Our Darwin Award Nominee for 2015....

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Forgive me for being insensitive. This truly is tragic for this man's family and friends, but still when you read it you just can't help but shake your head and wonder WHAT was going through his mind. Craig Strickland, a singer in a country-rock band called Backroad Anthem, is missing and feared dead after taking off for a duck hunting trip in the middle of a horrible storm (named "Winter Storm Goliath" by the Weather Channel) in Oklahoma. He left with his friend and his dog Sunday morning while storm warnings were posted for the area. Strickland's friend, Chase Morland, posted a tweet that said, "In case we don't come back, BackroadCraig (Strickland's Twitter handle) and I are going right through Winter Storm Goliath to kill ducks in Oklahoma." He posted it with the hashtag "Into the storm." Morland's body was found Monday morning. He was 22. Strickland's dog, Sam, was found alive near Morland's body. A boat was found capsized on the lake they were hunting on. Authorities are still searching for Strickland. WHAT were they thinking? This is a shoo-in for a Darwin Award nomination. (For those of you who don't know: the "Darwin Awards" are a tongue-in-cheek "award" given to the person with the, ahem, "dumbest" form of death. Recipients in the past have included a man who "proved" that the glass in a high-rise office was shatterproof...by running through it, falling 24 stories to his death. The name comes from the Darwinian theory of "survival of the fittest.") This isn't like the deaths in Garland, Texas, where people got caught on the interstate when a tornado came through. These guys deliberately went out in the teeth of a bad storm to hunt for animals that weren't even going to be there because ducks wouldn't have been out in that weather. This is why people make fun of southerners, and why there's a running joke that most rednecks' last words are either "here, hold my beer" or "watch this." I truly hope the guy will be found alive, but it doesn't look good.