There is no shortage of contestants for the annual Darwin Awards. If you aren’t familiar with them, it’s a list of people who do incredibly stupid stuff that gets them killed. I don’t keep up with it regularly, but I just heard about what will surely be an entry for 2012.
A man in North Carolina drank some gasoline and then smoked a cigarette. You’d think common sense would apply, but it didn’t. Also, somehow he made it to 43 years old. The man was at a friend’s apartment when he apparently mistook a jar of gasoline sitting by the kitchen sink for a beverage. Later, he went outside to smoke and burst into flame.
That’s about all the details in the news article, but it leaves so much to question. Here’s what I immediately think of:
1) Did he not smell the gasoline before he drank it?
2) Why was a jar of gasoline by the kitchen sink?
3) Why wouldn’t he go to the hospital after drinking gasoline?
4) Shouldn’t he have realized gasoline is highly flammable and thus smoking would be really dangerous?
If you have any potential answers to those questions, feel free to leave a comment…
Buffet o' Blog 
Holiday Inn Express
I always leave a glass of gasoline out when I have company over. That way I know if my guests are the sort of people who go around drinking from other people’s glasses.
Thomas Wayne
I figure most people would recognize it’s gasoline before they drink of it. It does have a fairly strong smell. Maybe the guy in the story had already been drinking something else that dulled his senses.
To test the guests theory, you could add turbo-lax to the glasses left out. Just make sure you remember which ones are the test ones!