I just noticed this and thought I'd get myself worked up a little...
From the Darwin Awards' 1996 nominations (direct copy/paste quote):
(Cairo, Egypt, 31 Aug 1995 CAIRO, Egypt) Six people drowned Monday while trying to rescue a chicken that had fallen into a well in southern Egypt. An 18-year-old farmer was the first to descend into the 60-foot well. He drowned, apparently after an undercurrent in the water pulled him down, police said. His sister and two brothers, none of whom could swim well, went in one by one to help him, but also drowned. Two elderly farmers then came to help, but they apparently were pulled by the same undercurrent.The bodies of the six were later pulled out of the well in the village of Nazlat Imara, 240 miles south of Cairo.The chicken was also pulled out. It survived.
And now for today's questions:
- Spot the missing participles. (God, thank you for American grammar.) See also question 2.
- Who's Monday, and why isn't he/she/it mentioned in the rest of the article?
- How does a chicken fall into a well? Maybe I'm just being simple here, but if the well has a parapet, it must be hard for a semi-flightless bird to get in.<\li>
- Why would anyone go down into a well to rescue it? Okay, if it died in there it might pollute the water supply, but don't they have buckets in Egypt? If not, how do you get the water out? If you have a pump, why use a well? In any case, from my experiences of Egypt, I doubt many people, least of all farmers, care that much about polluting things.
- How do you get undercurrents in a well? Okay, there was probably some kind of underground river here, but
- If your brother has drowned, it's probably not the best idea to jump into a potentially dangerous well when you can't swim.
- Similarly, if four of your able-bodied colleagues have just been sucked under, these two 'elderly farmers' seem to be debunking the myth that 'with age comes wisdom'
Gosh, I just love sitting back and being cynically detatched. It's terribly reassuring.
Thanks to www.darwinawards.com and http://www.humorcafe.com/humor/gems/darwin1996.htm for the above tidbit.