COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:

Yes, it is that time once again: The awards have been announced. Not the Oscars. That doesn’t happen until Feb. 22. We’re talking about the Darwin Awards.

The voting is done, the ballots have been counted, except for Florida, and the 2008 winners have stepped into the history books. They’ve also stepped into the afterlife, since that’s how you earn a Darwin in the first place — by doing yourself in a startlingly dumb fashion.

Are the 2008 Darwins the best ever? Hard to say. With so many people over the years that have accidentally removed themselves from the gene pool, picking the best year of all is near impossible. Nevertheless, it is a pleasure and an honor to introduce the 2008 Darwin Award winners, all of whom thank the judges I’m sure, but all of whom are, regrettably, unable to accept their award in person. That said, we begin.

 In Modesto, two couples are bar hopping — a common Darwin Award theme.

The men are each 33 years old, the women, 30 and 29. It’s closing time, but not wanting to call it a night, the men, both dirt bike enthusiasts, retrieve their bikes and the four party animals rev it up in an open field off Highway 99.

One of them — we will never know exactly which one — gets the excellent idea that playing chicken would be fun, an idea that in itself takes a lot of the mystery out of the rest of the story. Four fully medicated people on two dirt bikes, no helmets, playing chicken in the middle of the night. Whichever pair was driving, also unknowable, were very, very brave, because investigators determined the two bikes, each with two Darwinites aboard, collided head-on at a closure speed of at least 70 miles per hour. When they are discovered by a passing trucker near dawn, there is no need to rush anyone to the hospital.

 At Camp Bullis, a U.S. Army training facility outside San Antonio, a civilian worker climbs halfway up a 225-foot communications tower to replace some faulty equipment. He clips his safety harness onto a cross bar and carefully loosens the bolts holding the faulty equipment, but apparently not carefully enough.

He in fact loosens the bolts on the bar to which he has attached his safety belt, sending him immediately on his way to becoming a Darwin Award winner, which greatly surprises his co-workers down below and is also a clear violation of the communications workers’ safety code. “Step 3: Once you have secured your safety harness to a cross bar, avoid loosening the bolts on the cross bar.”

Electrocuting yourself is a popular Darwin Award strategy, year after year.

 In France, an elderly pensioner is upset at rising utility fees. He is so upset that he decides to break into a large electrical transformer behind his home and run a pirated line to his home, but the plan breaks down shortly after he breaks into the transformer. Au revoir, mon amie … bonjour, tristesse.

 Monsieur le Vieux actually tied with an 18-year old Indonesian man in Djakarta who tried to see what was wrong with his parent’s Jacuzzi, which is not that unusual, except that he was standing in the Jacuzzi while he was fiddling with the wires in the equipment box, which is both unusual and deadly.

I especially liked two of this year’s honorees because they proved beyond a doubt that just because you don’t have a shred of common sense doesn’t mean you can’t have a sense of fun.

 A group of Italian men enjoyed a perfect day of skiing at a resort in northern Italy’s “Milky Way” ski area. That night, after a leisurely dinner and a record-setting consumption of wine by four men at one table, they sneak back onto the slopes and try some body skiing, which doesn’t work well.

One of them thinks deep thoughts and comes up with a solution. They strip the bright yellow pads off the legs of a power pole on one of the slopes and use them as sleds, which works really well. They could have laughed and slipped and sledded down the slope on the yellow pads all night, but they stopped immediately when one of them slid head-first into the legs of the same power pole where they got the pads, killing him instantly. Managia!

 Fun run No. 2: An 18-year-old Florida man thinks it might be cool to climb into a shopping cart, latch it to his friend’s SUV and have them tow him down the road.

He is right, it is cool, but he is dead right when they hit a speed bump doing about 30 miles an hour. His trajectory was roughly the same as a human cannonball in the circus, except human cannonballs have air mattresses to land on, which the streets in Florida apparently do not.

Are there more? Of course there are. But our time is done, as is theirs. To all the current and former Darwin Award winners, there are few like you, which is a good thing.

We salute you, you are incredible, and I say we should pop a bottle of Veuve Clicquot in your honor. Well, Martinelli’s maybe. I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at [email protected].