, a Ukrainian student, died after accidentally dipping a piece of homemade chewing gum into explosives he was using on another project. He mistook the jar of explosive for citric acid, which was also on his desk. The gum exploded, blowing off his jaw and most of the lower part of his face when he bit into the gum.

There you have it. I think it is God’s way in culling the world’s population.