Contrary to belief, there is no panel of distinguished judges weighing each potential Darwin Award entry then sagely reaching agreement as to which deserves an official accolade. Darwin Awards e-mails have been circulating on the Internet at least since May 1991, with the earliest e-mails and newsgroups posts of this nature setting before posterity inventive works of fiction that had been labeled by their authors as true accounts of actual deaths. Years after the term "Darwin Award" was being used in connection with text descriptions of deaths by misadventure, a number of web sites sprung up to archive the variety of Darwin Award tales then in circulation. Those sites not only collected the fictional offerings then making the online rounds but also on their own dug up numerous true accounts of death by stupidity, thus building a vast body of such tales, some true and some not. While other sites have since faded into obscurity, one has emerged as the clear winner: DarwinAwards.com, a site owned and maintained by Wendy Northcutt. Ms. Northcutt has since authored three highly successful books based on her site.
DarwinAwards.com does its best to separate the wheat from the chaff, identifying for its readers which of its stories are factual and which are not. The various "Annual Darwin Awards" e-mails (such as the one which is the topic of this article) do not originate with DarwinAwards.com; they are put together by unknown persons.
Of the seven gruesome accounts given in the "Darwin Awards 2004" e-mail, six fail to check out, but one is real. The lone entry that stands up to scrutiny is the sorry tale of a Reston, Virginia, man who foolishly taped a selection of store-bought bungee cords together, then used them to bungee jump off a 70-foot railroad trestle.
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