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

  Source: ABC News Online (Australia)

  LATER IN THE DAY, THE NRA WENT THROUGH THE HALLS SHOOTING BLANKS

  The object of a doctors’ lobbying group is to convince legislators to rally to doctors’ causes, not to send them screaming through the halls of state government, convinced they’ve been infected with some horrible viral contagion.

  The distinction between these two goals appears to have escaped the Florida College of Emergency Physicians. In May 2003, the group wanted to impress upon Florida state legislators the idea that medical malpractice insurance rates were reaching ridiculous heights, possibly driving doctors out of business. And that meant if some horrible disease suddenly struck Florida there might not be enough doctors to deal with problem.

  Fair enough, good point. No doctors equals runaway viral infections equals lots of German tourists deciding that maybe this year they’ll skip Epcot. It’s just that the Florida College of Emergency Physicians chose an odd way to make this point to state legislators. The organization sent them all little toy petri dishes, which were meant to imply that if such a dish actually contained a virus, they’d all be in big trouble.

  They Were Petri-fied

  Unfortunately for the Florida College of Emergency Physicians, a number of legislators actually believed the petri dishes were filled with something contagious. Let’s remember the Great Anthrax Scare of 2001, in which the weaponized, sheep-killing microscopic nasty actually did show up on the desk of Senator Tom Daschle as well as in several other places—and killed a few innocent bystanders.

  State legislators had every right to be just a teensy bit paranoid, which is why several called the Florida senate sergeant at arms about the little dishes, who in turn brought in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Police investigators pronounced the petri dishes harmless, other than their ability to cause a few panic attacks. That assessment also neglects the fact that it undoubtedly put the physicians’ legislative effort on life support. Nothing puts you on a legislator’s bad side like the feeling you’ve just exposed him to something that will turn his pancreas into Jell-O.

  Maybe for their next act, the Florida College of Emergency Physicians might want to create a vaccine for stupid lobbying tricks.

  Source: Associated Press

  “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

  —Nick Diamos

  DUMB MOVIE FESTIVAL: THE ADVENTURES OF PLUTO NASH (2002)

  Our Entry: The Adventures of Pluto Nash, starring Eddie Murphy and Randy Quaid

  The Plot (Such As It Is): Eddie Murphy plays a bar owner on the moon whose territory is muscled in on by the mob. Refusing the proverbial “offer you can’t refuse” to sell his bar (after which the bar blows up), Murphy then runs about the lunar surface plotting his revenge, trailed by comedy relief in the form of a robotic Randy Quaid. That Quaid should be comedy relief for Eddie Murphy tells you what sort of trouble this picture is in; it’s the sort of film that spends millions on special effects but forgets gravity on the moon is one-sixth that on Earth.

  Fun Fact: The film was on the shelf at Warner Bros.’s studio for two years before it was finally released, with little fanfare, in August 2002. The ostensible excuse was that they were working on the special effects all that time. Yeah, that’s it.

  Total North American Box Office: $4,411,102 (source: The-Numbers.com). A record-setting bomb, considering the estimated budget of $100 million.

  The Critics Rave!

  “The Adventures of Pluto Nash is so unremittingly awful that labeling it a dog probably constitutes cruelty to canines . . . Watching it is like watching 90 minutes of outtakes—deleted scenes randomly assembled by a drunken night watchman at the studio.”—New York Post

  “In a sense, The Adventures of Pluto Nash does America a real service: Every generation needs its own hugely expensive yet unfathomably bad science fiction comedy flop, and it’s not likely that Generation Y even remembers Howard the Duck. So now that Pluto’s on the scene, we’re good through 2015 at least.”—Dayton Daily News

  “The Adventures of Pluto Nash is so thoroughly drab that I wish it were worse. Awful movies have more personality than this.”—The Coast (Halifax)

  “The mystifying thing about the atrocity that is The Adventures of Pluto Nash is the puzzling question as to why this project attracted so many notable names in the first place. Did someone’s Mercedes have to be paid off immediately or something?”—MovieEye.com

  “It might be the first sci-fi comedy that could benefit from a Three’s Company—style laugh track.”—Chicago Tribune

  “There are worse movies, but that’s no excuse . . . rarely has so much money delivered so little entertainment.”

  —TV Guide

  A SNAFU AT HQ

  After the U.S. Armed Forces invaded Iraq and squashed the existing army, it fell upon the land’s new overlords (the Americans) to create a new Iraqi army, one that was better run, better organized, and more inspiring to the average man on the street. And thus was born the New Iraqi Corps!

  It was inspiring but not the way the U.S. authorities had hoped. Here’s why. Make an acronym of “New Iraqi Corps” in English and you get “NIC.” Depending on your age and inclinations, it might remind you of either a shaving mishap or a member of the Backstreet Boys. Neither is a big positive, but neither is so bad either.

  But translate “New Iraqi Corps” into Arabic and make an acronym out of that, and you get something a little more . . . spicy. How spicy? Well, let’s just say that if there were a U.S. SCUBA military unit called the Fabulous Underwater Corps, it’d have basically the same problem in English as the New Iraqi Corps has in Arabic.

  One senior American official put it this way: “I am told reliably but unanimously that that acronym is not a nice word in Arabic. Therefore we had to come up with another word.” This is why the New Iraqi Corps are now the New Iraqi Army, whose acronym means little in English and presumably even less in Arabic.

  Incidentally, if there were a Fabulous Underwater Corps, we would have joined up long ago. Their gear would have been stunning.

  Source: ABC News Online (Australia)

  DUM-PL8S

  In the United States the various states make a lot of money selling “personalized” license plates. If people stopped to think about it, they’d realize that, in reality, since every license plate has a different number on it, they are all personalized. Maybe “CBF 1134” doesn’t say as much as “HOTDUDE” or “CUBZFAN,” but on the other hand, if you think too much about the idea that one’s entire life philosophy can be compressed into seven letters and numbers, you might go insane. However you look at it, it’s a nice little profit center for your state government, and these days, they need every profit center they can get.

  But these license-plate-based money-raising schemes have nothing on the license plate scheme that went on in Thailand. In that country, certain numbers are considered lucky, and there’s a healthy black-market business selling lucky-numbered license plates to the rich and famous. Public complaints about this practice led Thailand’s Land Transport Department to a decision to put lucky-numbered license plates up for auction and let people bid for them over three days in August 2003.

  How High?

  How much would you pay for a license plate you really wanted? $100? $200? $1,000? We hate to tell you, pal, but you’re not even in the running. The plate with the luckiest number of all, “9999” (lucky because the number nine is associated with royalty), sold for $95,200—almost ten times the number on the plate.

  “This is better than investing in the stock market,” said plate winner Suriya Jungrungraungkit, in a comment that should alarm any investors in Far East securities. The next luckiest number, “5555,” sold for $47,619. Of 42 “lucky” plates up for bid on the first day, the average bid was $23,900, or about three and a half times what the average Thai makes in a year.

  That makes the guy driving around with the “CUBZFAN” plate seem like
a financial genius.

  Source: Associated Press

  IT’S BETTER TO BE DRUNK IN NORWAY

  A drunk driving case against an Oslo man was thrown out when it was discovered that the man’s confession was extracted while he was drunk. And you’re thinking, well, yeah. But apparently the police had no evidence the man had been drinking and driving other than his drunken confession, which was judged to be worthless because, after all, he was drunk at the time. We honestly don’t know what to think about this.

  Source: Aftenposten

  “The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.”

  —G. K. Chesterton

  HE’S NOT EXACTLY HAPPY ABOUT THOSE “SKORTS,” EITHER

  Sometimes the world is just one seriously messed-up place. Besides famine, pestilence, and death, which we’ve been dealing with ever since our ancestors climbed out of the trees and thought it’d be a neat trick to stand on two legs, we’ve got other, newer problems as well: rapidly mutating superbugs, worldwide economic slumps, and of course, global warming.

  The Seat of the Problem

  Sure, we could have a UN conference where delegates from around the world intoned seriously about the root causes of all this unmitigated evil, but let’s cut to the chase and come right out and state the real problem: pants. Women’s pants.

  Search your heart. You know it to be true. Women wearing pants is the center of our world’s woes. At least according to the king of Swaziland, who said so in a national address in late May 2003. Quoth the king: “The Bible says curse be unto a woman who wears pants, and those who wear their husband’s clothes. That is why the world is in such a state today.”

  Of course, now it’s clear. If history shows us anything, it’s that nothing bad ever happened until that meddlesome Amelia Bloomer popularized pants for women in the 1850s.

  Ignore Him and Maybe He’ll Go Away

  Not everyone was convinced by the king, even in Swaziland. Reuters news agency asked women in Swaziland’s capital of Mbabane what they thought. “The king says I am the cause of the world’s problems because of my outfit. Never mind terrorism, government corruption, poverty, and disease, it’s me and my pants. I reject that,” one said.

  Undoubtedly she was wearing pantaloons at the time.

  Source: Reuters

  SENIORS IN SENSIBLE SHOES

  Australia’s leading relationship counseling body has a suggestion to older women who have outlived their husbands and are worried about burying another man: try a woman instead. “As they get over 60, opportunities to get a man diminish substantially. Men marry younger women and they die about eight years younger, so there is a real male shortage,” said Relationships Australia spokesman Jack Carney. “And as women get even older it gets much worse, so we ask them to entertain the idea of lesbian relationships.”

  Source: Sunday Herald Sun

  “‘Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.”

  —Mark Twain

  GRANDFATHER CLUCK

  Grandpas like to be useful. And we have no doubt that being useful was what “Lars” intended, when he offered to pick up his 15-month-old grandson Jonas from day care in Copenhagen, Denmark.

  Lars drove down to the day-care center, identified himself as Jonas’s grandpa, and announced he was there to take the little cherub home. The day-care center staff handed over the tyke, and off Jonas and Lars went, back to Jonas’s parents’ place—where Lars discovered Jonas’s mother already at home with another toddler. That toddler was Lars’s grandson, Jonas. The toddler Lars had was someone else’s kid, also named Jonas. What happened? Lars had gone to the wrong day-care center.

  Bringing Down Baby

  Lars drove back to the day-care center with the Jonas who was not his grandson, where he was greeted by the police, who’d been called by the panicked day-care staff after they realized they’d handed over the baby to someone they shouldn’t have. Lars told his side of the story, and fortunately for him, he was believed. But we expect the day-care center might be looking at a lawsuit somewhere along the way.

  As for Lars, we recommend that he spend more time with his grandson. You know, to make sure he knows what he looks like.

  Source: Ananova

  BLOODY DUMB

  In July 2003, Ionel Bleoanca, a Romanian public prosecutor, was in a serious car accident. In critical condition, Bleoanca required a blood transfusion. His blood type was so rare that his doctors asked local blood banks to solicit donors.

  Cut to the Turnu Severin prison, which holds dozens of criminals that Bleoanca helped put there. Prisons aren’t noted for being wellsprings of human kindness, and prisoners aren’t typically known to show any sort of kindness to the prosecutors that sent them up the river. In spite of that, more than 40 prisoners offered to give blood for Bleoanca.

  A feel-good story of forgiveness and redemption? Remember, this book is called Book of the Dumb. And here comes the dumbness: this impromptu blood drive was rejected by the prison authorities, who said that even if one or more of the prisoners had the right blood type, they would not be allowed to donate blood to him. “We would have to deal with an obvious moral dilemma in this case,” prison chief Vasile Burcu said. From our perspective it seems the real moral dilemma is that the prison authorities would apparently rather let Bleoanca die than receive blood from an inmate.

  Source: Ananova

  FAN SERVICE

  You’ll recall the voting controversy that rocked the United States to its core—no, not the 2000 presidential thing! We’re talking about the final vote between Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard on American Idol. As you may recall, Clay’s fans complained that they couldn’t get through on the phones, a glitch (if it was a glitch) that kept their man from the prize they thought he deserved.

  You’ll recall the uncertainty that gripped the nation: what would Clay’s fans do next? Eventually we realized that the sort of people who enjoyed it when Clay sang “Bridge over Troubled Water” were not the sort to do anything more than pout.

  Meanwhile in the Middle East . . .

  Better that than what happened on an Arab variation of the show, called Arab Superstar, in August 2003. It was the semifinal episode of the show, and there were three contestants remaining, from Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. At the end of the show, the contestant from Lebanon, a singer named Melhem Zein, got voted off the island (to mix our reality show metaphors).

  Unlike Clay Aiken fans, Melhem Zein fans are not pouters, or if they are, that’s just the preliminary stage to actual violence. As it happens, Arab Superstar was taped in Beirut, Lebanon, and the hometown audience was not pleased to have their contestant tossed. After the vote was announced, the studio audience didn’t just gripe, it rioted. One of the audience members even tried to attack the Jordanian finalist, after which 60 members of Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces jammed into the studio to reimpose calm. The finalists, neither from Lebanon, fainted in shock and had to be taken to the hospital.

  Outside the TV studio, scores of angry Lebanese converged, waving pictures of their fallen hero and chanting “With our blood and souls, we sacrifice for you, Melhem!” They also converged on the Le Bristol Hotel, where the contestants were staying, and were agitated enough that Zein’s dad had to make an appearance in an attempt to calm them down. Demonstrations were reported all over the country, and newspaper accounts had the army surrounding the television station.

  Now, that’s fan loyalty! Which you just don’t see people doing for Clay. Or for Ruben, for that matter.

  Sources: Reuters, Lebanon Voice

  “With fame I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon.”

  —Albert Einstein

  IF HE’D TAKEN THE ICE CREAM, HE’D PROBABLY BE LOOKING AT A FELONY

  Here’s a family that’s going to have a fun holiday season: in late July 2003, “Chad,” a growing boy of 18, stopped by his
sister’s house in Ruther Glen, Virginia. His sister’s mother-in-law was there, and Chad asked if he could come on in and look for a pair of sunglasses he’d left behind. Well, sure; into the house Chad went.

  A couple of hours later, Chad’s sister (let’s call her “Debbie”), her husband, and the aforementioned mother-in-law decide they’d like something to eat. The husband suggests pizza, which they have in their freezer. Or do they? An examination of the freezer shows it to be pie free. Well then, says Debbie (or words to that effect), let’s have some teriyaki chicken instead, I know that’s in the freezer. Only it’s not; it too is missing. The family is reduced to settling for scraps of indeterminate animal flesh pressed into a tube-like shape, i.e., hot dogs. But even these inferior sources of sustenance have gone missing. Debbie and her kin face the immediate prospect of starving, or at least having to order out.

  Hey, Wait a Minute!

  Then, a brain flash: Debbie remembers her mother telling her that Chad had scarfed down on pizza, teriyaki chicken, and hot dogs that very day! Debbie hied herself over to Mom’s, where she found her freezer bags. Armed with this evidence, Debbie confronted her brother, who denied everything. So Debbie called the cops, who carted Chad away and charged him with petty larceny. “They felt he needs to learn a lesson about taking other people’s property,” Sheriff’s Capt. Scott Moser said to the Fredricksburg Free Lance-Star. Chad was still maintaining his innocence, though he also acknowledged “the facts look awful bad for me.” Cut a deal with Debbie, Chad. Preferably sometime before the next family get-together.