Even Russia has a Mississippi

Иван пропустил Darwin Awards от это много.

(Translation: Ivan missed the Darwin Awards by this much.)

How, oh, how did I miss this when it appeared a couple of years ago?

Natural selection 1, snake owner 0

Draping a 9-foot python around your neck? What could go wrong?

Strangulation, for one thing. No doubt, this poor Papillion, Neb., fool's last words were "Hey, y'all! Watch this!"

PRAISE GOD the snake-squeezed corpse here didn't belong to the little neighbor girl Cory Byrne let play with his python . . . and put around her neck, as recounted by the Omaha World-Herald:

He placed it on the trampoline outside. He let the children play with it.

“My daughter actually had it around her neck,” said David Driggers, 44, the neighbor. “There were about five or six kids over here that day.”

Things went terribly wrong Wednesday when Byrne, 34, tried to show off the python to a friend.

He was critically injured when the snake, estimated by authorities to be 9 feet long, wrapped around his neck and began strangling him.

Byrne died later at Midlands Community Hospital.

A friend tried to pull the reptile loose. Police arrived, finding Byrne unconscious and without a pulse. They managed to pry the python off Byrne.

“It took all they could do to get it back in the cage,” said Lt. Chris Whitted of the Papillion Police Department.

UNFORTUNATELY, congratulations are not in order for Mr. Byrne as a possible Darwin Award winner, being that you win one by "naturally selecting" yourself out of the gene pool.

On the other hand, we can all look at it this way: He may have accidentally sacrificed his life so the neighborhood kids might keep theirs.

That's not nothing.

God help me, I know it sounds cruel -- and maybe it is -- but it's true. Somebody usually ends up paying for that level of stupidity and irresponsibility, and thank God it wasn't an innocent child.