Uncle John's Presents Book of the Dumb 2

by John Michael Scalzi

  Source: Canoe.ca

  A Boner of a Regulation

  Dogs are man’s best friend (says so right there on the label), and what do they want from us? The odd scratch behind the ears, the occasional Frisbee throw, and yes, every once in a while it’d be nice if we threw our furry pal a bone. Word on the street is that they love those crunchy, marrow-packed treats, and hey, it’s not like you’re going to gnaw on it.

  Well, the friendship might be strained in Europe, where EU bureaucrats have announced that no longer can butchers give their spare bones to dogs. If you’re a butcher, and you debone a piece of meat, that bone is now defined as a “waste by-product” (as is any trimmed fat), and as waste by-product, it must be disposed of properly—it has to be incinerated. Give a dog a bone, and you can get fined for improperly disposing of waste.

  What makes this regulation well and truly stupid is not that butchers can no longer give customers bones for their dogs; what makes it well and truly stupid is that they can, so long as everyone pretends that they’re not. See, by EU regulations, if you take the bone out, it’s a by-product and therefore must be incinerated—but, as a spokesman for Britain’s Department for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs noted: “Customers can take bones when they buy deboned meat if it is for human consumption.” So all you do is go into the butcher shop, declare your intention to personally jaw on a bone, take the bone home, and feed it to the dog. It’s the carnivorous equivalent of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

  We wonder if those EU bureaucrats have told their own dogs about their new “no bones” policy. And if so, how well they sleep at night. Dogs are simply domesticated wolves, you know. If you won’t give them a bone, they may be inclined to take one.

  Source: The Sun (UK)

  If You Give a Polar Bear a Cookie

  We’re not sure what it is with people being dumb in zoos, but this scenario seems to take the cake. There was drinking (of course). There was the blackout. There was the waking up in the zoo in Tallinn, Estonia; moreover, there was the waking up in the Tallinn Zoo in the polar bear exhibit. Okay? Got all the details? Holding them in your brain? Now, pay attention:

  Don’t try to give the polar bear a cookie.

  Of course, put yourself in the place of “Ivan,” who found himself in just the sticky pickle we described. Hungover, disoriented, and facing a massive predator, perhaps he thought that offering the sweet crispy treat will distract the animal long enough for him to run away. Or perhaps Ivan, brought up as so many of us have been on the idea of polar bears being cute spokes animals for fizzy beverages, thought they would bond over a doughy treat. But the fact is polar bears are carnivorous, wild animals—certainly not to be trifled with.

  It was his screams that brought Ivan to the attention of the zoo staff, who found the polar bear busy chomping away, not the cookie, but the hand with which it was offered. They took Ivan to the hospital. Meanwhile Tallinn Zoo manager Mati Kaal, who has seen run-ins with the polar bear and dumb humans before, offered this blasé yet scary comment: “This is the first hand. In other cases it’s been the whole arm.” So maybe the cookie was a useful deterrent after all.

  Source: iol.co.za

  The Really Stupid Quiz

  Outsmarted by Animals

  One of the stories is a true animal tale, the other two are more made up than a Jackalope. You make the call.

  1.There are many reasons not to attack a wasp’s nest with a flame thrower made from a can of WD–40, and “Sid,” of Painesville, Ohio, illustrates one of them. Sid’s plan was to torch the wasp’s nest that was residing in the bushes outside his home, but he neglected to consider that in lifting his lighter into the aerosol spray to ignite it, some of the spray might get onto his hand, thus catching his hand on fire. He then neglected to consider that as he was hopping around in pain over his burned hand, he might accidentally brush up against the wasp nest he planned to burn, thus enraging the residents of the nest, who would deploy in a swarm to sting Sid several dozen times before he could manage to retreat to his home to call 911. “Looking back, I could have handled it better,” Sid admitted to a reporter, at the hospital.

  2.In Waco, Texas, the owner of “Preston,” an Australian Shepard mix, probably thought he was being clever when he trained his pup to retrieve beer cans, just like that dog does in that commercial. Unfortunately, the owner apparently did not teach his dog to distinguish between the owner’s beers and the beers of others. Or perhaps he chose not to, because on a visit to Waco’s Cameron Park, when Preston began retrieving beers from other picnickers, his owner began drinking the ill-gained booty. This was good, beery fun until one of Preston’s beer-snatch victims followed Preston to his master, identified himself as an off-duty Waco policeman, and arrested Preston’s owner for receiving stolen property. Preston was not charged.

  3.What would you call a rabbit with an explosive strapped to it? In this case, you’d call it Lucky. For one, that was its name. Second, when the two men taped that M-1000 explosive (the equivalent of a quarter stick of dynamite), lit the fuse, and then tossed the at-that-moment-ironically-named Lucky into Lake Don Castro in Castro Valley, California, they neglected to consider the fuse-quenching capacity of the lake. So Lucky was lucky that her tormentors weren’t very smart. They were, however, arrested on misdemeanor charges of animal cruelty. This caused one of the men to complain, “I think that a lot of people are judging us without knowing us at all.” When asked to explain why he strapped an explosive to a bunny, the man replied, “That’s a real tough question to answer.” We bet.

  Answers on page 329.

  Dim Bulbs in Bright Lights

  Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

  Our Dumb Guys: Theodore “Ted” Logan (Keanu Reeves) and Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter). And together, they are WYLD STALLYNS!!!!!

  Our Story: Two mentally hypoxic teenagers from San Dimas, California, are about to flunk out of high school if they don’t ace their history presentation. Lucky for them a mysterious stranger, Rufus (George Carlin), offers them the use of a time travel machine to do their most excellent research. They go back in time to procure august personages from the past, such as Abe Lincoln and Joan of Arc, to show how they would react to modern times.

  Dumb or Stoned? We are supposed to believe that two hard rock-loving teenage wanna-bes who hang out in a convenience store parking lot in the late 1980s are not, in fact, stoned to the gills most of the time. Uh-huh. Whatever you say, guys.

  High Point of Low Comedy: Bill and Ted convince Socrates (whose name they pronounce “So-crates”) to go with them by quoting lines from rock band Kansas’s 1970s hit “Dust in the Wind.”

  And Now, In Their Own Words: Ted, introducing Genghis Khan: “This is a dude who, 700 years ago, totally ravaged China, and who we were told, 2 hours ago, totally ravaged Ashman’s Sporting Goods.”

  They’re Dumb, But Is the Film Good? Not really, but for a film about stupid teenagers, it’s surprisingly not gross or drugged-up. In its own dim-bulb way suggests that there might be something to that whole “education” thing teenagers may have heard about. And it’s packed with one-liners that teenagers quoted to each other well into the 1990s. Still, be excellent to each other, dudes.

  CHAPTER 12

  Political Pinheads

  Ultimately, politics is about people; and as you’ll learn in this chapter, it’s often about dumb people. Let us note, however, that politically speaking, dumbness is an equal opportunity employer. In a way, it’s nice to see stupidity evenly distributed across the entire political experience. In another way, it can make you want to hide in the basement stocked with a good supply of water and canned goods, just in case the political system implodes. Which way you’re leaning can depend on what day it is and how many stories you read from this chapter. Courage.

  Spelling Lesson

  Give New York City Councilwoman Margarita Lopez this much credit: her intentions were good, but she lost points on execution. Wanting to call atten
tion to what she believed were deficiencies in educational policy, Lopez issued a press release attacking the policies of promoted by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. There was just one thing Ms. Lopez forgot: when blasting someone else’s educational policies, make sure that you yourself appear somewhat educated.

  The misstep? See if you can spot it: “Why is Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein ignoring the fact that the test is flawed and discriminatory?” Okay, who can spot the grammatical error? Hands please, let’s not have everyone shout it out at once. Yes, that’s correct, the first “is” should be “are” in that sentence (there are two people referred to in the sentence).

  Undaunted, Lopez’s office shot out a second release asking: “Why are advocates targeted for examining testing prodecures and policies implemented by the Department of Education?” An excellent question, although it would have been made even more excellent through the simple use of a spell check. Lopez’s office immediately moved to correct the error by issuing a revised press release. The good news: “procedures” was no longer spelled “prodecures.” The bad news: it wasn’t spelled “procedures,” either—instead, we were introduced to “proceedures.” Thus was the point of Lopez’s press release lost in the din of giggling about her staff’s inability to wield the language in a competent fashion.

  Lopez herself did not write the press releases, but nevertheless she took the heat, proclaiming: “I take total responsibility . . . The member of my office who committed the mistake is going to be protected by me, the same the way that I protect the children of the City of New York.” Hopefully she’ll hold the children of the City of New York to higher spelling standards.

  Source: New York Post

  Not Clear On the “Have to Win People’s Votes” Thing

  The spring of 2004 wasn’t the most congenial time in American politics, what with the snowballing presidential campaign and some particularly bad moments in Iraq splitting the nation into highly partisan and largely annoying camps. But even in moments of high political duress, it’s a good idea to keep one’s cool. It’s not like the 1850s, when members of Congress could whack each other with their canes, or even the 1950s, when Harry Truman threatened to beat the crap out of a newspaper critic who had given his daughter a bad review. This is the twenty-first century, and we try to be a little more genteel.

  Perhaps Democratic Representative Pete Stark from California didn’t get the memo, because when one of his constituents sent him a fax complaining about his vote on a resolution he lost his cool. The constituent, a member of the National Guard and a law student, wrote, in part: “Your no vote on this resolution is a disgrace to the people of this district who have elected you . . . I urge you to stop your contemptuous display of bitter partisanship.”

  Less than an hour later, a message appeared on the constituent’s cell phone. It was from Congressman Stark himself. He basically ripped the guy a new one, suggesting that “you don’t know what you’re talking about,” and that “I doubt if you could spell half the words in the letter, and somebody wrote it for you.” However, he promised to call back later “and let you tell me more about why you think you’re such a great [profanity deleted] hero.” Clearly, Stark wasn’t worried about getting this guy’s vote in November.

  Sure, it sounds like Stark got the better of the guy. Here’s a tip to you future leaders of America, however: if you leave a message spouting bile upon one of your constituents on his cell phone, don’t be surprised if he doesn’t keep it to himself. Not long after Stark left the message, a tape of it was aired on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, which allowed that famously bloviating talk show host several minutes of his patented liberal bashing. Probably not what Stark would have wanted at all.

  Source: NBC11.com, Trivalleyherald.com

  Put Down That Comic Book!

  Here’s a little story to inspire confidence in your political institutions. Over there in Japan, prime minister Junichiro Koizumi had a little sit down with the newest members of parliament from his party and asked them do something for him—stop reading comic books at work!

  Is this the Japanese parliament or a high school? If it were the latter, that might explain a lot about Japan’s anemic economic performance the last several years. But in fact it’s the former. The lawmakers are reading comic books because in Japan, comic books (or “manga”) aren’t just for kids; they’re common reading material for average adults (it helps that many of the comic books in Japan are quite, uh, racy compared to what most American comic books). Everybody has their favorite manga—even parliamentarians.

  And therein lay the problem for Prime Minister Koizumi. As newer members of the parliament are seated in the front, the prime minister was getting a mighty fine view of the boys goofing off. So down came the heel. “Don’t . . . read comic books in Parliament while in session,” Koizumi was quoted in the Japanese press as saying. “You can be seen very clearly from the prime minister’s seat. You should really stop that—it’s disgraceful.”

  And if they don’t stop, Koizumi is going to give them detention.

  Source: Associated Press

  Well, Then, Stop Printing Them With Flavored Ink

  We can’t say enough good things about Canada, who even the most jingoistic American will admit is a perfect neighbor. Be that as it may, every once in a while we get an indication that up there in the Great White North, they do things a little differently.

  As an example, take the following bit of advice, from the Web site of Elections Canada: “Eating a ballot, not returning it or otherwise destroying or defacing it constitutes a serious breach of the Canada Elections Act.” Which led us to ask, in that logical way of ours, well, have Canadians been eating their ballots in numbers large enough to warrant a warning on a government Web site? Sure, you’ll always have one or two odd ducks who’ll snack on a ballot just because they’re pathological paper eaters, but to have the government actually address the issue, there’s got to be a bunch of Canadians looking for snacks at their ballot box.

  The answer is that indeed there are. The Edible Ballot Society of Canada promotes ballot ingestion as a form of civil disobedience: “Voting is not only useless, it actually undermines genuine democracy by legitimizing an inherently un-democratic process . . . Check out great dishes such as The Ballot Burger, with a side order of Campaign Literature. Or perhaps you enjoy cheese and would like to try a Ballot Fondue,” says the group’s Web site (everyone has a Web site these days).

  The EBS notes that members of its pulp-loving crew were arrested for eating their ballots in the 1997 and 2000 elections; apparently these incidents caused enough consternation for Elections Canada that they posted a warning. It must have worked, since Canada’s 2004 national election was by all indications free of ballot ingestion. We guess this time around, the ballot choices were more palatable than the ballots themselves.

  We wonder if the movement would ever catch on here in the United States, although most Americans, confronted with the choices on their ballots are probably less inclined to chuck their ballots down their throats than the opposite maneuver entirely.

  Source: Reuters, The Edible Ballot Society

  Vice Presidential Misprint

  Newspapers can be a rough gig, especially in New York City, where three daily newspapers kick and bite and scratch and gouge at each other trying to get to the stories first (well, the Post and the Daily News scratch and gouge; the Times sends out a manservant to rough up the others). So in early July 2004, when it was time to sniff out which person Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry would choose as his running mate, all three newspapers were hot on the trail.

  And it was the scrappy, sassy New York Post—a frequent source for this very book!—that pulled out the scoop: “Kerry’s Choice: Dem picks Gephardt as VP candidate,” blasted the Post from its front page, referring to Missouri congressman Richard Gephardt. “Gephardt—a 63-year-old power player in Washington for nearly three decades—beat out such contenders as Sen. John Edwards o
f North Carolina,” read the story, which led on the front and then booted to page four, which was filled with colorful pictures of the erstwhile VP candidate. In all, a nice presentation of a nice scoop—and the Post had it in the newsstands while the other papers were still speculating on Kerry’s selection.

  There was one minor factual error with the scoop, however: mainly, that Kerry selected John Edwards for his VP candidate, not Gephardt. So by 9 a.m., the Post’s big scoop turned into one of the great screw-ups in New York newspaper history and in political reporting—not quite supplanting the Chicago Tribune’s infamous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline, but rather comfortably settling in to position number two.

  Were the other media outlets understanding of the Post’s error? Nope. The New York Daily News was particularly gleeful: “In another of its ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’–style ‘exclusives,’ The New York Post reported on its front page and website Tuesday that Missouri Rep. Gephardt was Kerry’s choice,” the competing tabloid crowed. “The struggling tabloid’s site pulled the embarrassing image of its flat-out-wrong front page and swapped in a wire story instead of its sure-to-stay-exclusive original, but thousands of copies of the baffling Gephardt front page were already on the streets.”

  Meanwhile, over at media industry bible Editor & Publisher, things weren’t much nicer: “The New York Post . . . became an object of ridicule Tuesday morning,” E&P noted on the same day. The Post, which posts its front page on its Web site, pulled down the page and replaced it with its back page; the “scoop” article was also pulled down. Rather sadly, however, there were still all those thousands of physical copies of the newspaper out there, which were rapidly snapped up as collector’s items: “Copies of the paper are already available on eBay,” the E&P said. Some wags speculated that the Post purposefully ran the wrong story simply to get a sales spike.