The Southern African Wildlife College offers a one year course preparing for a career as a safari guide, costing UK£ 5595 / US$ 10,910 / € 8395, including “dangerous game experience.”

The Telegraph story reports that one of the lessons included the transfer of a black mamba (Dendroaspis polylepis) between containers, in the course of which a British student, one Nathan Layton, 28, was bitten.

Neither Layton nor the college’s staff believed the snake had injected any venom, so the lecture was resumed. Twenty minutes later, however, Mr. Layton went into a coma, and subsequently died.

The late Nathan Layton with girlfriend

I don’t know that he had a practicable way to secure that cage to the truck bed, but I expect he wished he did.

Via Gwynnie.

Michael Ledeen announces the Darwin awards for 2007.

There’s really no need for my comments here, except to marvel at the fantasy, creativity and colossal stupidity that led these people (all men?) to remove themselves from the gene pool. Here you go:

DARWIN AWARDS 2007

And once again, it’s time for the Darwin Award Nominees. The Darwins are awarded every year to the persons who died in the most stupid manner, thereby removing themselves from the gene pool.

This years nominees are:

Nominee No. 1: [San Jose Mercury News]

An unidentified man, using a shotgun like a club to break a former girlfriends windshield, accidentally shot himself to death when the gun discharged, blowing a hole in his gut.

Nominee No. 2: [Kalamazoo Gazette]

James Burns, 34, (a mechanic) of Alamo, MI. was killed in March as he was trying to repair what police describe as a “farm-type truck”. Burns got a friend to drive the truck on a highway while Burns hung underneath so that he could ascertain the source of a troubling noise. Burns clothes caught on something however, and the other man found Burns “wrapped in the drive shaft”.

Nominee No. 3: [Hickory Daily Record]

Ken Charles Barger, 47, accidentally shot himself to death in December in Newton, NC. Awakening to the sound of a ringing telephone beside his bed, he reached for the phone but grabbed instead a Smith & Wesson 38 Special, which discharged when he drew it to his ear.

Nominee No. 4: [UPI, Toronto]

Police said a lawyer demonstrating the safety of windows in a downtown Toronto skyscraper crashed through a pane with his shoulder and plunged 24 floors to his death. A police spokesman said Garry Hoy, 39, fell into the courtyard of the Toronto Dominion Bank Tower early Friday evening as he was explaining the strength of the buildings windows to visiting law students. Hoy previously has conducted demonstrations of window strength according to police reports. Peter Lawson, managing partner of the firm Holden Day Wilson, told the Toronto Sun newspaper that Hoy was “one of the best and brightest” members of the 200-man association.

Nominee No. 5: [The News of the Weird]

Michael Anderson Godwin made News of the Weird posthumously. He had spent several years awaiting South Carolinas electric chair on a murder conviction before having his sentence reduced to life in prison. While sitting on a metal toilet in his cell attempting to fix his small TV set, he bit into a wire and was electrocuted.

Nominee No. 6: [The Indianapolis Star]

A cigarette lighter may have triggered a fatal explosion in Dunkirk, IN. A Jay County man, using a cigarette lighter to check the barrel of a muzzle loader, was killed Monday night when the weapon discharged in his face, sheriffs investigators said. Gregory David Pryor, 19, died in his parents rural Dunkirk home at about 11:30 PM. Investigators said Pryor was cleaning a 54-caliber muzzle-loader that had not been firing properly. He was using the lighter to look into the barrel when the gun-powder ignited.

Nominee No. 7: [Reuters, Mississauga, Ontario]

A man cleaning a bird feeder on the balcony of his condominium apartment in this Toronto suburb slipped and fell 23 stories to his death. Stefan Macko, 55, was standing on a wheelchair when the accident occurred, said Inspector Darcy Honer of the Peel Regional Police. “It appears that the chair moved, and he went over the balcony,” Honer said.

Finally, THE WINNER!!!: [Arkansas Democrat Gazette]

Two local men were injured when their pickup truck left the road and struck a tree near Cotton Patch on State Highway 38 early Monday. Woodruff County deputy Dovey Snyder reported the accident shortly after midnight Monday. Thurston Poole, 33, of Des Arc, and Billy Ray Wallis, 38, of Little Rock, were returning to Des Arc after a frog catching trip. On an overcast Sunday night, Pooles pickup truck headlights malfunctioned. The two men concluded that the headlight fuse on the older-model truck had burned out. As a replacement fuse was not available, Wallis noticed that the .22 caliber bullets from his pistol fit perfectly into the fuse box next to the steering-wheel column. Upon inserting the bullet the headlights again began to operate properly, and the two men proceeded on eastbound toward the White River Bridge. After Traveling Approximately 20 miles, and just before crossing the river, the bullet apparently overheated, discharged, and struck Poole in the testicles. The vehicle swerved sharply right, exiting the pavement, and striking a tree Poole suffered only minor cuts and abrasions from the accident but will require extensive surgery to repair the damage to his testicles, which will never operate as intended. Wallis sustained a broken clavicle and was treated and released. “Thank God we weren’t on that bridge when Thurston shot his balls off, or we might both be dead,” stated Wallis “I’ve been a trooper for 10 years in this part of the world, but this is a first for me. I can’t believe that those two would admit how this accident happened,” said Snyder. Upon being notified of the wreck, Lavinia (Poole’s wife) asked how many frogs the boys had caught and did anyone get them from the truck???

(Though Poole and Wallis did not die as a result of their misadventure as normally required by Darwin Award Official Rules, it can be argued that Poole did, in fact, effectively remove himself from the gene pool.)

Hat tip to Dominique Poirier.

The Bangkok Post reports a story of imprudent optimism.

A Cambodian man who took off his trousers, tied the legs at the bottom and wrangled a 2-metre cobra into them died when it bit him through the fabric, local media reported Monday.

Khmer-language daily Koh Santepheap [Peace Island] quoted police as saying Chab Kear, 36, saw the reptile swimming in a river just outside the capital last Thursday during a drinking session and captured it in the hopes of selling it later in the day.

He tied the animal inside his trousers and a scarf around his waist, but as he continued carousing the enraged snake managed to get its fangs free and bite Kear three times on the stomach.

The newspaper reported Kear’s last words as being “don’t worry – it’s nothing a drink can’t fix” before he succumbed to the cobra’s venom.

MadOgre has quite a story about a chap test-firing his .50 BMG rifle.

6-27-07: BOOM HEADSHOT! This is amazing. Willie, the father of Tina, who made the sandbag rests fires a .50BMG, an Armalite AR-50 and it ricochets off of a steel plate that it should have easily penetrated. The bullet comes straight back and hits him in the head. You can see it hit the dirt about 15 feet in front on him before it clobbers him. Luckily he was uninjured. He’s a bit sore today, but otherwise fine. Lucky lucky bastard. He has been advised to buy lottery tickets while he still has so much luck. I don’t know about the timing, but you can hear the hit on the steel plate. Time that till the impact on Willie’s head… how fast is that 750 grain slug traveling? The range is 100 yards. Amazing.

0:41 video

I don’t think anybody could have predicted that ricochet. Things happen.

Some years back, I was test-firing a newly acquired 7.63 mm Broomhandle Mauser in my Connecticut basement.

I used to fire from one room through a doorway into another room, using a few pieces of 2×4 lumber, backed by a 5×5 hunk of post, backed by some plywood, backed by another 5×5 post.

Well, the old Mauser belched fire from the barrel and the breech, and that 7.63 mm fully-jacketed bullet sped off at over 1400 fps and proceeded to penetrate all the boards. It then bounced off several concrete walls and finally went right out one of two small basement windows in that room.

I could imagine only too well what my wife would have said if I had managed to shoot myself with my own ricochet, firing pistols in the basement.

AP:

Snake collector Matt Wilkinson of Portland (Oregon) grabbed a 20-inch rattler (Crotalus viridis viridis) from the highway near Maupin, and three weeks later, to impress his ex-girlfriend, he stuck the serpent in his mouth.

He was soon near death with a swollen tongue that blocked his throat. Trauma doctors at the Oregon Health and Science University saved his life.

“You can assume alcohol was involved,” he said. Actually, not just beer. It was something he called a “mixture of stupid stuff.”

Calls from cable network television stations poured in Tuesday, when he still had sore muscles and nerves from the venom.

It happened at a barbecue with friends.

Wilkinson, 23, had downed a six-pack and his ex-girlfriend asked him for a beer. He handed her one, not realizing the snake was also in his hand.

“She said, ‘Get that thing out of my face,”‘ Wilkinson said. “I told her it was a nice snake. ‘Nothing can happen. Watch.”‘

So he stuck the snake in his mouth.

“It got a hold of my tongue,” he said.

He was having breathing problems when his ex-girlfriend drove him to the hospital. “She was the only one sober,” Wilkinson said.

2:11 video

Hat tip to Xavier.

A Prosser, Washington man learned the hard way the fact that the severed head of a rattlesnake remains capable of biting for a long time after being separated from its body. The old-timers in rural Pennsylvania always swore that a snake couldn’t die before sundown. I doubt that sundown has anything to do with it, but there is no doubt that the body of a decapitated snake will twist and coil for many hours and a decapitated snake’s head can definitely continue to bite for a very long time.

In this case, the perpetrator was probably the Western rattlesnake (Crotalus viridus).

AP story.

Some people fall off roofs. Others are more lucky.

1:33 video

An overly enthusiatic pair of 21-year-old lovers evidently fell 50 feet (15.24 meters) to their deaths from the roof of an office building in Columbia, South Carolina.

KNBC

slideshow

1:20 video

Lamborghini Murcielago, before

The Wall Street Journal Weekend edition, in Honey, I Wrecked the Porsche, discusses the really painful kind of car crashes, those involving $250,000+ exotic cars.

According to the California Highway Patrol, the total number of accidents involving Aston Martins, Bentleys, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Lotuses and Maseratis rose to 141 last year, an 81% increase from 2002, while overall crashes declined statewide during that period. Porsche, BMW and Mercedes-Benz, which sell a wider range of models, saw a 22% increase during that time frame.

These accidents are happening so regularly that a Web site called WreckedExotics.com — which contains photos of dream cars reduced to smoking heaps — added as many as 700 new examples to its gallery last year and says it attracts about 650,000 visitors a month. Founder Gregg Fidan explains the attraction this way: “It’s like seeing a supermodel fall off the runway.”

slideshow

Martin Gegenfurter has a web site devoted to arguing< that a href="http://www.lambounfall.de/indexe.html"> it wasn’t his fault.

Lamborghini Murcielago, after

————————————-

Now, don’t you feel much better about not owning one?

AP:

VILNIUS, Lithuania – Climbing into a giraffe’s cage at the local zoo seemed a good idea after a few drinks. But the prank went wrong when the 1.3 ton animal flew into a rage and attacked the three student trespassers at a zoo in Lithuania on Monday night.

Ruta Greiciute, a 22-year-old student at Kaunas Technology University, was hospitalized with a broken collar bone and nose after the nine-year-old male giraffe, named Solut, attacked her.

The other students survived the incident unscathed.

“This was a very silly thing they did. The scared giraffe could have stomped her to death,” Kaunas Zoo spokeswoman Angele Grebliauskaite said.

The zoo reported that many animals had been disturbed Monday night as students celebrated a festival in a nearby condominium.

Police have launched an investigation to find out how the intoxicated students entered the zoo at night and climbed the 10 foot high fence surrounding the giraffe cage.

WIS10:

Police in Indiana think an injured man who was found in a cemetery over the weekend might be guilty of vandalism.

He was found amid 14 damaged headstones — including a thousand-pound stone that had tumbled over and pinned the young man to the ground. Police say the 22-year-old was found unconscious, with both legs broken.

They say it took five officers to lift the headstone. The impact left the letter “V” imprinted on Michael Schreiber’s thigh. Police say the “V” stood for the name on the family tombstone.

Schreiber will face charges of criminal trespassing, criminal mischief and public intoxication. He may also be ordered to pay for damage to 14 headstones.