They have finally been released! The 1998 DARWIN AWARDS!! For those not familiar with the Darwin Awards, it's an annual honor given to the person who provided the universal human gene pool the biggest service by getting killed or injured in the most extraordinaily stupid way. As always, competition this year has been keen. Some candidates appear to have trained their whole lives for this event. Enties this year have not had the elan of some previous ones, but are a worthy catalogue of stupidity, incompetence, and just plain bad luck.

DARWIN AWARD CANDIDATES^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

1. In September in Detroit, a 41-year old man got stuck and drowned in two feet of water after squeezing head first through an 18-inch wide sewer grate to retrieve his car keys.

2. In October, a 49-year old San Francisco stockbroker, who "totally zoned when he ran", according to his wife, accidentally jogged of a 100-foot high cliff on his daily run.

3. Buxton, NC: A man died on a beach when an 8-foot deep hole he had dug into the sand caved in as he sat inside it. Beachgoers said Daniel Jones, 21 dug the hole for fun, or protection from the wind, and had been sitting in a beach chair at the bottom Thursday afternoon when it collapsed burying him breneath 5 feet of sand. People on the beach, on the Outer Banks, used their hands and shovels, trying to claw their way to Jones, a resident of Woodbridge, VA, but could not reach him. It took rescue workers using heavy equipment almost an hout to free him while about 500 people looked on. Jones was pronounced dead at the hospital.

4. In February, Santiago Alvarado, 24, was killed in Lompac, CA, as he fell face-first through the ceiling of a bicycle shop he was robbing. Death was caused when the long flashlight he had placed in his mouth (to keep his hands free) rammed into the base of his skull as he hit the floor.

5. According to police in Dahlonega, GA, ROTC cadet Nick Berrena, 20 was stabbed to death in January be fellow cadet Jeffery Hoffman, 23, who was trying to prove that a knife could not penetrate the flak vest Berrena wa wearing.

6. Sylvester Briddell, Jr, 26 was killed in February in Selbyville, DE, as he won a bet with friends who said he would not put a revolver loaded with 4 bullets into his mouth and pull the trigger.

7. In February, according to police in Windsor, Ontario, Daniel Kolta, 27, and Randy Taylor, 33, died in a head-on collision, thus earning a tie in a game of chicken they were playing with their snowmobiles.

8. In September, a 7-year-old boy fell off a 100-foot-high bluff near ozark, Ark., after he lost his grip swinging on a cross that marked the spot where another person had fallen to his death in 1990.

9. Paul Stiller, 47, was hospiatized in Andover Township, NJ in September, and his wife Bonnie was also injured, by a quarter-stick of dynamite that blew up in their car. While driving around at 2 AM, the bored couple lit the dynamite and tried to toss it out the window to see what would happen, but apparently failed to notice that the window was closed.

AND THE WINNER IS^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ PADERBORN, GERMANY -

Overzealous zookeeper Friedrich Riesfeldt fed his constipated elephant Stefan 22 doses of animal laxitive and more than a bushel of berries, figs and prunes before the plugged-up pachyderm finally let fly - and suffocated the keeper under 200 pounds of excrement. Investigators say ill-fated Friedrich, 46, was attempting to give the ailing elephant an olive-oil enema when the relieved beast unloaded on him like a dump truck full of mud. "The sheer force of the elephant's unexpected defecation knocked Mr. Riesfeldt to the ground, where he struck his head on a rock and lay unconscious as the elephant continued to evacuate his bowels on top of him, " said flabbergasted Paderborn police detective Erik Dern. "With no one there to help him, he lay under all that dung for at least an hour before a watchman came along, and during that time he suffocated. It seems to be just one of those freak accidents that happen."