Darwin guy close to getting a Darwin Award

In this blog, here, I’ve already mentioned the prestigious annual Darwin Awards. They’re necessarily posthumous awards, because a winner has to have done something immensely stupid, to such an extent that he kills himself, whereby benefiting humanity through the removal of his ugly chromosomes from the human gene pool. The standards for receiving this award might appear to be excessively high, but the underlying idea is that, if a candidate doesn’t kill himself, then he wasn’t stupid enough to deserve a prize. You might say that such a failed candidate demonstrates, through his survival, that he wasn’t sufficiently altruistic or self-abnegating, with respect to his fellow men, to be a winner.

In the case of the following fellow, with a shirt hiding his face, all I can say is that he came bloody close to getting an award. The ATM [automated teller machine] that he succeeded in blowing up knocked him backwards onto the ground, but the explosion didn’t have quite enough force to blow his stupid head off. Pity.

I was most impressed by the way in which the guy got back up immediately onto his feet, tore the shirt off his face, and headed off away from the camera. When I was a kid in Australia, we had a nice expression that sums up this kind of sporting prowess:
He took off like a bat out of Hell.

This would have been a particularly poignant Darwin Award, because the fellow’s act took place in Winnellie, which happens to be a suburb of the Northern Territory town of Darwin. What a shame he failed.

Incidentally, among the comments of well-wishers who appreciated this fascinating video, I was really pissed off by an American who talked as if our hero were a citizen of God’s Own Country… and moreover a Republican. Bloody pretentious Yanks. It’s time they realized that, Down Under, we’ve got individuals who are just as brilliantly idiotic as the dumbest US specimens.

Bon voyage

I would have liked to publish this blog post yesterday... but (as Bill Shakespeare put it, so succinctly) better late than never. The last time I spoke about links between the French railway system and the city of Sydney in Australia was almost 7 years ago in a blog post entitled Silly sendup of Sydney by French railways [display]. Happily, things have evolved a lot since then. Yesterday morning—on April 1, 2014, a great date in links between France and Australia—the electronic departure board at the train station in Lille, France’s great northern capital near the Belgian border, announced the inauguration of the first-ever train service from France to Sydney, with its departure set for 11h40 (exactly 23 minutes after the departure of the regular train from Lille to Los Angeles).

As a former resident of Sydney, and now a naturalized French citizen, I must admit that I was totally shocked by the absence of our ambassador at Lille, to bid farewell and Bon voyage to the adventurous inaugural passengers. To understand the full meaning of “adventurous”, simply take a look at a map of the world. Fortunately, the trip is remarkably cheap: a mere $1000 for a return trip. If interested travellers care to send me that meagre amount (multiplied, of course, by the number of people in their group), I’ll make a point of obtaining tickets as soon as possible.

New lesbian in heaven

This morning, I accomplished my good Mormon deed of the day. I accessed a recently-created website, http://alldeadmormonsarenowgay.com, that enables kindhearted Internet users such as me to perform a worthy miraculous act. First, I requested that they select for me, automatically, a deceased Mormon... which they did, instantly.

The website supplied me with the name of a dead person about whom I know absolutely nothing... apart from the fact that the individual in question was no doubt a female (since the person's name is Jennifer Lee), and that she was apparently Mormon. I also know nothing whatsoever concerning the actual circumstances in which Jennifer Lee became a baptized member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Was she born that way, or has somebody transported her soul posthumously into the community? Regardless of my substantial ignorance concerning the dead Mormon with whom I was dealing, I acted swiftly. I clicked the conversion button... and the late Jennifer Lee was transformed instantly into a lesbian. All I can hope for now is that she'll run into a host of nice hot female friends up there in the celestial Mitt Romney Land.

I've just heard on the US news that the Republican's wife Ann claims: "I don't even consider myself wealthy." Jeez, that sentiment worries me. I hope that Jennifer is not trying to screw up my conversion operation by running around up there and telling all the angels: "I don't even consider myself gay." Is it possible that there might be leftover bugs in the conversion software?

BREAKING NEWS: I was disgusted, this morning, to learn that zealous Mormons have wittingly offended countless members and friends of the Jewish community by daring to baptize the Holocaust martyr Anne Frank into their crazy sect.