Roy Exum
The well-respected British Medical Journal has just published an exhaustive report that confirms, of all things, the Male Idiot Theory. The fact that significantly more males than females are treated in emergency rooms is well-documented and the mortality rate for men is known to be higher but now there is a new class of risk, according to a panel of English experts.
The “idiotic” risk, the journal claims, “is qualitatively different from those associated with, say, contact sports or adventure pursuits such as parachuting. Idiotic risks are defined as senseless risks, where the apparent payoff is negligible or non-existent, and the outcome is often extremely negative and often final.
“According to “male idiot theory” (MIT) many of the differences in risk seeking behavior, emergency department admissions, and mortality may be explained by the observation that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things,” the scholarly paper explained. “There are anecdotal data supporting MIT, but to date there has been no systematic analysis of sex differences in idiotic risk taking behavior. In this paper we present evidence in support of this hypothesis using data on idiotic behaviors demonstrated by winners of the Darwin Award.”
Now you know about the Darwin Awards. Started by a Cal-Berkley graduate named Wendy Northcutt in 1995, the Darwin Awards celebrate the somewhat altruistic behavior of those who have eliminated themselves from the world’s gene pool and, by no longer having the ability to reproduce, have contributed to the survival of our species.
Since 1995, there have been 413 nominations to the Darwin Awards committee and 332 have been found to be valid. For instance, there was the guy who mailed a letter bomb with insufficient postage. When it was returned (he actually wrote his own address,) the man apparently opened the envelope to make sure everything looked okay. At least that’s what the police think.
Or how about the three guys who were drinking shots of alcohol and playing Russian roulette in a bar by taking turns stomping on an old Cambodian land mine? When the thing finally exploded, it killed all three and blew up the bar. The British Medical Journal believes all three were clearly idiots.
What the research found was that of the 332 Darwin Award winners in the last 20 years, a whopping 88.7 percent of those who received the dubious distinction were men. The paper concluded, “We believe the Male Idiot Theory deserves further investigation, and, with the festive season upon us, we intend to follow up with observational field studies and an experimental study—males and females, with and without alcohol—in a semi-naturalistic Christmas party setting.”
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Derek Jeter, who carefully slipped under the harsh glare of the press in the 20 years he spent wearing New York Yankees’ pinstripes, gave some great advice on how to deal with the media in a talk this week.
“There are two things you can always say to the media. One is, you have no comment. There is no follow-up to that. The second thing I think most people get in trouble with, they’re afraid to say, ‘I don’t know.’ That a great answer … how are you going to follow it up? It was that simple for me. If I don’t know something, I don’t know.”
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There is a 14-year-old boy in Alexandria, Va., who just earned his Boy Scout Merit Badge for “bugling.” As his horn hit its last note, Josh McCoy earned his 135th Merit Badge and that’s all the great organization offers. “I’m a competitive guy. My dad got 83 and I just wanted to get more than he did.”
He said the bugling badge was tough because it took him two years to master the 15 songs. What’s more, his younger brother Zack just earned his 102nd Merit Badge. (The scouts should have given his dad a bugling badge after the guy had to endure those two years of practice.)
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The police have been on the prowl in Lowell, Mi., and earlier this week they pulled over drivers for petty offenses such as a brake light being out or several miles per hour over the speed limit. But that’s when the fun started.
Under the police officer’s jacket was a microphone and, as the officer pretended to write a summons, he would casually ask what was on the driver’s Christmas list. At a nearby department store, another cruiser was standing by and when an elf would race back with an item the person had mentioned, the second police car races up like Santa’s sleigh. About 35 totally-shocked people got gifts instead of tickets.
The gifts were provided by a TV station’s “Uplift Somebody Campaign” and when an elderly lady was presented a color TV, she wept and hugged the officer for several minutes.
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