DARWIN AWARDS
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Darwin awards -- it's an annual honor given to the person who
did the gene pool the biggest service by killing themselves in
the most extraordinarily stupid way.
Last year's winner was the fellow who was killed by a Coke(tm)
machine, which toppled over on top of him as he was attempting
to tip a free soda out of it.
And this year's nominee is:
The Arizona (US) Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smoldering
metal imbedded into the side of a cliff rising above the road,
at the apex of a curve.
The wreckage resembled the site of an airplane crash, but it was
a car. The type of car was unidentifiable at the scene.
The boys in the lab finally figured out what it was, and what
had happened.
It seems that a guy had somehow got hold of a JATO unit -- Jet
Assisted Take Off, actually a solid-fuel rocket that is used to
give heavy military transport planes an extra "push" for taking
off from short airfields. He had driven his Chevy Impala out
into the desert, and found a long, straight stretch of road.
Then he attached the JATO unit to his car, jumped in, got up
some speed, and fired off the JATO!
Best as they could determine, he was doing somewhere between 250
and 300 mph (350-420kph) when he came to that curve...
The brakes were completely burned away, apparently from trying
to slow the car.
NOTE: Solid-fuel rockets don't have an "off"... Once started,
they burn at full thrust till the fuel is all gone.