What does DA stand for?

Emboldened by his success with the pi story, Boslough struck again in 1999, with a fake Darwin Award about an Alaska worker who was cooked and killed in microwave radiation after standing too close to a telecommunications feed horn.

Dismayed of Dalton added: "Health and safety was brought in to protect workers from hazardous jobs, look through history and you will find lead miners suffering from mercury poisoning, the match girls who suffered from fossy jaw and many other industrial diseases, it is only recently that health and safety has got out of hand where the dim-witted are protected at all costs, try looking at the Darwin awards.

Anyone who rides a bicycle sans brain protection enters the Darwin Awards competition for a shot at being naturally selected for a bed in a long-term care facility.

Q: I never read the book you're spoofing, "Into Thin Air," because I was already familiar with the Darwin Awards.

In the meantime, however, we clumsies will just have to console ourselves with the fact that, no matter how many times we've sprained our ankles, pulled our shoulder muscles or tripped over our own feet, we have never, unlike a 2007 Darwin Award nominee, thought it was a good idea to steal the supporting steel girders from a factory roof.

It's the sort of behaviour that so often leads to a citation in the annual Darwin Awards, presented to those people (actually, let's be honest, men' it's always men) who have done most to enhance the human gene pool by removing themselves from it in an extravagantly stupid manner.

The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design Wendy Northcutt Dutton Publishing 375 Hudson Street, New York NY 10014-3658 0525949607 $19.

Penn's latest film, The Darwin Awards, premiered yesterday at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.