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The Darwin Awards: Wendy Northcutt

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Commonwealth Club of California

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Juggling Hand Grenades & Other Ways to Win a Darwin Award

05 min 51 sec

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Wendy Northcutt explains the governing rules behind the Darwin Awards, a postmortem prize doled out to people who die from foolish mishaps.

Northcutt offers a classic example: a Croatian man who died by juggling live hand grenades.
Darwin Awards Nominee Lawn Chair Larry Soars 12,000 Feet

02 min 20 sec

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Wendy Northcutt tells the story of Lawn Chair Larry, recipient of an honorable mention in 1982's Darwin Awards for strapping himself to a lawn chair attached to 42 weather balloons.

Rather than cruising around at a mere 100 feet, Larry soon soared into the primary air traffic corridor of LAX.
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01 hr 02 min 59 sec

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There are 6 comments on this program

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Previous FORAtv comments:

Jack Schitt

Posted: 04.29.11, 02:50 PM

The author comments on Australia and suggested that we do not rely on signage to prevent stupid people from meeting their well earned demise. Unfortunately this is not quite correct. Our Government is moving down the path of the nanny-state and it is becoming far more common to see tax payer funded signage that tells morons not to do the obviously stupid things that would spare the rest of us from their continued stupidity. Our new OH&S laws to be introduced in Jan 2012 are a perfect example.

TheDude

Posted: 10.21.09, 06:56 PM

I found it to be casually entertaining. I would akin it to an average author doing a reading at a bookstore. So if interested in the content its nice to "get to know" the author. I also perused the web page while watching the video and found the video more captivating. The web page is antiquated and the stories I did find weren't very entertaining.

kaioxygen

Posted: 09.17.09, 03:09 AM

She really is utterly useless.

AFG410

Posted: 05.19.09, 04:52 PM

This had the potential to be very interesting or at least humorous, but I thought it failed to be either. The presentation is really nothing more than a disjointed smattering of stories.

aldurzi

Posted: 03.31.09, 09:55 PM

What a cheap and amateurish presentation. She should have had someone else do it. I had very high expectation and was so disapointed, I will stick to the website and skip the public appearances.....

MichaelFoley

Posted: 03.29.09, 06:11 PM

I loved the presentation, I have been a fan of the awards since almost the beginning, and I recently saw the movie on cable, it was interesting and I have recommended it to several friends with whom I have discussed Darwin awards in the past. I did think that Wired Magazine had found the true origin of the JATO rocket car story several years ago.

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