by Uncle John’s
In April 2012, Khristopher Brooks was offered what he called a “dream job”: a position as a reporter for the Wilmington News Journal in Delaware. He was so happy he wrote a story about the hire—written as though it were a News Journal press release—and put it on his blog. A week later, the editor of the paper called Brooks. He’d seen the “press release,” he said, and Brooks was guilty of “illegal use of the company logo” in it, as well as the improper quoting of a section of the letter offering him the job. Result: The job offer was rescinded.
(NOSE) CANDY
On Halloween 2012, Donald Green was at his girlfriend’s house in Royton, England, handing out candy to trick-or-treaters. Three little kids came to the door, and Green reached into his pocket for bags of Gummi Bears that his girlfriend had given him to hand out. But Green reached into the wrong pocket and grabbed three little baggies of cocaine, and dropped those into the trick-or-treaters’ goody bags.
The kids’ father, it turned out, was an off-duty police officer, so when he saw his children playing with little baggies of coke later that evening, he confiscated the drugs. “Where did you get these?” he asked. “At the last house we went to,” replied his daughter.
Meanwhile, back at the girlfriend’s house, Green reached into his pocket for the drugs (which he’d purchased earlier that day for £200) and discovered his mistake. In a panic he drove all over town looking for the kids, but couldn’t find them. So he went back to his girlfriend’s house, and not long after, the police showed up. “I know why you’re here,” Green said sadly after he opened the door. He was arrested and sentenced to 130 hours of community service.
CAUGHT ON GOOGLE STREET VIEW
After photographing several UK cities for Street View, Google fielded hundreds of complaints from citizens who inadvertently wound up in photos—including a man caught exiting a sex shop, a man throwing up outside of a pub, and a group of teenagers getting arrested.
•Sharp-eyed Google Earth users noticed a collection of 40-year-old buildings in Southern California that, from above, resembled a Nazi swastika. The owner of the structures: the U.S. Navy (the buildings were barracks on a military base). The Navy spent $600,000 to redesign the facility.
•While photographing for Street View in Melbourne, Australia, Google’s car-mounted cameras captured a man passed out in the street in front of his mother’s house. The man, who’d had too much to drink after a funeral, later complained. Google removed the photos.
•Users scrolling through pictures of upstate New York on Street View noticed a fawn standing in the middle of a rural road. But in subsequent shots, the deer was lying in the road, dead, with blood-soaked tire tracks leading away from it. Google’s camera car, it turned out, had accidentally hit it. The company kept the images but edited out the deer.
•If you look closely, you can spot hundreds of photos that caught people urinating in public, including one with a French bus driver photographed relieving himself on the side of his bus.
•One female Google Earth user was looking at photos of a girlfriend’s house—and spotted her own husband’s Range Rover out front. Divorce proceedings followed.
ALMOST PRESIDENT
After a failed presidential run in 1836, Whig leader and former senator William Henry Harrison was selected by his party’s convention to run for president again in 1840. This time, he won. The race for vice president, however, ended in a tie between Senator John Tyler and convention chairman John Janney. Janney, doing the gracious and honorable thing, stepped aside as convention leader and ceded the VP slot to Tyler. Then Harrison died after 32 days in office, having caught pneumonia at his own inauguration. Tyler became the new president, a role he technically won by a single vote: Janney’s.
McWHAT?
In its ongoing effort to get every human alive to eat at McDonald’s, the fast-food giant’s ad team erected a billboard in St. Paul, Minnesota, with a picture of an Egg McMuffin and a cup of hot coffee next to these words:
Yuavtxhawbpabraukojsawv
yuavntxivzograukoj mus
A bewildering string of gibberish? Yes, especially in the language it’s supposedly written in. The text was Hmong, to appeal to St. Paul’s Hmong community, an ethnicity from the mountainous regions spanning China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand.
The ad backfired. That’s because whoever translated the words into Hmong botched the spelling, grammar, syntax, and punctuation. It was supposed to say, “Coffee Gets You Up, Breakfast Gets You Going.” But in Hmong, it read something like “Coffee up you, breakfast go you.” Or, more accurately, “coffeeupyou breakfastgoyou,” because the sign didn’t include the spaces that go between words in most languages, including Hmong.
A McDonald’s spokesperson apologized for the nonsensical billboard. Then they fixed it so that it made sense in Hmong.
MORE POLITICAL GAFFES
A stand-up guy. In September 2008, vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden was speaking at a rally in Columbia, Missouri, when he began going through a list of names of local politicians who were in attendance, thanking them from the stage and getting the crowd to cheer for them. “Chuck Graham, state senator, is here,” Biden said, as the crowd cheered wildly. “Stand up, Chuck. Let ’em see ya!” Biden yelled into the microphone. Then he went, “Oh!” and his face visibly dropped. Oops: Graham is a paraplegic and makes use of a wheelchair. Biden did his best to recover, saying, “God love ya. What am I talking about?” Then he asked the crowd to “stand up for Chuck,” which the crowd awkwardly did.
You’re fired. In October 2000, German chancellor Gerhard Schröder was invited by Israeli premier Ehud Barak to visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. When Barak and Schröder came to the museum’s Eternal Flame memorial for the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, Barak, in a somber and symbolic gesture, invited the German leader to turn a handle that would make the eternal flame grow in strength. Schröder turned the handle…the wrong way. The flame went out. Barak tried to help Schröder correct the mistake, to no avail. (A technician relit the flame.)
He got beat. Newly elected Australian Liberal Party leader Alexander Downer, in line to be the country’s next prime minister, gave a speech at a 1994 formal dinner in Sydney. Downer began to talk up his party’s new “The Things That Matter” slogan. He started off with a joke, quipping that he was thinking of calling his anti–domestic violence initiative “The Things That Batter.” The crowd, which included several prominent female Australian politicians—and many Australians, since the event was televised—reacted with silent shock. Within months Downer was no longer leader of the Liberal Party. His eight months in the position is still the shortest term in the party’s history.
Darkest Portugal. On February 11, 2011, India’s foreign minister, S. M. Krishna, gave his very first speech before the United Nations Security Council in New York. A full three minutes into his speech, India’s envoy to the U.N. stepped forward, took the script from Krishna’s hands, and gave him another one. “You can start again,” he muttered before stepping away. The problem: Krishna had been reading the speech already given by the foreign minister of Portugal, left on top of Krishna’s papers by the Portuguese foreign minister. Krishna’s aides later tried to laugh off the gaffe, saying the beginning portion of the speech contained mostly pleasantries that any speech might have had, and that it could have happened to anyone. But probably not; among the lines Krishna read was, “Allow me to express my profound satisfaction regarding the happy coincidence of having two Portuguese-speaking countries here today.” (At which point chuckling could be heard in the room.)
It’s Finnished. In July 2005, French president Jacques Chirac attended a dinner in Kaliningrad, Russia, and at some point during the evening made what he thought were private comments to Russian president Vladimir Putin and German leader Gerhard Schröder. Speaking about their mutual allies the British, Chirac said, “The only thing they have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease.” He added: “You cannot trust p
eople who have such bad cuisine. It is the country with the worst food after Finland.” Chirac thought the comments were private…but reporters overheard them. The next day the insults made headlines all over Europe—especially in the UK, where the British press savaged Chirac. (The Sun called him a “petty, racist creep.”) Boycotts of French foods followed, and the insults caused serious tension between the two nations. Just two days after Chirac made the comments, the International Olympic Committee met to decide who would host the 2012 Olympics: London or Paris. Paris was the favorite, but London got the Games. How much it had to do with the two Finns on the final voting board, we’ll never know for sure.
WORLDS WERE ROCKED
In the 1980s, Michael Jackson was certainly the most popular—and arguably the most recognizable—entertainer in the world. His 1982 album Thriller sold more than 42 million copies, his 1987 follow-up Bad sold 17 million, he pioneered the music video format, and he popularized the Moonwalk and the idea of wearing a single, sparkly glove.
His profile as both a musician and an icon dwindled in the 1990s because of Jackson’s bizarre behavior and eccentric personal life. He attempted a comeback in 2001: He held a show at Madison Square Garden celebrating 30 years as a solo artist, and he recorded a new album, Invincible, with a top-10 hit, “You Rock My World,” his first hit single in more than five years. He also hired a British film crew to follow him and his three children around and make a documentary about him.
But instead of lionizing the singer, the film made Jackson look alarmingly weird. Living with Michael Jackson, which aired in 2003 on ABC, depicted, among other things, Jackson dangling his infant son over a balcony and admitting to sleeping in beds with children. This led to Jackson’s arrest on child abuse charges, a controversy that haunted his career from then on. Jackson never had another hit song, and died in 2009.
EXCERPTS FROM ACTUAL INSURANCE CLAIMS
Coming home I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I don’t have.”
•“The accident occurred when I was attempting to bring my car out of a skid by steering it into the other vehicle.”
•“I was backing my car out of the driveway in the usual manner, when it was struck by the other car in the same place it had been struck several times before.”
•“I bumped into a lamppost which was obscured by human beings.”
•“I was driving along when I saw kangaroos copulating in the middle of the road causing me to ejaculate through the sun roof.”
•“The car in front hit the pedestrian but he got up so I hit him again.”
•“I knew the dog was possessive about the car but I would not have asked her to drive it if I had thought there was any risk.”
•“My car was legally parked as it backed into another vehicle.”
•“The other car collided with mine without giving warning of its intention.”
•“I had been shopping for plants all day and was on my way home. As I reached an intersection a hedge sprang up obscuring my vision and I did not see the other car.”
•“To avoid hitting the bumper of the car in front I struck a pedestrian.”
•“First car stopped suddenly, second car hit first car, and a haggis ran into the rear of second car.”
•“As I approached an intersection a stop sign suddenly appeared in a place where no stop sign had ever appeared before.”
•“Windshield broken. Cause unknown. Probably voodoo.”
•“I was sure the old fellow would never make it to the other side of the road when I struck him.”
•“No one was to blame for the accident but it would never have happened if the other driver had been alert.”
•“I started to slow down, but the traffic was more stationary than I thought.”
•On approach to the traffic lights, the car in front suddenly broke.
•“I thought my window was down but I found it was up when I put my head through it.”
•“I didn’t think the speed limit applied after midnight.”
YOU SHOULDN’T BE NAKED
In May 2007, British bridegroom Stephen Mallone, 25, was celebrating a stag weekend in Bratislava, Slovakia, when he decided it would be good fun to strip naked and swim in a public fountain. He was arrested and sentenced to two months in jail—which meant he would be missing his £20,000 wedding. After nearly two weeks, Slovakian authorities finally relented—and Mr. Mallone made it to the church on time.
•A man from Cookeville, Tennessee, visited the local mall. When he returned to his car, it wouldn’t start. A heavy rainstorm came through and the man, not wanting to get mud on his car’s seat covers via muddy and wet clothes, stripped naked before he got underneath the car to diagnose the problem. That’s when police arrived and arrested him for indecent exposure. The charge was later dropped, but not until after he was fired from his job as an industrial engineer.
GARFIELD HATES MONDAYS, VETERANS
Since 1978, Jim Davis has drawn and authored Garfield, one of the most popular daily comic strips in the world. He works in advance, sending out finished Garfield episodes to his syndicate and newspapers as much as a year ahead of time.
This strip ran in November 2010: Garfield the cat holds up a rolled newspaper about to squish a spider. The spider implores him to stop, saying, “If you squish me, I shall become famous! They will hold an annual day of remembrance in my honor, you fat slob!” The final panel depicts a classroom full of spiders, with a spider teacher asking “Does anyone here know why we celebrate National Stupid Day?” The implication is that Garfield killed the spider, and that he was stupid for baiting the cat.
The strip, celebrating “National Stupid Day,” ran in newspapers on Veterans Day. Davis issued an apology, saying he didn’t know the strip would run on Veterans Day, and called it “the worst timing ever.”
THAT SINKING FEELING
April 15, 2012, was the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Former baseball star and reality TV show participant José Canseco thought he’d tweet some thoughts:
•“Titanic 100 years wow. Global warming could’ve saved titanic. Sad to say.”
•“Because we don’t recycle and consume like crazy icicles are non existent. Titanic would’ve still existed today.” (“Icicles” apparently referred to “icebergs,” which, by the way, do exist.)
•“With global warming the weather is hotter so the icebergs would be melted and titanic saved.”
•“Titanic reminds me of the days I had two yachts in Miami,” he wrote, “but no icicles.”
NICE MOVE, SLICK
CHOKING HAZARD
Millions of cute animals got an unwanted oil bath, all because Captain Joe Hazelwood got drunk and went to bed. Yet was the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill really caused by a lone drunk man? That’s what the Exxon Shipping Company’s lawyers argued. In court, Hazelwood admitted that in the hours preceding the accident, he and a few other officers had had a few vodkas in the town of Valdez, Alaska, where the ship had been docked. By the time they arrived back onboard that evening, Hazelwood claimed, he was sober. He took command, and the 986-foot tanker carrying 53 million gallons of crude oil departed for California. After being guided out of the Narrows by a tugboat, the Valdez had to navigate its way out of the rocky Prince William Sound. Captain Hazelwood had successfully performed this maneuver many times.
MIDNIGHT OIL
It was a “dark and misty” night, and the ship’s sonar had picked up ice floating on the surface. Hazelwood plotted a new course outside of the regular shipping lanes to avoid the ice. He then asked Third Mate Greg Cousins, “Do you feel comfortable enough that I can go below and get rid of some paperwork?” Cousins said he was. He was authorized to take command of the ship in open waters, but he did not have a license to pilot the ship in difficult Prince William Sound. But Hazelwood had confidence in him. So he went to his cabin to “sleep off his bender,” as newspapers would later report. Cousins took control and spouted off orders to helms
man Robert Kagan, who was on his first ocean voyage in four years.
There was more ice on the water than Cousins expected and, according to Kagan, at one point Cousins became “panicked” and ordered Kagan to take a hard right. Kagan refused. Cousins then tried to take the wheel himself. Kagan refused to let him. Barely 10 minutes after he got to his cabin, Hazelwood received a call from Cousins: “We’re getting into serious trouble here.”
“Where’s the rudder?” asked Hazelwood. But before Cousins could answer, at 12:04 a.m. on March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez ran aground on an underwater rock formation called Bligh Reef. Hazelwood hung up and ran to the bridge. He took the helm and tried to free the ship from the jagged rocks. He made the problem worse. Within a few hours, eight of the ship’s 11 cargo tanks had ruptured, and about 11 million gallons of crude had gushed out into the sea.
YOU’RE SOAKING IN IT
As the spill made international headlines, Captain Hazelwood became the scapegoat. News programs showed globules of crude oil washing up along 1,300 miles of Alaska’s pristine southern coastline. It covered everything it came in contact with— orcas, herring, salmon, seals, birds, otters, clams, even plankton. To this day, crude oil from the Valdez can be found in Prince William Sound, and the region’s tourism and fishing industry never completely rebounded. The Valdez accident wasn’t even in the top 50 spills in terms of the amount of oil lost, but it has become one of the most infamous manmade disasters of all time.