Uncle John's Presents: Book of the Dumb Read online

DRIVEN TO DRINK

  We like efficiency, even when it comes to doing stupid things. For that reason, we’d like to present an “Efficiency in Stupidity” award to a man from Westmoreland, Tennessee, who allegedly did all these stupid things in rapid order:

  1. Carrying an open container in the car. Now, we’re the first to admit that an open container of alcohol doesn’t automatically mean you’re drinking when you’re driving. But then again, if you’re not drinking and driving, what are you doing with an open container in the car? Flicking the alcohol on you to keep yourself refreshingly moist? Savoring the car-filling aroma of beer? Preparing for road accidents that require the immediate topical application of Budweiser?

  2. Littering. At some point during the drive, said open container was hurled—or launched itself—from the car our man was driving. Littering isn’t very nice; for one thing, it makes a mess on the side of the road, which has to be cleaned up by well-meaning Adopt-a-Highway people. You may think that by littering you’re giving these do-gooders something to do on Saturday afternoons, but if you didn’t litter, and no one had to adopt a highway to pick up your crap, these people would find something else to do.

  Also, your trash might actually hit another car, as happened with our man, whose flung beer can smacked right into the windshield of a Tennessee Highway Patrol car. The Tennessee highway patrolman, not at all amused at having his vehicle assaulted by beer, gave chase.

  3. Evading arrest. Our escapee must have been aware that the Tennessee highway patrolman wanted to talk to him, what with the flashing lights and sirens. But since he was very close to the the state line, he sped up. As he was doing this, he performed his fourth stupid act of the day.

  4. Crash and carry. Sad. Our guy did make it across the state line into Kentucky. But if he thought he was home free, he should have guessed again. Who knows? Maybe he forgot there was a license plate on his car. Police in Kentucky, inclined to help their Tennessee brethren, tracked the license plate to a rental car company. The driver may have thought since it wasn’t his car, he couldn’t be tracked. But the rental car company keeps records of who it rents its cars to.

  And so, the police found their way to our driver, who was charged with reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon and felony evading arrest, littering, and violation of the state’s open container law. See, the police can be efficient, too.

  Source: Gallatin News Examiner

  BAD PARENTS, IN CARS

  Kids, cars, and stupid parents: a bad combination. As proven by “Leon” of Tampa, Florida, who had a hankerin�� to catch the pole-dancing girls over at a local strip joint. There was just one little problem. Well, actually, four little problems, aged eight, six, four, and one and a half: Leon’s kids. Strip clubs are known for many things, but having on-site child care is not one of them. This presented Leon with a quandary: how to see scantily clad women with four kids in tow?

  Daddy Dearest

  Leon’s solution: the family automobile. Leon drove the kids to the parking lot of the strip club, got out, and locked the kids in. Then he headed into the bar. A satisfactory solution for Leon, but less so for the kids; after a little while, they got antsy and the youngest started bawling. This attracted the attention of the club’s security officers, who as you might imagine were a little surprised to see a car full of kids in their parking lot. They called the bar’s manager. “We asked where their parents were,” manager Bob Finkelsen said to a St. Petersburg Times reporter. “They said they didn’t know.”

  Pin the Tale on the Daddy

  Finkelsen considered making an announcement over the bar’s PA, but called the cops instead. When they arrived, Leon’s excuse for being in the strip bar was that he was only using the toilet services. Nice try, except for the fact that the toilets were in the lobby, and Leon was in the bar proper. He’d even paid the $20 cover charge to get in; the lobby, we should note, was cover-charge-free. A pretty steep pee fee.

  The kids, scared but unhurt, were picked up by their aunt. Leon was arrested on four counts of child endangerment and held on $30,000 bail. We’re guessing that it’ll be a while before he’s trusted to take the kids on another field trip.

  Mommy’s Visit to the Slammer

  Now, before you get all smug and think “Isn’t that just like a man,” we’d like to trot out Exhibit B in the bad-parents-with-cars sweepstakes: “Karen,” from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Karen’s bad luck was having a husband who’s locked away in one of those state prisons. So she drove to the prison with her three-year-old daughter to spend a little family time. But when she got there, her daughter wasn’t on the visitors list.

  At this point, it might be natural to have sympathy for Karen, who traveled all the way to the prison to see her man, just to be turned away at the door. Not so when you learn how she dealt with this little problem: she walked her toddler back to the car, opened the trunk, put her in it, closed the trunk, and went back inside the prison to visit with her hubby. We’re pretty sure that’s not suggested in any parenting guide on this planet.

  A Shut and Open Case

  Police estimate the kid was in the trunk about 40 minutes before prison guards heard her and got her out. The little girl was all right and went off with the authorities. So did Karen—but with different authorities and to a different place, namely jail, where she was charged with endangerment and attempted aggravated assault.

  So, yeah, that’s as bad as a carload of kids at a strip joint.

  Next time, find a sitter.

  Sources: St. Petersburg Times (Florida), Associated Press

  DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENTS IN ALCOHOL

  A landscape architect in Queensland was awarded the somewhat dubious honor of being perhaps the drunkest female driver ever pulled over in Australia when her Breathalyzer reading clocked in at .401, which is more than eight times Queensland’s legal limit. To put this in perspective: most people slip into a coma when their blood alcohol count is around .350 and die when it reaches .500. According to her lawyer, her excuse was that she drank four bottles of vanilla essence, which is more than 50 percent alcohol. That stuff is for baking, dearie.

  Source: Herald Sun (Australia)

  BANG! YOU’RE DUMB

  They thought it would be fun. Or maybe they were just stoned. Whatever the reason, teenagers “Chet” and “Joel” took to the roads of Pittsburgh to start their shooting spree. Their ammunition: paintballs. These balls of paint are nonfatal but kind of painful (as anyone who’s ever been hit with one can tell you), and of course, the paint is tough as heck to get out of your clothes. Normally, paintball-gun wielders are confined to a paintball field, usually found in a scroungy wood or a former landfill on the edge of town, where the only people who get shot are paintball enthusiasts and the occasional office work group on a dubious teamwork-building exercise. But Chet and Joel decided they needed to share the love.

  And oh, the high jinks they had, driving about and pinging paintballs. Until, that is, they made their fatal error and decided to paintball the houses near the intersection of Broad and Winebiddle Streets, in the Garfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Our boys drove by once, letting loose a hail of paint, and had so much fun that they decided to go around for a second pass. That’s when one of the residents of the area decided to wage his own battle by pumping a dozen real bullets into Chet and Joel’s vehicle. Chet caught one of those bullets in his arm; Joel got one in the ass.

  Pittsburgh police Lt. Philip Dacey noted, “It looks like they picked the wrong area.”

  Wait, there’s more. Chet and Joel managed to drive their bullet-riddled selves to the hospital. It was there the police discovered that our bright boys, in addition to carrying gunshot wounds, were also carrying heroin and crack cocaine. So after being shot at, they were brought up on possession charges as well as a charge for allegedly having a loaded paintball gun. Now that’s what you call some big fun!

  Just remember that guns don’t shoot morons with paintball guns. People shoot morons with pain
tball guns. And real guns, too. According to the Pittsburgh police, those people are still at large. So keep the paintball guns holstered, Hondo.

  Source: WTAE-TV (Pittsburgh)

  ZAP!

  It’s not nice to zap people with tasers, and it’s especially not nice to zap homeless people with tasers. But if you’re going to do something as stupidly evil as that, as four Cleveland, Ohio, teenagers thought they must in August 2003, it’s not wise to record yourself doing it on videotape. Because if the videotape is in your car when it breaks down directly in front of the city’s justice center, you might be arrested for assault, as these teenagers were.

  Source: Ananova

  JAILHOUSE LAWYER

  All right, this one’s pretty much the height of stupidity. It’s June 2003. A lawyer is going to visit his clients at the Cook County Jail. He figures, you know, as long as I’m going, I might as well get them something nice to share with their new friends in the jail yard. Because, let’s face it, you can never be too popular in jail! Maybe some cookies or some inspirational tracts (“Proverbs for Prisoners”)?

  Guess again. Try a quarter pound of weed, taped to the lawyer’s thighs.

  Our lawyer, who really ought to have known better, tried to get the pot past the drug-sniffing dogs at the jail. Hey, the reason they call them “drug-sniffing dogs” is because that’s what they do. And that’s what they did, raising the alarm by barking up a storm as the lawyer entered the jail. At this point the lawyer chose not to offer up any excuses—such as “I wore this suit to a Dave Matthews concert” or “My glaucoma’s been acting up again”—and allowed a search. The pot was found, and he was arrested on charges of bringing contraband into a penal institution. And that’s a felony, with a sentence of up to five years.

  So boys and girls, just say no.

  Here’s some irony for you: although the lawyer admitted he was bringing in the pot to give to his clients, none of his clients were charged, because the pot never made it to them. Not that they should get too smug. The lawyer posted bail and they’re still in the slammer.

  Source: Associated Press

  TAKE A BITE OUT OF CRIME

  Here’s a lesson about sticking body parts where you oughtn’t to. “Goran” was weaving his way drunkly down a street in Zagreb, Croatia, when he decided to harass a woman standing in her yard. At first he cursed and shouted at her, but it wasn’t giving him any satisfaction. So Goran stumbled over to the woman’s property, dropped trou, and stuck Little Goran through the fence. What Goran didn’t realize in his drunk, harassing state was that she wasn’t alone.

  Snausages! Snausages!

  With her was her dog “Medo,” which we are told means “Little Bear” in Croat. Well, Little Bear saw what came through the fence and, either motivated by Goran’s lack of manners or sensing the opportunity for a little snack, went right up to the offending appendage and took a bite—although fortunately for Goran, the dog did not actually manage to take a bite out.

  This is where it gets good: Goran filed a police report! The police were not notably sympathetic; yes, he had a nasty bite on a rather sensitive part of his body, but if he hadn’t been acting like a jerk, both he and Little Goran would have made it through the night unscathed. Goran was charged with “insulting the moral feelings of citizens” and “violation of public order.” As for Medo, he probably spent the next couple of days dragging his tongue across the dirt to get the taste out of his mouth.

  Source: Reuters

  GIVE ’EM 15 MINUTES AND YOU’LL HAVE THE SCREENPLAY FOR GIGLI

  Thomas Huxley is supposed to have said that if you gave an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, eventually they would produce the works of William Shakespeare.

  Researchers at Plymouth University in England, armed with dauntless curiosity about typing monkeys, and, not entirely coincidentally, taxpayer money, gave a computer to six macaques in the Paignton Zoo in southwest England in early 2003, to see what prose, if any, these monkeys might commit to the computer screen.

  Here’s the Poop

  The results, shall we say, were not entirely unexpected. Once presented with the computer, the alpha male of the monkeys, apparently having recently caught 2001: A Space Odyssey on basic cable, picked up a rock and started smashing his new monolith. The rest of the monkeys, not nearly as ambitious, merely defecated on the keyboard. After a month of coexistence with this miracle of high technology, the six macaques had typed five pages of text—mainly the letter “S” with occasional appearances of “J,” “L,” “M,” and, for vowel purposes, “A.” No Shakespeare. Heck, not even any Gertrude Stein.

  The lead researcher for the project said that it did have some benefit: “It showed that monkeys are not random generators. They’re more complex than that.” It also showed that if you give a monkey a computer, you damn well better have the thing professionally cleaned afterward.

  Purists will note that the experiment was doomed from the start: Huxley called for infinite monkeys, each with his or her own personal Underwood, not six macaques time-sharing a word processor for 30 days. Anyone who has to share a computer with someone else knows how hard it is to get any work done with someone constantly looking over your shoulder. What this experiment really shows is this: even lower primates get writer’s block.

  Ol’ Will Shakespeare would probably sympathize.

  Source: Associated Press

  “[Computer] programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.”

  —Rich Cook

  “To err is human; to remain in error is stupid.”

  —Anonymous

  PAY FOR TV? THAT’S COMMUNISM!

  This might be shocking to Americans, but in Britain, you have to pay to watch TV. The British government charges its subjects annually for the privilege of staring blankly in the direction of dancing electrons; in 2003, the fee was £116 (about $185). Now, why Americans, two-thirds of whom live in households that are hooked up to cable television of some sort, would find paying for TV shocking is another question entirely. Nevertheless, there it is.

  Not every person in the United Kingdom complies with the license fee; an estimated 2 million of the queen’s subjects refuse to pay. The British government doesn’t just sit idly by, though. Why, if the masses start getting used to the idea of free telly, anarchy would surely follow!

  Big BBC Is Watching

  To prevent citizens from freeloading their BBC, an agency called TV Licensing tours the countryside in special detector vans that pick up a signal that U.K. televisions emit when they’re turned on. If they catch a signal coming from someplace that doesn’t have a license, the unlicensed cable poachers get hauled into court, where they could be charged up to £1,000 in fines.

  Leaving aside the issue of whether charging people to watch TV is dumb, and the fact that having people driving around your neighborhood tracking your television usage is Orwellian in a profoundly bad sort of way, let us grant that if you’re nabbed illegally watching TV in Britain, you better have a really good excuse as to why the Beeb’s on the box without your quids paid to the queen.

  But We Only Watch Reruns

  As you might expect, good excuses are in short supply, but bad ones are plentiful. TV Licensing has collected some of their favorite excuses. They are, in no particular order:

  “That’s not a TV you saw through the window. It’s just my Christmas tree lights!”

  “How did that TV get in here? I’ve never seen it before in my life!”

  “We don’t watch the TV. We just keep it around to give the cat somewhere to sleep.”

  And our favorite:

  “I thought if I wrapped my TV up in kitchen foil, your detector vans wouldn’t be able to detect it.”

  Silly people. Everyone knows that kitchen foil only works to prevent the aliens from beaming messages into your TV, not
keeping signals from coming out of it.

  Source: Scotsman, TV Licensing

  “It’s so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don’t say it.”

  —Sam Levenson

  TIPS FOR STUPID CRIMINALS

  Because you never know when one of these guys might pay attention.

  THAT DIVAN LOOKS DIVINE Today’s tip: Try to stay fresh.

  Burglar “Rob” lurked on the streets of Amsterdam. Make no mistake, it’s a strenuous gig: all that skulking, sneaking, and burgling is very physical work. And it had its effect on Rob.

  In August 2003 he snuck into a nice old lady’s house and stole some of her jewelry. But then all his thievery sapped him of his will to go on. The nice old lady’s sofa beckoned, so cozy, so soft. Rob lay down and within minutes was off in a refreshing slumber.

  Refreshing, that is, until he found himself being nudged awake by the cops; the nice old lady had found him snoozing on the sofa and made the call. Lying there on the sofa, the old woman’s jewelry still in his hands, Rob didn’t even bother to try to come up with an excuse for being in someone else’s house with someone else’s property. He just owned up to the theft and gave himself up. We hope he’ll get some rest in jail.