Uncle John's Presents: Book of the Dumb

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Bet his bosses are wishing they’d let him wear shorts.

  Sources: Vaesterbottens Folkblad, Agence France-Presse

  THE IMPORTANCE OF PACING ONESELF

  The Czech bus driver was having difficulty controlling his bus after he clocked in for work one morning. When he was stopped by police, he explained why: he’d been out drinking with his pals until 4 a.m. Alas, his work shift began at 4:10 a.m.

  A subsequent blood test showed the bus driver had enough alcohol in him to suggest that he’d imbibed several pints of lager and a few hard liquor shots thrown in to make things interesting. Well, he probably won’t have to worry about his work interfering with his drinking anymore.

  Source: Reuters

  #1 AT WIMBLEDON

  Australians have the reputation of being the party animals of the English-speaking world, which is impressive considering that they’re up against both the Americans (who invented the fraternity kegger) and the Irish (who if they didn’t invent drinking, surely raised it into an art). But then, neither an Irish nor an American citizen decided to relieve himself in the center court of Wimbledon before the 2003 men’s final between Roger Federer and Mark Philippoussis. It took an Aussie to do that. Three of them, actually.

  A Wimbledon security guard told the British newspaper Daily Star that he saw the Aussies climb over the fence of the court early one Sunday morning, amble on over to the center court, and water the grass. “We heard they had climbed in and went looking for them. We found them pissing on the baseline and by the net,” the security officer reported to the newspaper.

  The security guard claimed that the groundskeepers knew about the incident but did nothing to clean up the mess, noting that there was no reason to bother since there was no Brit in the final match.

  We should note that this report varies from the official police report, which says there were two Aussies, not three, that they didn’t actually make it onto the court, and that there was “no evidence of any offense being committed.” We smell a cover-up. Or, at least, that’s what we hope we’re smelling.

  Sources: Daily Star, Australian Associated Press

  TIPS FOR STUPID CRIMINALS

  Because when smart criminals need tips, we’re all in trouble.

  “HI, I’M HERE TO FIX YOUR . . .”

  Today’s tip: When you decide to reembark on a life of crime, don’t leave your ID at the scene.

  We don’t know for sure, but we expect that “Joaquin” did not spend his free time in California’s Folsom Prison in job-training courses. This might explain why, nine days after being released, Joaquin was lurking around homes in Los Angeles, searching for that certain special domicile to break into.

  Eventually Joaquin found one that appeared just right, so, like an older, scruffier, more Y-chromosome-laden Goldilocks, he just wandered right in through the back door. Whereupon he found the homeowner, who just happened to be home on that day. This particular homeowner, incidentally, happened to be Rocky Delgadillo, City Attorney for Los Angeles. In the entire city of L.A., there may be worse houses to break and enter into, but off the top of our heads we can’t think of any.

  So there they are, the just-released inmate and the guy who represents the second largest city in the United States in court (although Joaquin, who is proving himself to be kind of an “always the last to know” sort of guy, is not up on this little fact). But Joaquin is not entirely without guile, and suggests to Delgadillo that he’s part of a work crew at the address. But Delgadillo, being the homeowner, would probably know if he was expecting people to work at the house today, so he decides to call 911. Joaquin runs away, but leaves a backpack with identifying information. Soon enough, the LAPD hustles him off and holds him without bail.

  Source: Associated Press

  LAST ROUND, FELLAS

  A Brazilian prison guard was feeling a bit parched after his shift and headed to a bar near the prison, where he was surprised to find three prison inmates enjoying a brew. A jailbreak? Not really.

  “I told them they were arrested again and they didn’t react,” the guard told a local newspaper. “They even told me they were not running away, they were only having a beer.” The bartender noted that they were regular patrons. They were made to go back to jail anyway.

  Source: Ananova

  THE REALLY STUPID QUIZ: ARTSY-FARTSY

  Time for another Really Stupid Quiz! Pick the one that’s true. It’s not as easy as you might think (proving that the world really is a scary place to live).

  1. Officers from Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice closed down a Medina children’s theater production of skits inspired by children’s tales after deciding that the story “The Three Little Pigs” was morally questionable because the pigs emerge victorious. The Koran forbids the eating of pork (Surat-ul Baqara [2]:173); many Muslims view pigs as unclean. (This is not the first time Saudi Arabia has banned depictions of pigs: the country famously banned The Muppet Show because of the positive portrayal of pigs by way of Miss Piggy.) The Medina show was allowed to continue after the “Pigs” segment was axed.

  2. Some attendees at Edinburgh’s Festival Fringe got a little more than they bargained for when they nibbled on the performers of “Edible You,” an experimental participatory play in which the actors, dressed in edible costumes, would occasionally wade into the audience and encourage people to take a bite. “One of the costumes featured cold cuts and we believe that too much time under the stage lights turned the meats,” noted a Festival Fringe spokesperson. As a result, two members of the “Edible You” audience took a trip to the hospital after the performance, where they were diagnosed with mild food poisoning. The play skipped one performance but was allowed to resume after the producers promised not to let the audience eat from the cold-cut costume again.

  3. A São Paulo resident sued a Brazilian television station for trauma after she inadvertently drove into a reenactment of a crime being filmed for a show. The woman was driving down a São Paulo street when she saw two armed men on motorcycles appear to take a pedestrian hostage. The woman panicked and crashed her car into a nearby truck as she tried to hightail it out of the area. “We live in a violent country, you know,” she told a local newspaper. “What was I to think? There was no sign whatsoever this was a filming.” The television station has agreed to compensate the twitchy driver. We’re assuming a walk-on role on a show is not in the cards.

  Which one is really stupid?

  Answer page 311.

  Source: Ananova

  “There is one quality greater than hardness of heart, and that is softness of head.”

  —Theodore Roosevelt

  YOU CAN BUY BULLETS IN THE GIFT SHOP

  Dandong, located in northern China, is a city of 2.3 million within the Liaodong Peninsula Economic Opening-up Zone. It’s rich in all sorts of resources including tobacco, ginseng, and Chinese chestnut, as well as minerals like copper, gold, magnesium, and boron (94 percent of national reserves). It’s also famed for its marble, which the locals claim is called “Champion of Marbles” by the Southeast Asian countries. To top it all off, it’s home to Mianjiang Mountain Park, a nature park where, until recently, you could shoot the animals for fun.

  The park was looking for an idea that would bring in more tourists when someone realized, hey, people like animals in zoos. And people like shooting things. What if we just combine the two concepts and let people shoot animals in zoos!

  Let’s Not and Say We Did

  The folks at the Mianjiang Mountain Park quickly learned that there were some notable downsides to letting zoo patrons blast the animals. First, it made the animals nervous, and not merely the ones being shot at; several species of protected animals housed near the shooting ranges became notably jumpy when the guns started blazing. Second, it seems that the kids visiting the park were upset about the idea that the cute little creatures they had just seen might be trotted out the back door and shot. Third, animal rights activ
ists were wound up. The park officials countered complaints by pointing out that they were only letting people shoot domesticated farmyard animals; it’s not like they were shooting panda cubs or anything.

  Nevertheless, stung by the bad publicity, the Mianjiang Mountain Park has phased out the shooting of zoo animals. Now you’ll have to kill off the zoo animals the old-fashioned way: by throwing them high-fat snack foods that could lead to heart disease. Zoo officials would probably tell you that’s just cruel.

  Sources: News.com.au, Ananova, Liaoshen Evening News

  WOOF!

  A police suspect in Hamilton County, Tennessee, gave himself up when the police who were chasing him threatened to send police dogs after him—and even barked like dogs to convince the suspect that the animals were already on the scene. The suspect, who had fled police on foot after they had pulled him over for a broken taillight, was later charged with driving under the influence, driving on a revoked license, evading arrest, and a taillight violation. When told of the police’s tactic to get the suspect to surrender, the judge in the case said, “I suppose as long as the officers have had their shots and don’t bite, I’ll allow them to continue that technique.”

  Source: Associated Press

  DON’T DRIVE ANGRY. DON’T CRASH ANGRY, EITHER.

  As our story unfolds, “Eddie,” of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, is having a few relationship issues with Mrs. Eddie, who no longer lives with him. This particular day, Eddie decides, for reasons the police later suspect have something to do with alcohol, that what he really wants to do is get into his van, drive down to his wife’s home, and, oh, ram his van into her car 20 or 30 times. Just for kicks. So he gets into his van, drives to his wife’s house, spots her car outside of the house, and allegedly proceeds a-rammin’. Again and again. Eddie is just a rammin’ fool.

  Eventually the police arrive, and they ask Eddie what in tarnation he’s up to, and he tells the cops about his intense desire to reduce his wife’s automobile into a compact box of ruined metal. Whereupon the cops tell him something: that’s not his wife’s car. Heck, the car’s not even parked in front of his wife’s house. As Fond du Lac officer Greg Dieke noted, “He was at the wrong house. His wife lives next door.”

  The cops would have taken Eddie in anyway, but now Eddie doesn’t even get the satisfaction of knowing he’s trashed his wife’s car. He’s just an angry guy with a messed-up van and bad vehicular aim. So much for good clean satisfaction.

  We’re guessing reconcilement isn’t in the cards for this couple.

  Source: Associated Press

  TIPS FOR STUPID CRIMINALS

  They won’t make the criminals any less stupid. But they might keep them from making their stupidity known to others.

  A BAD DISGUISE

  Today’s tip: Don’t pretend to be a cop in front of real cops. They know the difference.

  For example, an off-duty Kansas City, Kansas, police officer became suspicious when a blue Ford Crown Victoria, similar to the ones used by police, tried to pull him over in June of 2003. The car had blue lights, whereas the real cop cars had red lights, too. Soon the fake cop car was being chased by a real cop car—you know, one with blue and red lights—which pursued the impostor car for six miles before some other real cops blew out its tires with “stop sticks.” The fake cop crashed his car and then tried to escape on foot, but that chase didn’t take six miles to end.

  The fake cop then got a ride in a real police car. And we bet that’s all he ever really wanted.

  Source: Ananova

  “The absurd is clear reason recognizing its limits.”

  —Albert Camus

  HE GETS FIRST PLACE IN SOMETHING, ALL RIGHT

  Before you start celebrating, make sure you won. Race car driver Bjorn Wirdheim, a member of the Arden International racing team, forgot that part when he was participating in a Formula 3000 race in Monte Carlo. He misjudged where the finish line was and as a result pulled off early to start accepting the congratulations of his teammates.

  This was just the lucky break rival racer Nicolas Kiesa needed; he zoomed past the locationally challenged Wirdheim to take the checkered flag. Wirdheim had to settle for second place.

  “I made a stupid mistake but I believe I am the moral winner,” Wirdheim rationalized later. He was right about one of those.

  Source: Ananova

  “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

  —Bertrand Russell

  “Nine-tenths of wisdom consists in being wise in time.”

  —Theodore Roosevelt

  THAT’S SOME BANK ERROR

  It all began when “Francesca” went to the Estado de Santa Catarina bank in Santa Catarina, Brazil. Francesca was getting money from her husband Alonzo’s pension and as his wife, she didn’t expect there would be any problem withdrawing the cash.

  So, of course, there was a problem: the people at the bank told Francesca that she wasn’t Alonzo’s wife. And they knew that because Alonzo had a bank account with an entirely different woman, and she was his wife. They even showed Francesca the account on the computer screen with the name of her husband . . . and some other woman.

  But, Honey . . .

  Francesca marched home and confronted Alonzo about the bank account and the other woman. Alonzo naturally protested and told her that there was no “other woman,” and that this was some weird error. But Francesca had seen the bank records, and to her, it probably seemed like the old Richard Pryor joke about a man getting caught with another woman and saying, “Who are you going to believe? Me or your own lying eyes?” In this case, Francesca believed her own eyes and divorced her still-protesting husband.

  Don’t “Honey” Me!

  You’d think the moral of the story here is that if you’re going to cheat on your wife, don’t be so dumb as to put your mistress on your bank account. But you’re wrong. Because Alonzo wasn’t cheating on his wife—it was the bank that had made the error. After five years fighting the case in the courts, Alonzo was finally able to get the bank to admit the error. As a consequence, the court had the bank pay Alonzo and Francesca about $16,500 in damages. So the moral actually is: when your husband pleads with you not to divorce him because the bank made a computer error, maybe you should entertain the notion that he might be telling the truth.

  Does this mean Alonzo and Francesca are going to patch things up? Not necessarily; Francesca told the Jornal Nacional that she wasn’t sure she wanted to get back together with her now-proven-innocent-but-still-ex ex-husband. As for Alonzo, he was philosophical: “The money is good, but it doesn’t make up for a failed marriage, does it?”

  Sources: Jornal Nacional, Ananova

  “People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want it to be true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.”

  —Terry Goodkind

  DUMB MOVIE FESTIVAL: THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (2003)

  Our Entry: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, starring Sean Connery and no one else you might know off-hand.

  The Plot (Such As It Is): Nineteenth-century British adventurer and public domain action figure Allan Quatermain assembles other public domain action figures such as Captain Nemo and Tom Sawyer to keep World War I from starting 15 years or so ahead of schedule. Action scenes include a car chase in Venice, Italy (notable for having water-filled canals rather than roads), and a fisticuffs festival in which Connery, at 72, handily dispatches multiple bad guys through physical exertion without having a heart attack. Interestingly, it is based loosely on a graphic novel by Alan Moore, which is substantially smarter and more in tune with its c
haracters.

  Fun Fact: Director Stephen Norrington had such an awful time with this film (and with star Connery) that after its completion he announced his retirement from directing Hollywood films. Asked by reporters about Norrington, Connery is said to have replied, “Ask me about someone I like.”

  Total North American Box Office (as of 7/28/2003): $53,629,000 (source: The-Numbers.com). It has little chance of returning the estimated budget of $140 million.

  The Critics Rave!

  “I don’t really mind the movie’s lack of believability . . . What I do mind is that the movie plays like a big wind came along and blew away the script and they ran down the street after it and grabbed a few pages and shot those.”—Chicago Sun-Times

  “Your adolescent son will think it’s all the dopest thing he has seen in, oh, weeks . . . Anyone without braces, however, may detect a low rumbling in the background. It’s not the screws of the Nautilus you hear, but the combined sounds of Verne,