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

  “Swept Away accomplishes the impossible: It makes you feel sorry for Madonna.”—Washington Post

  THIS RESCUE WAS ALL WET

  The boy told the rescue team who plucked him off the cliff that he was afraid his new shoes would get wet. Which is slightly confusing, because if the boy wanted to make sure his shoes stayed dry, climbing on rocks on the English shore with five other friends was surely a funny way to do it—especially since the six of them wandered off so far that they were cut off by the tides and required rescuing.

  The other five boys were easily rescued by lifeboats. But our Boy Whose Shoes Must Stay Dry was too clever for that. Rather than risk dampening his shoes, he climbed up a cliff—and got stuck. He had to be extracted through the use of a chopper, an air-sea rescue drama that cost in the area of $40,000. The cost of the shoes, which, apparently, did stay dry: about $110.

  The shoes, interestingly enough, were Rockports. We’d like to note that Rockports are generally known for their water resistance. A bit of sales fluff for the Rockport Canyon Vista APM31001 Outdoor

  Performance Shoe: “The Rockport® Canyon Vista outdoor shoe for men is seam-sealed waterproof for durability.”

  So you can see why keeping these shoes dry was absolutely imperative.

  Source: Sun (U.K.)

  A DOG DAY AFTERNOON

  For some people, it’s not enough that they hate dogs and don’t want any as pets. They also hate your dog and don’t want you to have any either. “Jurgen,” from Harrislee, Germany, was one of those people. We don’t know why he hated his neighbor’s German shepherd so much, but he did.

  And one day, he decided to do something about it. He called the police and complained that the dog was disturbing the peace with his barking. The police notified Jurgen’s dog-owning neighbor of the complaint.

  The neighbor thought there was something fishy about the complaint. So when he went out to his yard to investigate, he found, in the hedge . . . a speaker which was attached to a cable leading back to Jurgen’s house.

  This time the police to payed a call to Jurgen the Doghater. They turned on the sound system and the speaker started making barking and clicking sounds

  —just the sort of noises that get a dog all riled up. Apparently the German shepherd in question wasn’t making nearly enough noise for Jurgen to complain about, so Jurgen gave the dog a little encouragement.

  And there you have it—a clear-cut case of canine entrapment. “The whole story is so ludicrous, we really can’t imagine what he thought he would achieve,” a police spokesmen told reporters.

  It sounds like Jurgen could use a hug. Or maybe a nice puppy.

  Source: Reuters

  TIPS FOR STUPID CRIMINALS

  We’ve learned everything we know from episodes of Law & Order: Criminal Intent!

  AS DUMB AS WATCHING PAINT DRY Today’s tip: Pick up after yourself.

  Our crook, “Brandon,” got it in his mind to rob a house. In the process of committing his felonious activity, he tipped over a bucket of paint in the garage of the home he was burgling. Then, in a rush to head off with his ill-gotten goods, Brandon forgot to check his feet.

  The police were not so careless; they noticed that someone had gotten paint on his shoes and was leaving a trail of footprints. They tracked the footprints to a hotel, where they found Brandon, a pair of paint-caked shoes, and presumably a very bad alibi. Off to the slammer for Brandon, presumably without his shoes.

  Source: Associated Press

  “Those who realize their folly are not true fools.”

  —Chuang-tzu

  NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED

  Members of the county council in Staffordshire, England, were each given £10,000 (about $16,000) to spend on “good causes.” Being the sort of book this is, you might expect us to tell you they spent it on strip clubs and dinners with friends, but no.

  Staffordshire county councillor Robert Marshall allocated a portion of his share to purchase one of those speed cameras. You know, the ones that snap a picture of your car as you blast through an intersection and then nail you for bad driving even when there is no human being around to catch you. Isn’t technology wonderful?

  Paybacks Are Hell

  Councillor Marshall found out just how wonderful it is as he zipped through a 30-mph area at 42 mph and got a ticket courtesy of the very same camera his allocation had purchased. The ticket took him up to six points on his record (12 short of a suspended license but nothing his insurance company is going to be thrilled about). You would think, having given the camera to the county, that he might have asked where they intended to place it.

  Like any good politician, Marshall positioned this personal defeat as a moral victory. “My experience proves that the cameras are totally indiscriminate and that they are working.” What a spin job! Still, we bet that with next year’s “good deeds” money, he buys something safe and non-ticket-producing.

  Source: BBC

  TURN ON YOUR ART LIGHT

  When the Scottish repairman looked up at a flickering lightbulb on a street sign in Glasgow on a July day in 2003, he thought to himself: “This needs to be fixed. And I need to fix it.” So he did, and it was done, and our repairman moved on, happy in the knowledge that he had fulfilled his destiny. Hey, he’s a repairman. He repairs.

  Little did our repairman know that the lightbulb he fixed was supposed to be blinking. It was a critical element of a massive, $300,000 art installation, designed by Douglas Gordon, a winner of the prestigious Turner Prize (a sort of Nobel prize for the artsy set). The flickering lightbulb was supposed to replicate a similarly flickering bulb in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo.

  When informed of the fixed-but-yet-did-not-need-fixing bulb, the Glasgow City Council indignantly proclaimed that none of their repairmen fixed the street sign. But consider this: The street sign, and the installation it was a part of, had been up since 1998. It took five years for someone to get around to “fixing” that lightbulb. That has all the hallmarks of government efficiency.

  In case you’re wondering, the “repaired” sign will be returned to its former, flickering self by the Glasgow Visual Arts Project. Expect it to be “fixed” again sometime in late 2008.

  Sources: Daily Mail, Ananova

  GOLDEN RULE DAYS

  It’s important to teach children manners. At Hu Zhuang Elementary School in Beijing, the educators decided to back up their etiquette lessons with financial penalties. In addition to new rules that forbid littering or coughing without covering the mouth, Hu Zhuang now forbids passing gas. Anyone who gets caught having a methane moment is fined the equivalent of 75 cents.

  The decision was immediately controversial. “To form good habits is important,” a teacher named Gao told Sina News. “But according to Department of Education regulations, schools have no right to fine.”

  In addition, how do you go about enforcing such a rule? The intestinal functions of schoolchildren are highly, shall we say, dynamic. Even the best-behaved kids are at the mercy of whatever their parents fed them for breakfast. Plus, the system is ripe for abuse; if the school is ever short on funds, the administration could make the cafeteria serve beans five days running.

  Another teacher noted that since the rule was implemented, no child had been fined. That doesn’t mean that the gassing has stopped. It just means that the children might have quickly become masters of the “silent but deadly” technique, which we suppose is marginally more polite than your usual violent outburst, but probably not what the rulemakers had intended. In any event, you can’t say that the kids at Hu Zhuang Elementary aren’t learning new things.

  Sources: Sina News, Ananova

  SHE SCREAMED FOR ICE CREAM

  Everybody loves ice cream. Most people also know that if you eat too much ice cream too fast you will be seized by the dreaded “ice cream brain freeze,” which feels as if tiny little demons are congregating at the spot just behind your uvula, and stabbing needle-thin icicles directly into
your brain, giggling maniacally and all the while singing jaunty Oompa Loompa–like songs. After a few headaches, you learn how to pace your consumption of ice cream. It’s a food that teaches you to eat it daintily.

  We assume that “Shen,” a 23-year-old woman from Guangzhou, China, had never had a brain freeze. This would explain why one day, Shen came home, opened her refrigerator, grabbed the ice cream, and began to consume it at a frightening rate—so fast that the ice cream demons were unable to get a foothold in the back of her throat. That’s good, right?

  Think again.

  Hold the Cone!

  The next day Shen went to the doctor and complained about pain in her throat and stomach. The doctor took a look inside and immediately sent her to the hospital, where she stayed for a week. Shen had eaten so much ice cream so quickly that she had frozen her esophagus. So the next time you experience brain freeze, thank the ice cream demons for saving you from the emergency room.

  Sources: China Daily, Ananova

  HISTORICAL DUMBOSITY: LOUIS XVI’S MONEY PROBLEMS

  We can all agree that when you’re a king, a revolution can be dreadfully inconvenient. One day you’re minding your own business, running a country and being fanned by courtiers, and the next day, some badly dressed rabble is showing up at the door, talking nonsense about “rights” and “democracy” and asking for your head in a basket. It’s scandalous, really. They could at least put on a cravat before asking a person to hand over the country.

  For all that, it doesn’t pay to underestimate the intelligence of the rabble, or their ability to recognize you while you’re fleeing the country. Louis XVI of France found this out in 1791—that’s after that whole French Revolution thing you might have heard about—when he, his wife, Marie, and their kids decided that it might be prudent to skip out of Paris and head to Belgium, because the Belgians, for whatever their other shortcomings, wouldn’t try to kill them. So Louis and the family disguised themselves as a middle-class merchant family (horrors!) and headed north.

  The Not-So-Great Escape

  Apparently, they got lost. Louis, demonstrating a take-charge attitude that one usually admires in a king, decided to ask someone for directions. This was despite the urgings of his servants to stay hidden—he was, after all, fleeing the country. Louis must have thought his disguise was that good. And maybe it was. But maybe one of Louis’s servants shouldn’t have thanked the guy who gave them directions by handing him a tip.

  A bit of important advice: when fleeing the country in fear for your life, do not give over a wad of cash that has your face on it. The French currency of the time featured Louis’s mug, and it was a close enough likeness that the guy who gave the directions recognized the “middle-class merchant” as the guy on his cash. He ran to the town hall and announced his discovery. A posse was quickly formed, and Louis and company were apprehended up the road and returned to Paris, where in 1792 Louis was stripped of his crown, and in 1793, stripped of his head.

  Now you know why guys don’t ask for directions.

  “You can be sincere and still be stupid.”

  —Charles F. Kettering

  “Foolproof systems don’t take into account the ingenuity of fools.”

  —Gene Brown

  “I am afraid only of people who cannot think.”

  —Winston Churchill

  TIPS FOR STUPID CRIMINALS

  What? You want them to get tips from other stupid criminals?

  NO LICENSE TO DRIVE

  Today’s tip: In fact, the police can arrest you anywhere.

  Our gal “Sal” was driving her car without a license plate. Naturally, that’s a no-no, so when the fine officers of the Alexandria, Louisiana, police department saw her drive by, they signaled for her to pull over. She did not—what she did was speed up and get on the highway. Soon Sally was zooming along at nearly a hundred miles an hour, trailing cops from state, county, and local districts behind her.

  Where was Sally going? She was going home. With the cops still behind her, she parked in her driveway and got out of her car like nothing had happened. You see, Sally was working under an interesting assumption: she thought that if the cops were chasing you, and you made it your own house, they couldn’t arrest you—that you were, quite literally, home free. Sally got this idea, apparently, from a TV show.

  So imagine Sally’s surprise when she learned that you can be arrested at home—and she was, in fact, on charges including speeding, reckless driving, and failure to give way to an emergency vehicle. That’s what you get for taking legal advice from your television.

  Sources: Town Talk (Alexandria, LA), Ananova

  TAKING A YEN FOR PACHINKO A LITTLE TOO FAR

  At 6:30 p.m., May 26, 2003, in a pachinko parlor in the Akita prefecture of northern Japan, deputy governor Takashi Chiba was relaxing by sending little metal balls through the myriad metal posts of Japan’s favorite vertical pinball machines. And why not? He’d had a rough day doing . . . well, whatever it was that deputy governors of Japanese prefectures do. But on this particular day Chiba was slightly more important than most deputy governors. The actual governor of the Akita prefecture was in South Korea on a business trip, making Chiba the effective leader of 1.1 million Akita prefecture citizens.

  Well, maybe not the effective leader. Because on that day, at the time Chiba was winging balls through posts, the Akita prefecture was rocked by a 7.0 earthquake that was felt as far south as Tokyo. The temblor was as strong as the infamous Kobe quake in 1995, which killed thousands. Fortunately, this time the epicenter of the quake was offshore, minimizing the impact on dry land. But when all was said and done more than 100 Japanese were injured, and damage to buildings and roads was widespread.

  Life Must Go on—Ka-ching!

  Faced with a crisis of this magnitude, deputy (acting) governor Takashi Chiba called upon years of bureaucratic experience, plundered the depths of his feelings about serving his constituency and . . . continued to play pachinko. And kept on playing. And then, just when you thought he was done, he played some more. All told, he played for 45 minutes after the quake. It was more than an hour before he even bothered to contact other prefecture officials to see if anyone was buried under a collapsed highway or something.

  Needless to say, by Friday, deputy governor Chiba was out of a job, resigning rather than performing the ritual suicide that would have been expected of him several centuries earlier. Chiba explained to the Kyodo news agency, “I am extremely tired both mentally and physically and have lost confidence in my ability to do my job.” He wasn’t the only one.

  You know what would pick him right up? A nice game of pachinko.

  Sources: Reuters, Associated Press

  “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

  —Albert Einstein

  “Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.”

  —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

  SHE POPPED THE CLUTCH. HE PUT IT INTO GEAR. HEH HEH HEH.

  Here’s an interesting fact: in Germany, it is legal to have sex while driving a car zooming down the autobahn. Just don’t hit anything.

  So discovered “Rolf,” a 23-year-old Cologne motorist. In June 2003, Rolf picked up a blond hitchhiker while he was tooling around in his car. The two then decided it might be fun to—ahem—get into gear. Long story short, she got naked and climbed into the driver’s seat while Rolf was in it. Rolf, understandably distracted, drove off the pavement and hit a road sign. Let us pause here to consider the comical image of the air bags going off in this little crack-up.

  Then Rolf made a big mistake: he drove off in a hurry. This was a no-no, because although having sex while operating a moving vehicle is not a crime in Germany, racing away from damage you’ve created is. Rolf was tracked down by the police and hauled into court. There he was convicted of a hit-and-run and fined 600 euros (about $
600). He also had to pay for the sign he mowed down in his moment of vehicular passion. That was another 400 euros. Hope it was worth it.

  Why isn’t having sex while driving a car illegal in Germany? Said court spokesman Juergen Mannebeck: “It’s a situation lawmakers never thought about.”

  Source: Reuters

  TIPS FOR STUPID CRIMINALS

  Why? Because we’re not going to pay their bail.

  I’VE POSITIVELY ID’D MYSELF

  Today’s tip: Try not to leave behind massive amounts of evidence.

  Poor “Brad” wanted a cell phone. But Brad didn’t want to pay for it. This fundamental dissonance between desire and stinginess is probably what caused Brad to bolt from a Chino Hills, California, Radio Shack with a cell phone in hand but without paying for it.

  Brad’s five-fingered cellular discount might have worked too, if not for two basic flaws in Brad’s mode of thievery. First, while casing the joint, he cleverly disguised his criminal intent by posing as a customer, filling out a credit application. Not so cleverly, however, he used his real name and address on the application, which made it nice and easy for the cops to track him down later.