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

  Source: London Times

  THE TOILET PAPER–DISPENSING PDA COSTS EXTRA

  One often overlooked aspect of a successful hoax is the willing suspension of disbelief on the part of those being hoaxed. At some fundamental level, most people who get hoaxed really, truly want to believe, and this desire to believe allows them to overcome logical objections that someone else might immediately see. Say, for instance, that Van Gogh did not in fact regularly work in the medium of Marks-A-Lot permanent markers or that Hitler’s diaries probably weren’t written in a lined, spiral notebook with Spongebob Squarepants on the cover.

  Après the Internet Café

  A perfect example of this willing suspension of disbelief occurred in April 2003, when tech journalists across the world reported that the British arm of Microsoft’s MSN Internet service had created the world’s first Internet-enabled portable toilet: the “iLoo.” “The Internet is so much a part of everyday life now that surfing on the loo was the next natural step,” opined MSN spokesperson Tracy Blacher. MSN was creating a self-contained waste station complete with a wireless keyboard, a plasma screen, and wi-fi Net access. Never had it been easier to do your business while you were doing your business. MSN declared that the new iLoos would debut at music festivals across England over the summer.

  Hey Dude, Hurry Up with That Download

  At this juncture, some of the less starry-eyed might have observed some of the following data points:

  1. Longtime Microsoft rival Apple is the technology company that habitually names its products with a lowercase “i” out in front—“iMac,” “iPod,” “iBook,” “iTunes”—so Microsoft trying to come out with an iAnything would be likely to arouse the iWrath of Apple’s iLawyers. Therefore, it probably was not meant to be taken seriously.

  2. As anyone who has ever gone to a summer concert knows, music festivals’ portable toilets are a prime example of man’s inhumanity to man. Using one for even a few seconds is unadulterated hell in a fiberglass shell; the idea that someone would want to hang out in one and check e-mail strains credulity.

  3. Anyone who admits to downloading jpgs of anime chicks while a line full of sun-baked partiers are not so slowly becoming candidates for peritonitis is going to spend the rest of the concert trapped screaming in the portable toilet tank.

  4. Two words to dissuade anyone from touching that keyboard: people miss.

  But tech reporters, enticed by the idea of surfing the Web while riding the porcelain throne, reported it uncritically. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks later that Microsoft admitted what should have been obvious: “I can confirm it was an April Fools’ joke,” said Microsoft spokesperson Nouri Bernard Hasan. Seems the British arm of MSN is filled with irrepressible pranksters who learned all they know from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It was a prank, nothing more.

  Rebooting the System

  Or was it? No sooner had Microsoft admitted fooling the media than it reversed itself: “We jumped the gun basically yesterday in confirming that it was a hoax and in fact it was not,” said yet another Microsoft spokesperson. The line from Redmond now was that it wasn’t really a hoax, but the point was moot, since the iLoo project was canceled anyway. To which the obvious rejoinder is “Okay, guys, whatever you say.”

  So who ends up looking dumber: the tech media, for breathlessly announcing the iLoo, or Microsoft, for announcing it, denying it, and then denying the denial? All one can truly say is that the portable toilets at the summer festivals aren’t the only things that stink about this story.

  Source: USA Today

  “Before we work on artificial intelligence, why don’t we do something about natural stupidity?”

  —Steve Polyak

  “If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”

  —Anatole France

  IF YOU’RE SEEING DOUBLE, DOES THAT MEAN YOU’VE VOTED TWICE?

  There are all sorts of things you probably shouldn’t do when you’ve been drinking.

  Driving is a big one, but so are (in no particular order) operating heavy machinery, signing legal documents, formalizing lifetime commitments, climbing over zoo fences to play with large mammals, and telling your in-laws what you really think about them.

  Voting while drunk is another bad idea. People do a bad enough job of it sober, after all; the idea of people stumbling into the voting booth and trying to operate one of those little punch pens is enough to terrify even those folks who have somehow managed to wrap their minds around the concept of an electoral college.

  Arriving Under the Influence

  For these reasons among others (although not so much the electoral college thing), Norway has long outlawed voting while drunk. Indeed, the Norwegian law specifically bars voters entry to voting booths if they exhibit “reduced consciousness” or “seriously impaired judgment.” One could of course argue that it’s difficult to say whether one shows seriously impaired judgment until after one has made one’s voting selections. But let’s leave that alone for now. The point is if you’re plastered in Norway, you’re not voting.

  I Demand My Rights As a Citizen!

  Or, at least, you weren’t voting. But now comes news that, for the 2004 general elections at least, Norwegians will be able to vote while blasted. “The election board can no longer refuse anyone to vote because they are intoxicated,” the local government ministry told the Bladet Tromso newspaper in July 2003. Meanwhile, Norwegian politicians, apparently alarmed at the prospect of all of Norway getting tanked and falling into the voting booths, have reinstated the “no drinking, no voting” law, but the new law won’t take effect until 2005.

  So we have one guaranteed year of drunken Norwegian voting! Sure, it’s a bad idea—but it’s a bad idea that’s happening somewhere else. That’s the best kind of bad idea.

  Sources: Bladet Tromso, Reuters

  FAIR’S FAIR

  A policeman in the state of Victoria in Australia was wondering why female police officers were allowed to wear their hair long, but men were not. It didn’t seem fair to him. So he complained. And it worked: the state police hair regulations were made “gender nonspecific.” So male officers are now allowed to wear their hair long. And interestingly, theoretically, female police officers are also allowed to wear beards and mustaches. Wonder how many will?

  Source: Herald-Sun (Australia)

  FOR GOD’S SAKE, DON’T GO AFTER A GRIZZLY WITH ENDUST

  Africanized honey bees, better known as the dreaded “killer bees,” have a nasty if slightly overblown reputation. They’re not waiting to jump you and steal your lunch money, but if you do disturb them, you’ll find that they have shorter tempers and longer memories than their European-bred counterparts. Which is to say, they attack more quickly and will chase you farther distances than their more domesticated counterparts. Leave them alone and they’ll generally leave you alone. However, if you go and intentionally tick them off, don’t be at all surprised when they decide to live up to their name.

  Let Us Spray

  Just ask “Tom” of Las Vegas, who in May 2003 had been fighting an ongoing war with the hive of Africanized bees in his front yard for just about five years. From time to time Tom would hit the bees with bug spray, but the stubborn bees simply wouldn’t take the hint. Tom decided it was time to escalate the attacks, and try a new form of chemical warfare: Comet cleanser.

  Now, Comet does many things well, most of them, not surprisingly, having to do with cleaning. Procter & Gamble, which makes the popular product, suggests it for “tough cleaning problems around the house”—the kitchen, tub, and toilet bowl, for example. But nowhere on the packaging does it suggest that the product would be excellent at rubbing out bees. Perhaps Tom was an optimist. He took a handful of the stuff and flung it into the bee hive.

  Let’s Get the Heck Outta Here!

  This was rather quickly followed by the bees swarming around Tom and stinging him viciously. “He was running all over the place trying to get th
em off his head and he came in here and he fell on the ground,” his neighbor Shirley Collura told a local television station. Perhaps the bees were insulted by the implicit suggestion they were unhygienic and needed a good scrubbing. Perhaps they were irritated by the fact that Comet’s primary active ingredient, sodium dichloro-s-triazinetrione dihydrate, does not really improve the taste of honey. It may have simply been that after five years of low-grade hostilities, the bees needed to show Tom that just because you have opposable thumbs and cleansers doesn’t mean you’re the boss.

  Whatever the reason, it was the bees who cleaned Tom’s clock, not the other way around. “I grabbed a handful of [Comet] and put it in that hole and I never should have done it,” Tom said later, and probably painfully.

  Incidentally, here’s a note from your can of Comet: “It is a violation of Federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling.” So not only were Tom’s actions dumb, they were also illegal. No wonder the bees attacked.

  Source: KLAS-TV

  HAKENKREUZING FOR A BRUISING

  Here’s the basic rule on using swastikas in your decorating: don’t. Crazy as it may seem, people still haven’t stopped associating this particular symbol with genocidal Nazis bent on world domination.

  But people still slip up, including some people who really ought to know better. For example, the Coca-Cola Company. In April 2003, Coke did a promotion in Hong Kong that featured a popular series of robotlike toys called Robocons. With the purchase of a six-pack of Coke and the equivalent of $3.60, you could take home one of several Robocon toys, complete with a plastic base emblazoned with the Coca-Cola logo. Among these characters was “Robowaru,” a goofy-looking fellow with silvery boots, a headdress that looks like a melted motorcycle helmet, and two, count ’em, two swastikas on his chest—one for each pectoral muscle.

  Good vs. Evil

  Now, it’s true that they have swastikas in Asia whose arms point in the other direction. And they are symbols of peace! Buddhist-style swastikas are common all over our largest continent. However, in this particular case, close examination reveals that the arms of Robowaru’s swastikas do not point in the happy, prosperous, riding-high-on-the-eternal-wheel-of-rebirth direction, but in the evil, let’s-blitzkrieg-though-Europe direction. It’s the little details that make the difference.

  To Coke’s defense, the cola giant did not create Robowaru—the toys were made to specifications provided by the Robocon designers. But you’d think someone would have noticed. The person who eventually did notice was Hong Kong-based rabbi Yakkov Kermaier. He said that while he believed it was an innocent enough flub, the toy and its attendant swastikas still had to go. “It’s not simply a politically incorrect symbol,” he noted. “It’s an emblem that represents the wholesale slaughter of six million Jews.”

  Coca-Cola agreed and pulled the Robowaru figure from stores in late April. That’s the good news. The bad news, of course, is now that particular figurine is certain to become a collector’s item.

  Source: Associated Press

  A MAN WALKS INTO A DENTIST’S OFFICE

  Man: “Excuse me, can you help me? I think I’m a moth.”

  Dentist: “You don’t need a dentist. You need a psychiatrist.”

  Man: “Yes, I know.”

  Dentist: “So why did you come in here?”

  Man: “The light was on.”

  OM, OM, OW!

  Yoga can help you relax, make you feel more calm, reduce your stress level, and possibly even help you extend your life. Unless, that is, you decide that yoga can help you avoid a shark attack while you’re standing in shark-infested waters. In which case, let us suggest that yoga is possibly more dangerous than driving drunk while smoking crack.

  We know you’re skeptical. So we invite you to meet Dr. Erich Ritter, a behavioral scientist who was under the impression that by using certain yoga techniques, he would be able to hang out with the bull sharks who live in Walker’s Cay in the Bahamas and not be molested, even though the waters in which he stood had been liberally laden with chunks of cut-up fish. The doctor’s thinking was that through yoga, he could slow his heartbeat and calm himself to the point where the sharks would see him as just another predator. He also suggested to the Discovery television network crew who accompanied him that he could read shark body language, which is what kept him from being nibbled on in the past.

  So what happened? Well, what do you think?

  Somebody Call a Doctor!

  The damn fool got bit, of course; a shark ripped off his left calf. It was aiming for a remora fish that darted between Dr. Ritter’s legs in an attempt to avoid being eaten. And indeed, the shark missed the remora. Good strategy on the remora’s part, but very bad news for Ritter, who was now bleeding like crazy in shark-filled water, and who suffered massive blood loss and had to be rushed back to Florida for a six-week stay in the hospital. All of which was filmed by the Discovery network crew, who had a front row seat and who made a special out of it—“Anatomy of a Shark Bite.” Really, there are easier ways to get on TV.

  Defenders of Dr. Ritter may note that the doctor was sort of bitten on a technicality, since the shark was aiming for something else and Dr. Ritter just happened to be in the way. So there may still be something to the yoga-as-shark-repellent thing; at the very least, it wasn’t definitively disproven. But we would imagine that’s cold comfort when there’s a fearsome ocean predator gnawing on your leg, for whatever reason. We’ll be doing our yoga exercises on dry land, thank you very much.

  Source: Western Daily Press (Bristol, UK)

  THE MONEY! IT’S HAUNTED!

  We know some of you persist in believing in psychics, even after Miss Cleo didn’t see the Feds coming right at her, but trust us when we provide you with this handy tip: when your “psychic” tells you your cash is cursed and must be “cleansed,” it’s a scam. A Colorado woman found that out after handing over $5,000 in cash and a $33,000 check to her psychic to be karmically scoured, only to go to the psychic’s apartment a few days later and find it cleaned out. The erstwhile psychic was tracked down and arrested; authorities know she scammed other people but they’re too embarrassed to come forward. You didn’t need to be psychic to figure that one out.

  Source: TheDenverChannel.com

  CONFIDENTIAL COMMUNICATION GONE WRONG

  So there you are at work, flipping burgers, realigning the nuclear accelerator magnets, or whatever it is you do for a living, when you mention in passing to your boss that you’re going to head over to the bank to deposit your paycheck. Your boss then scribbles out a note, hands it to you, and tells you not to read it but to give it to the teller when you get to the bank. Do you read it or not?

  “Marty” can tell you why you should. He and three other employees of a North Carolina auto shop were on their way to the bank to salt away their hard-earned cash when (so one of the men says), their supervisor “Chet” gave Marty a note to hand over to the teller, instructing him not to read it. Marty, apparently a trusting soul who thought perhaps his boss needed coin wrappers or something, took the note and, as requested, handed it over to the teller unread. Upon receiving the note, bank employees read something along the lines of “This is a robbery. I’ve got a gun.” So they handed over a box, which happened to contain $4,500 and an exploding ink canister.

  The Joke’s on You—and So Is the Ink

  Neither Marty nor his pals thought anything was amiss until they left the bank and the exploding ink canister did its thing. “It was just like smoke started coming out of the box, and I said, ‘Man, drop that box. There’s money in it,’” one of the guys told the local newspaper. “I went around front to go into the bank, to let them know it was a mistake, but it was too late.” Sensibly, everyone waited around for the cops to arrive.

  Poor Marty was arrested for robbery with a dangerous weapon (even though no such weapon was displayed at the time) and Chet, who wrote the note, was charged with conspiracy to commit robbery. Marty’s coworkers
suggested the note had been a joke. We’re guessing Marty and Chet aren’t finding it very amusing. And if it was a joke, we sure hope Marty’s jail stay counts as overtime. Or, perhaps hazard pay.

  Source: News & Observer (Raleigh, NC)

  NICK IT LIKE BECKHAM

  Supermarkets are used to dealing with shoplifters stuffing candy bars or Christmas hams down their pants and then trying to walk out of the store, but over in the United Kingdom, supermarket chain Tesco wasn’t expecting people to try to nick an entire human being. Or a cardboard cutout of him, anyway: seems that fervent fans of soccer superstar David Beckham snuck off with a number of life-sized cardboard Beckhams, used to promote the athlete’s biography. The solution: cameras focused on the cutouts 24 hours a day, not to mention security alarms. Which suggests it might be a fine time to graze Tesco’s candy aisle.